Open Source Programming Tools On the Rise

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner takes a look at several open source development projects making waves in the enterprise. From Git to Hadoop to build management tools, 'even in the deepest corners of proprietary stacks, open source tools can be found, often dominating. The reason is clear: Open source licenses are designed to allow users to revise, fix, and extend their code. The barber or cop may not be familiar enough with code to contribute, but programmers sure know how to fiddle with their tools. The result is a fertile ecology of ideas and source code, fed by the enthusiasm of application developers who know how to "scratch an itch."'"

Comments

Really?

[MrEricSir]

Here is a very unscientific survey of worthwhile open source tools that have caught our eye.

I guess CVS, Firefox, Linux, GNU Make, etc. didn't catch your eye years ago?

Re:Really?

[Sarten-X]

Years ago, they certainly would have been "making waves", but they aren't as impressive now. CVS is surpassed by Subversion and Git, with the latter mentioned in TFA. Firefox is rapidly becoming a bloated but unremarkable product. Linux isn't really a "programmer's tool", so doesn't blong on the list in the first place. GNU Make has certainly earned its place among the annals of history, but it's only had four minor releases in the past decade. These projects are important, but hardly eye-catching for an article written today.

I'll get off your lawn now.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU Make has certainly earned its place among the annals of history, but it's only had four minor releases in the past decade.

So?

If there isn't any bugs that needs to be fixed and no extra features to add, why would you need a new release?

Make 3.83 - Changelog:
* Updated year in copyright string.
* Updated version number.

Is that what you want?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP? That piece of trash can die.

Re:Really?

[serviscope_minor]

CVS is surpassed by Subversion and Git

If by "surpassed", you mean "better", then sure. No doubt.

Of course, there's no statistics, but I would expect CVS to still have a very strong (declining) showing, possibly still more than the other two combined.

Basically, the problems with CVS are really for big projects. If there are lots of developers and/or lots of stuff is happening, lots of bufixes on branches, forks and so on.

For small projects, almost any versioning system will do, CVS was there first and there's no really compelling reason to move since the limitations of CVS aren't being bumped into regularly (or at all). Except moving files. Which is why, IME CVS users tend to switch to SVN for new projects, but don't generally bother migrating existing repositories.

More economic than ideologic

[Anonymous Coward]

We use open source in business because it does the job and doesn't require a PO and all the hassle that goes along with that process.

Open? Or free (as in beer)?

[Chuck_McDevitt]

I'll bet that lots of enterprise use of Open Source tools is due to the price tag, not the ability to fiddle with the source code.

Re:Open? Or free (as in beer)?

[clang_jangle]

While that's almost certainly true, it really doesn't matter at all. Everyone benefits from wider deployment of FOSS, whether or not they're using it "for the right reasons".

Re:Easy

[MrEricSir]

I'm not sure those are cloud-y enough. There needs to be more in the way of webservices, AJAX, and maybe a VM or two.

Re:Easy

[clang_jangle]

I know that words are mostly defined by popular usage, but it annoys me that people say "the cloud" when all they really mean is "online". "The cloud" was supposed to be about distributed computing or using online computing resources from your choice of locations/devices. We're not seeing much of that, but we sure are aiding and abetting the marketing tards who keep saying "cloud, cloud" until it actually means nothing at all.

Re:Open? Or free (as in beer)?

[Jaime2]

I'm not so sure.

I work for a huge company. The corporate standard for software development is Java, so you'd think there would have a bunch of open source tools in the processes. Instead, they are heavily into the Rational tools suite and run apps on WebSphere. On the other hand, my division writes software on .Net, but we use SubVersion, NAnt, NUnit, and Wix. Our tool set is frowned upon precisely because it's free. The enterprise attitude seems to be "if it doesn't cost an-arm-and-a-leg and doesn't come with an 800 support number, it can't be any good".

Re:Easy

[calmofthestorm]

Also more lag and pagination so users have to look at more ads and click more.

Re:Open? Or free (as in beer)?

[QilessQi]

Then your enterprise attitude is woefully wrong.

Open Source IDEs

[ProzacPatient]

We're seeing some cool new programming environments show up too.
I've always preferred Visual Studio and I never did like Code::Blocks or DevC++ but I found CodeLite relatively recently and I love it!
I find Visual Studio's price tag combined with the gradually improving open source tools make it difficult to stick with VS but maybe that's just me.

Re:Open Source IDEs

[mirix]

Qt creator looked pretty snazz last time I played with it. Cross platform is a nice bonus too...

Qt

The reason is clear but it isnot the one mentioned

[Quantum_Infinity]

I highly doubt that open source tools are used because they allow themselves to be modified. What percentage of people actually look into the code and modify them? The main reason is that most open source tools are free and have absolutely zero delay in being available. Download, install and code away! In most cases, you don't even have to install, just unzip and you are good to go.

Kind of makes you wonder...

[DoofusOfDeath]

What the world would be like without onerous patent systems.

Re:Kind of makes you wonder...

[VortexCortex]

Open source is good for software like this. On the other hand, it's not good for a competitive market like an MMO or RPG game. You could, in theory, argue that open source game engines are viable.

Yep, the game engine, and the physics engine, and the network platform, and the rendering API, and the anti-cheat code, and the installer -- Know what? It takes "a bunch of organizations" to create closed source MMOs and RPGs, or any game that's sufficiently complex anyway. Why re-invent the wheel when I can license Bink Video, Havoc, Unreal or ID-Tech, for much less and have a fully functional game to market in a fraction of the time?

Now, what if all that bad-ass tech was free-libre-open source? The customers win because of all the rampant competition, driving down costs (it's expensive to license commercial game components) -- The game developers win because my ultra-fast instancing algorithm would make all games that wanted to use it better...

Saying that "open source isn't good" for just about any purpose is just plain wrong...It's just software, its good anywhere other software is good.

Case & Point: I purchased and played Blood Rayne on PS2, and World of Goo for Win / Linux & Wii -- Both games used the open source Open Dynamics Engine as their physics engine. To hell with arguing "in theory", open source has been used, and will continue to be used in "competitive markets".

Now, if you're trying to say that open source development isn't a good model for closed source software -- I'd have to agree, "Open Source Closed Source Software" would be an outright contradiction in terms.

Another case & point: The Internet -- open source software runs the majority of this "competitive market".

Re:Easy

[Gerzel]

That's what any cloud is really.

If you can't see its boundries and design (in other words you're the customer using the cluster) it is a cloud.

If you know how everything goes together and where the servers are it's a cluster.

Re:Open? Or free (as in beer)?

[JoeMerchant]

I can deal with the dollar cost of proprietary tools, what I find harder to deal with is the administrative overhead of getting corporate approval for a license, periodic renewal or maintenance, licenses for my coworkers when they want to do something similar to me, and evaluating the tool vendor's commitment to maintaining the tool. All of that (except the commitment to maintenance issue) is absent in FOSS.

It's nice to be able to "scratch an itch" and fix a bug in a week if it really needs fixing, instead of begging for a patch, waiting and hoping for 6 months or (more often) just having to live with and/or work around a bug. This is a benefit of FOSS I rarely use, but have done on occasion, same for extending a package to add that one last missing feature.

The really cool thing with an open toolkit (like Qt Creator) is the ability for anyone, anywhere in the organization to be able to install and execute the developer tools and "get it to run just like on my machine" without having to go through creating an installer. Sure, "finished product" deserves a good installer, but for quick little developers' tools that might need source level tweaking, an installer is just annoying.

Craft Guild

[oldhack]

Most of us pay our bills building god-awful websites and writing financial/accounting stuff. It is, intellectually, drudgery. Those of us in better situations, and others who manage to find energy, write tools to make the drudgery bit more palatable.

It's a labor of love.

Or sadism in Larry Wall's case.

Virtualization has changed the game for me

[maxm]

These days you don't have to choose. I run Win 7 on my machine and a virtualbox Ubuntu on that. So I develop in Ubuntu, and any kind of multimedia stuff is handled in Windows.

The great thing about development on Unix is that it is all just there. apt-get install xxx and you are ready to go. Versions are automatically upgraded. If you prefer working in a windows environment for some part of your project, you can easily do it by sharing drives and networking.

Re:The reason is clear but it isnot the one mentio

[williamhb]

I highly doubt that open source tools are used because they allow themselves to be modified. What percentage of people actually look into the code and modify them?

It doesn't really matter what the percentage is, because there's a strong positive reinforcement loop. If an open source programming tool has a wide audience, then it has a wide audience of programmers -- just what it wants to recruit to improve the codebase! That makes it a little different than, say, an open source spreadsheet attracting a million more accountants. For programming tools there really is a much stronger positive feedback loop between popularity and rate of development.

Re:Open? Or free (as in beer)?

[CalcuttaWala]

The ability to buy a product through a purchase order and have access to customer support is sometimes very important to large corporations. I had once used a legitimately downloaded PGP encryption product as key component of a complex Cash Management application in a global multinational bank but the biggest challenge in getting it accepted as a part of the solution was the lack of a purchase order. I remember the IT Head of the bank almost pleading with me to get a commercial product but because PGP had already been integrated with the system, the difficulty of a change was immense. I believe that the bank finally got someone do download PGP and sell it to the bank for $10 through an invoice before the row was settled !!

Free, widespread and easy to trial

[Aceticon]

FOSS tools are widelly use in enterprises because of three reasons:

1. They're free: no need to justify a budget for them and the cost of failure (i.e. if it doesn't work for the company's needs) is low (all you loose is time)
2. They're used in many places: so your new developers often already know the tools in question because they used them somewhere else. New developers are much less likelly to be familiar with specific third party tools since they probably haven't used them in a previous job or at home.
3. Trying them out is easy: it's usually just a question of downloading them, installing them and trying them. FOSS tools usually come with simple and/or well known licenses (GNU, Apache) which probably have already been checked by the company's legal team for another tool. Compare this with tools from 3rd party vendors which often require getting in contact with the vendor in question to arrange a trial (if at all possible) and include a proprietary license, different from everybody else's.