"[You] have to examine [vendors'] motivations," DrKW's Howe agrees. "I think a lot of people are effectively end-of-lifing products in an open-source way. That doesn't work because you end up with a lot of dead software out there that no one's updating."

That very concern struck Shaf Rahman, group technical director at International Customer Loyalty Programmes (ICLP), which puts together loyalty marketing programs for companies, after he heard that CA was going to release its Ingres database -- on which many of ICLP's core systems are built -- to open-source.

"I think in the back of my mind there was that thought that 'They've absolved all their responsibilities and given it to the people.'" But his fears were calmed after he saw the orderly manner in which the company handled the transition, plus the fact that CA was clearly staying in control of the project and carefully vetting any potential contributions to the source code. This provided both indemnification for any potential legal hassles and a well-known source for support services. As a result, Rahman has hopes that Ingres will be revitalized, gaining both new features and, more importantly, new prominence in the marketplace. "In the past, I'd try to recruit people and they'd say "Ingres? How do you spell Ingres?'"

Some observers see the trend of vendor-released open-source as a sign that certain parts of the software stack -- particularly those at the low end that have become ubiquitous (think operating systems and integration tools) -- simply have very little commercial value left and thus are better supported by their communities, freeing up R&D resources for high value-add products.

"Things like [Microsoft] Word and Excel have become relatively static," says Ian Campbell, president and CEO of Nucleus Research Inc. "That's why you see Linux on the desktop with the [open-source OpenOffice productivity suite] as a reasonable alternative." And, he says, as time goes on, more products will fall into the "best as open-source" category.

Lead or Get Out of the Way

Open-source advocates have their own worries, of course. One concern with open-source is the threat of the nuclear lawsuit, the legal case that could declare certain open-source licenses unconstitutional (think SCO vs. the GNU Public License) or make the burden of intellectual property protection so onerous that software communities are crushed under the weight. But observers argue that legal uncertainties are a fact of life with commercial software as well.

"Is there risk? There's probably some," says Bernard Golden, author of Succeeding with Open Source and founder and CEO of Navica, an open-source consultancy. "But you need to look at all the risks, including the risk of not doing the project."