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Open Source Poses “Huge Risk” To Organisations
European CIO of GE has said that open source is only useful for internal “playground” uses, despite other parts of GE having deployed Linux for healthcare platforms
A chief information officer for engineering giant General Electric (GE) has said that open source software is only suited for internal “playground” applications and that businesses that use it for mission critical infrastructure are taking a huge risk.
Responding to a question from eWEEK Europe UK on the first day of the Central and Eastern European IT Leaders Summit & Expo, in Budapest, Peter Gyorgy, chief information officer of GE’s Consumer and Industrial division in Europe, said non-proprietary code presents a significant risk to companies.
“I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things but if it’s running vital mission critical applications – networks running on open source for example – then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation,” he said.
Gyorgy was taking part in a panel discussion on how companies in Central and Eastern Europe are adjusting their IT operations to respond to the credit crunch. Asked by eWEEK Europe UK whether open source offered one way for businesses and the government to cut costs associated with proprietary software, Gyorgy dismissed the approach as one that could put businesses at risk.
“We are not here to be an IT shop, we are here to be the partner of a business and we shouldn’t put businesses operations into risk by running very low cost solutions,” he said.
The GE CIO also made a passing reference to Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its MySQL open source database business which is currently being investigated by the European Commission over possible competition issues.
“I cannot personally ever imagine that, at a large company, that MySQL databases are ever going to take over from Oracle databases for example or that we will ever have an open source ERP system that is taking over from Oracle or SAP,” he added.
Gyorgy’s comments may surprise some other parts of the company, as GE has been reported to be a user of JBoss open source middleware and other open source applications. GE Healthcare has also been a user of the open source Linux operating system since as far back as 2007 for seemingly critical applications.
Despite the concerns of companies such as GE about the maturity of open source, governments across Europe have come under pressure to change the way they procure software to allow for more open source alternatives to be considered.
Late last week, the European Commission released the Malmo declaration on approaches to e-government in the region, which includes a commitment to put open-source solutions on an equal footing when it comes to awarding government contracts.
In February, the UK government said it intended to use open source to save £600 million a year and published guidelines the that effect but, despite this, the UK lags badly at open source, using it less than countries like Mali, open source activists said at a meeting in September.
Elsewhere in Europe, other countries including Switzerland and Hungary have seen action taken by open source backers to force governments to break-down barriers to the use of non-proprietary software in the public sector. In an open letter to the Hungarian government’s procurement agency earlier this month – Directorate General for Central Services (KSZF) – the Open Document Format Alliance (ODFA) stated that last year the government spent around 9.5bn Hungarian forints (£32 million) on Microsoft software and has already spent 6.3 million euros (£5.6 million) on educational licenses and millions more on consultation and services from the software giant.
“Please make your calculations known to the public which will prove that open source will not be a viable low cost alternative,” the letter states.
The UK government is also involved in the drafting of the new Malmo regulations and has pledged support for extending its existing commitment to open source across Europe, despite the concerns over whether it has even been able to apply the policy in its own country.
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12 replies to Open Source Poses “Huge Risk” To Organisations
This guy says that using open source is just a matter of costs and buying software. He is forgetting that using open source opens a handfull of services and high aggregated costs, that can be (or still are) better business partners as “Software in a box” companies do today. Totally wrong, mistaken, FUDly and closed minded.
GE’s and the like provide services.. and if companies start to save money using FOSS then their pockets will be hit HARD… so it is no surprise that he would be saying this like that.. i mean.. how critical is the NYSE yet they use OSS.. ..
I wonder if any kickbacks the CIO might receive from the vendors of proprietary software might have something to do with his position. This sounds like the FUD scripts Microsoft was distributing to their sheep back in the 1990′s. If you’re going to disseminate FUD, you might try putting a bit of effort behind making it at least semi-plausible, rather than painfully obvious FUD.
As someone who has to actually use GE software on a daily basis, I’ll say this: he who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones. Buggy, incomplete documentation, inconsistent interfaces and incomplete features.
So how much did Steve Ballmer pay this guy ?
Should be titled, “GE has stock in Microsoft”
This CIO has no clue. How does the source being secret make the software any better? How can the price being high make it better? I can make something, keep the source secret, and charge a huge price for it. Then maybe he will buy it, and I will be rich!
Quality and performance need to be evaluated without regard to the methodology used in the development. If you think that high price makes it good, you have not used any commercial ERP products. They are terrible and full of bugs, and the response from support, even when you show them exactly what the bug is takes weeks or months. At least if full source was available to anyone at all, I could do a crazy auction where the first correct fix got my money.
Set up a panel; I’ll happily serve on it as a CIO, I think I can line up a few others. Invite this Peter Gyorgy on to. Then let’s discuss software providers and development methods and risk.
Too risky for “vital mission critical applications”. IBM. J P Morgan. London and NY exchanges. Peugeot Citroën. Then of course there is Google whose entire business is based on open source.
The risk balance is in fact the other way. An open source application can be supported fixed by your own people, by contractors and by huge global companies providing support services. Closed source products can be fixed by the maker.
Open source products can be supported for as long as you want to have them; closed source products are supported as long as the maker wants to support them.
Now where is the risk?
Then the GE CIO has his head in the sand or is spreading FUD, as anyone who knows anything knows better.
What planet does this guy live on, and in which decade is he living? How clueless can somebody get about open FOSS? Man, is HE asking for it.
He talks about the role of IT as a partner to the business and then rules out using a myriad of software which, his own company’s business and IT users have found useful? This isn’t partnership! Rather, it would seem that his interest is rather self-serving insofar as he doesn’t want his IT resources learning to modify and support OSS even if it would be in the best interests of the users! Unfortunately business is rife with these sorts of CIO’s who are there by virtue of some black box of skill sets rather than for the contribution they can make to the business!!!
It’s a shame to be Hungarian, sometimes.