Where did my Open Systems go?

Early in my career I bought into the concept of 'Open Systems' in a big way. I'd been working on proprietary mainframe systems for a couple of years and figured that 'Open' had to be the way to go.

For those unitiated in the world of Open Sytsems it effectively was a euphamism for UNIX and RDBMS technology. The 'Open' basically mean that systems could be developed on one platform (say Sun) and ported to another (i.e HP or IBM) without much effort. Portability was the key to keeping your vendors sweet and it was also ensure that cross skilling your staff was easier. The same was theoretically possible with SQL based databases.

So did this happen? Not really. I used to work in a software porting team for a UNIX/RDBMS based product and because we applied strict standards to keep our code open we managed the transition without too much effort. This was not typical though. Most IT guys out there will tell you that porting from one server or database to another is a major undertaking.

That has resulted in the vast majority of IT shops out there often selecting a particular flavour of UNIX or RDBMS as its system of choice and that kind of defeats the whole argument of Open Systems if you think about it.