Choosing Open Source

Monday, 13 February 2006

Dan Creswell’s suggestion: that businesses use open source because it is free, does not adequately describe the open source ecosystem.

Ultimately, businesses are driven by cost. Open source in itself is not free of costs. In some cases, they can end up being more expensive than their shrinked wrapped counterpart.

I would group open source consumers into the following classes:

a) best-of-breed – some software packages represent the best of the breed in it’s class, open source or not. The Apache web server enjoys a large developer community and has earned the respect of security researchers.

b) network-strategic – open source software also means open protocol. Some software companies build on top of these software, for instance, on top of Jabber, as a strategic way of breaking big-co dominance.

c) non-core-cooperation – a company may choose to use and share the development of components which otherwise have to be reinvented at every business.

d) deep-customization. SAP, whose software is hardly free, ships source code with every SAP deployment. This enables mass customization of a very specialized piece software.

e) technical-blueprints. Microsoft’s Shared Source for Windows CE makes the source available for partners for debugging purposes. One reason this doesn’t happen more often in the commercial world is because the source code’s comments might not be sanitized, or the source code comments is not adequate as documentation because they are in English, or has to be read with other technical documents.

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The entry 'Choosing Open Source' was posted on February 13th, 2006 at 6:03 pm and last modified on February 13th, 2006 at 6:05 pm, and is filed under Thinking IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Choosing Open Source”

  1. Jeff Haefner writes:
    No. 1 — November 27th, 2006 at 10:50 pm

    I would agree. I can’t tell you how many retailers look forfree POS software because they want to keep their costs down. They end up getting way over their heads.

    When choosing POS software for a small business, I always tell retailers to find a system that will give them their highest return on investment. And take care to find a great company that can support their IT needs. Open source is great but unless you have the experts to take care of it, you’ll probably get yourself into trouble.

    Jeff

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