With all the hype regarding Open Source Software (OSS), we sometimes forget logic in the excitement of trying to get on board with this latest trend. What we really care about (or should care about) is making a sound business decision regarding software. Think you should be hopping on the OSS bandwagon just because the software is free? Think again. There's a lot more to making a business decision for OSS than With all the hype regarding Open Source Software (OSS), we sometimes forget logic in the excitement of trying to get on board with this latest trend. What we really care about (or should care about) is making a sound business decision regarding software. Think you should be hopping on the OSS bandwagon just because the software is free? Think again. There’s a lot more to making a business decision for OSS than just the up front cost. As the Open Source zealots like to say, “Free as in freedom, not as in beer.” Of course, there are the financial benefits! With an Open Source license which does not restrict your use of the software, you can install as many copies of the software as you want. Since there are no licensing fees, you could install two or two hundred seats with no additional costs beyond the labor required to do so. Without licensing fees, you pay only for hardware and support costs. So not only the upfront costs are lowered, so are the ongoing costs of software ownership. So what else is there to Open Source Software? Why does my company q!Bang Solutions try to pursuade our clients to use OSS when possible? It’s the end of licensing restrictions that tell you how you can use your software. Tired of obtaining license keys from your software vendors every year or even every month just to keep your software running? Feel like your vendor is holding you hostage via your software licensing? With OSS, you never have to enter another annoying license code ever again. They just don’t exist in the world of OSS. You don’t even have to keep track of silly license validity seals or your purchasing paperwork to prove ownership. Never again will you fear the BSA (Business Software Alliance, not the Boy Scouts!) knocking on your door wanting to perform a software audit. The BSA even takes out advertisements on Google search pages for and up to $200,000 reward a disgruntled ex-employee can receive for reporting your company to the BSA! That’s quite a powerful motivator. My favorite benefit of Open Source Software is one that most people don’t even think about. What happens if something happens to the software vendor? What if the vendor gets bought by its big competitor and that new owner wants nothing to do with supporting you? What if the vendor is affected by a natural disaster in some other part of the country (or world) and can no longer function? A perfect example is a small auto insurance company that we recently did some work for. They use a custom CRM application that is designed for small independent auto insurance companies. It’s a special application that nobody has the source code for other than the vendor, whose technical division is located in Alabama. Our client has to get a license key from the vendor each month and enter that into the program, or else it will stop functioning. So what happens if a tornado rips through the vendor’s offices? That horrible tragedy would put a huge burden on our client the insurance company. The insurance company would not be able to use their custom application which has all their customer data including payment information. They could pay an IT consultant big money to extract their data and import it into another program. For the money that it would cost them to save their data, they could just hire us to write a new OSS application that performs all the same functions as their proprietary one. Or how about the vendors who just abandon a not-very-successful software product? It’s not good business, but it happens. Maybe the software is not profitable and requires a lot of resources to maintain, so the vendor just stops development and no longer supports the software. Of course, that software vendor thinks about all the money that it spent in developing and supporting that software, so they feel that it’s theirs and nobody else should get it for free. So instead of releasing the software and its code to the public, the software just dies off because the vendor couldn’t let go of something it had spent its money on. And now your company is stuck with no support, no updates, no new features, and no bug fixes. Maybe you’re even stuck with non-functioning software like in my example of the auto insurance company. Open Source Software does not die because the developers stop working on it. The software is still available for download so anybody can make new features or fix bugs and security problems. Nobody is left without the software that their company needs to function. And since this is Open Source Software, you can choose anyone you want to support the software. You might be able to pay the developers for support. You can certainly find a third party to support the software. With OSS, if you are not happy with the support you are getting, you do not have to get rid of the software. You just get rid of the vendor who is providing the support and pay a different vendor for support. Of course, if you find that the software is not doing the job for you and you want to use a different application, go ahead and do so. Open Source Software almost always uses Internet standards for data storage, so it’s simple to migrate your data out of one application and into another. The same cannot be said for a lot of proprietary software applications. Just like our auto insurance client above, pulling data out of the proprietary application and getting it into a new application can be quite a time consuming hassle! I know that we’ve all been in the situation where you’re waiting on a new feature to be released from your proprietary software vendor. They promised it would be available two months ago, and they’ve been “working around the clock” to finish it, blah, blah, blah… In the world of Open Source Software, if you can’t wait on someone else’s schedule for a new feature, then you add that feature yourself. What? You don’t have programmers on staff? You can always outsource to a programming company and have them do it for you. Even better, you can pay the software project’s developers to add the feature. Many OSS developers aren’t accustomed to being paid for their efforts, so money can be a great motivator. The point is that you always have some options. Sure, the cost savings of Open Source Software is a great benefit and a strong reason to choose OSS over proprietary software. However, you now have a few more points to consider as you mull over your software decisions. I hope that I have convinced you that the “freedom” benefits of Open Source Software are just as important as the “free” parts, if not more so. High Mobley Co-owner of q!Bang Solutions February 26, 2007 Technology Industry