Comments on: Open Source vs. Closed Source: The Managed Services Debate

By: Madhoo Soodan

Madhoo Soodan — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:31:27 +0000

In terms of the development lifecycle, at the inception stage and initiation stage, of a project it is irrelevant whether Open Source or Closed Source products will be used. The issue does become very significant at the analysis and design stage as the decisons have to be made very quickly. Unfortunately that is a bit late for either approach.

Therefore, the issue of Open vs Closed are strategic not tactical. Business must take at least a medium term view of their IT and software strategy and decide whether they are going to make commitment to Free Open Source and to what extent (Closed Source is the default choice). The choice may be a mixture based on horses for courses. Where the choice is for Closed Source then business also make a choice whether inhouse or turnkey. For inhouse there are plenty of business models, tried and tested, that can be used. Where the choice is Open Source then careful consideration has to be given to business model/givernance for the development and support.

Personally, in today’s market place Free Open Source is becoming the model of choice in the same way that Unix, SQL, php, J2EE, XML, WSDL etc. have done in the recent history. The Rationale here is that in many functional domains the FOS code has reached that critical mass to outweigh the benefits of inhouse developments of closed source. Buying Turnekey closed source offer little or no flexibility. However, it has to be recognised that moving to FOS may still require investment but if done sensibly it should pay back quickly.

By: Santo Cannone

Santo Cannone — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:20:06 +0000

Good advice Joe. It is interested how the definition of “open” has evolved over time. In the early 90s, if your application ran on a Unix operating system, you were considered open. A few years later, if your data was accessible using ODBC, you were open. Now, the measurement for some is open source. Through it all, user communities have created great value by sharing ideas, strategies and best practices. Our partners consistently tell us that one of the biggest benefits of attending our annual Partner Summit, regional user groups and Mastery series presentations is the time spent with other partners. It really is as much about the people as it is about the stuff under the hood.

By: Tara Spalding

Tara Spalding — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:29:59 +0000

Great article MSP Mentor. I’m with GroundWork and I get the privilege to speak to our customer base and hear about their decision making. As intelliginix mentions above, open source functionality is quickly commoditizing the options/ functionality that proprietary software has dominated with, but there’s more to evaluation than functionality alone.

Few points our customers evaluate upon that I thought would be good to share:

1. is your in house talent/ staff experience and problem solving manners biased towards an open source solution or a proprietary solution? (developer centric vs. deployment centric)

2. is your company’s business model stable or evolving in this economy? Would the supportive software fit with the flexibility your company needs – or is this a low risk?

3. what are the expectations that your customers have? are they tolerant of open source or is there a learning curve to understand and accept open source?

By: Intelliginix

Intelliginix — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:35:18 +0000

I guess it all depends on your perspective. My company helps businesses find the best for for them in terms of software, open source of otherwise. But I cannot tell how many times that we have replaced MS SQL, Oracle, and DB/2 database management systems with mysql, and postgreql, or simple file and print servers running Win2K3 with SuSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu. Just from a dollars perspective your saving anywhere from $4000-$8000 per server.

Open source may not make a difference to the company that doesn’t manage their applications in-house, but it could. It all depends on your perspective, approach, and strategy.

From what I see, businesses want the same features and functionality of premium software for less . In some cases this is easy to do, while others can turn into an enormous task. For instance, if you have a small in-house application developed on Microsoft Access that now needs to be reborn into a client server application, why would you spend even $1000 on commercial RDBMS when mysql or postgresql can do the same job for free? Now for a larger scaled project it may be worth looking into a proprietary solution for features, but open source software makers are bridging that gap as sure as I take the next breath.

intelliginix.com