Why Open Source?
Speaking only for myself, it’s a philosophical decision. These are our options:
- Buy software from a your friendly neighborhood sales person, or
- Download it from the community.
The Real Issue
We tried the mega-corp thing, throughout the 1990s-2000s actually. Envisioning systems comprised of hardware from one vendor, operating systems from another vendor and software from multiple/separate vendors; cobbling it all together only to find out our vendors really don’t want to support one another, leaving us in the middle holding the bag.
Culturally, we’ve been doing this since the beginning, in the mid-70s, starting with IBM. Somehow this compulsion still persists today. We imagine that somehow it’s going to work out next time. It almost never does.
But, much like playing golf or surfing, the hope that rare success brings, carries us through the multitude of failures we endure daily.
We hope that someday our vendors will get it and all disparate systems will communicate at the protocol level, bound by some standard — but they never do. We hope they innovate (they do) and that our successes are tied together (they are not). We hope that next time will be that time and it rarely is.
Alternatively, there is open source. Shiny new bits from the cosmos.
As the beard grays, and I recall the balance, open source was a minority player. The venerable Apache web server carried all of our confidence with it for years until other packages arrived to carry some of the weight.
Mega-corps like IBM, HP, Computer Associates and Microsoft ruled the world and open source was characterized as a wild night-beast because it fed on their profits.
Bit by bit, open source grew, slowly and without parade.
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Now, present day, the rebalanced landscape finds those same companies using open source as a primary means of delivering value to the customer. Everyone is notably happier. The mega-corps don’t have to write the software. And we the people get common solutions to common problems.
So what’s the problem?
The philosophical decision comes from observation; there are 2 paths:
- Buy from my vendor. At the core, this is about money — your money. This one fact makes the relationship adversarial by its nature.
- Use open source. It’s built by people that are just trying to get work done. The same work you’re trying to do.
In both cases employee competence is the constant.
In the first case, this results in mile-long lines in vendor support queue as the agents spoon-feed your employees. This decreases the company’s profitability and there is no end to it as it does not solve the root problem of education. As well, the vendor’s offerings to you are mainly what is most profitable for them to sell, not what is technically correct for the company’s current need.
But most importantly, support contracts are expensive for us and profitable for vendors. As vendor software quality decreases, the importance of those contracts increases. Historically, there has been no motivation for vendors to create better software.
In the second case, your employees bleed for their craft, learning from the R&D cycle of repetitious error until (potentially) arriving at the same conclusion as your vendor, making the employee increasingly valuable to the company.
Open source lives and dies by standards; vendor software sometimes does not. Respecting the existing body of work and expanding upon it is important during vendor selection. This guarantees eventual uniformity. And thus, eventually we will all arrive at very similar conclusions.
Exceptions
Hardware; it’s the only non-downloadable component. Would that it weren’t true.
Company/Vendor Relations Tests
Are your vendor’s sales staff happier than your employees? If so, something is terribly wrong.
Eventualities
You’re going to spend the money anyway — you have to if survival is at all important. The question is, what assets do you have after the transaction? A competent staff with the ability to test small models is a good start.
Nobody ever wants to pay — but they always do. You’re going to spend the money anyway; get something in return.
