Embracing Open Source and Free Software

Continued from page: 1

Saturday, March 01, 2008

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Understand the benefits
Before taking the plunge into any technology, it's important to weigh its pros and cons. The biggest pro or benefit of Open Source software is the price advantage you get from using it. Around 47% of the respondents to our survey confirmed this. Indeed, lots of Open Source applications are freely downloadable, so you do save some cost there. However, that's not the only cost you incur over an application's lifecycle. You would need to pay somebody to deploy and maintain it, which could be an implementation and support partner or an in house team. You would need to study your existing setup and see how well does it integrate. If you're already using a commercial ERP solution for instance, and deploy an Open Source CRM package, then you would need to see how well do they integrate. Otherwise, there will be administrative overheads such as duplicate user names and databases. There would be other overheads like patches and regular updates of the application. You might also occasionally require some troubleshooting of the application, for which you would need to fix an SLA with your support partner.

Incidentally, all these cost heads also need to be considered when deploying a closed source, commercial application. So the bottom line is that you need to compare both types of applications on all these grounds before taking a final call.

Free access to the source code is another big benefit of Open Source software. It also received the second highest response from our survey's participants. This is indeed a true benefit of using an Open Source application, but many organizations wouldn't worry about it too much. At the end of the day, you're worried about having an application up and running quickly for your business, and not about tweaking its source code, compiling and then using it. Not every organization has the required resources to go down to that level. But there are many who have access to such resources, be it a full-fledged development team or a few internal champions. Some organizations have developed complete information systems using Open Source software, while others have tweaked existing products to interact with the modules of another program.

Know the key challenges
Surprisingly, though Open Source has been around for years, the biggest challenge still faced by most CIOs continues to be difficulty in finding support for it. Thirty five of the respondents to our survey confirmed this. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 5 (see graph) for difficulty in finding support for Open Source, the responses were skewed towards 3 and beyond. There are many sources of support available for Open Source software, in which the web serves as the biggest one, followed by having a support partner and an internal team. Speaking of issues on support, Open Source is perhaps the only platform on which you could reach out directly to the creator of the software for support. But then, it seems that nothing beats having a support engineer come directly from the company or a partner to resolve your queries.

The second biggest issue was interoperability with other platforms. This also seems to be changing gradually because today, there are solutions available to integrate different platforms together.The Fedora Directory Services for instance, allows you to provide centralized authentication between multiple applications. Likewise, in Windows, you'll find many tools to ease interoperability. There are tools that allow you to run one platform's software on another. We've covered many of them in our previous issues.

The other key challenges in Open Source world are confusion between what's free and what's not, reliability, and difficulty in installing and configuring Open Source software. Thankfully, most of this is being addressed by the Open Source community. Take virtual appliances for instance. They ease installation and configuration problems. Open Source licenses of course, are still very confusing. We've given a broad overview of these licenses elsewhere in this story.

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