I thought that company directors spent some of their time playing golf with their peers as part of “networking”. However it turns out that the modern IT director, such as ours, seems to think that a good time spent networking with his peers involves discussions around relevant topics like “Strategic Resourcing”. It was no surprise when he returned from a recent event and started asking me about using free open source software.
They had been discussing the effect of collaboration tools, especially instant messaging, on company culture. The CIO of a local utility company had mentioned that they were rolling out messaging using open source products which had saved capital expenditure compared to the commercial offerings. Without morning coffee I couldn’t really think of any cogent arguments either way and by the time I had he was away discussing something else of importance like the role of IT in business transformation.
The question of whether to use Open Source software or pay for commercial products keeps coming up and my answer is still the same as it has always been: It depends!
I’m not an automotive engineer, and when I sit in my car I’m not overly concerned about how it does what it does. I just want it to work. Frankly for most businesses I expect IT to be treated in the same way; concentrate on the business itself and how IT helps to make it work, not on how IT works. If that fits with how you want to do business, then you’ll want IT products to work without deviating your time away from the core activities. Despite the occasional report to the contrary, software businesses put a lot of effort into testing their products to work well.
Larger companies like Microsoft or Symantec develop & test the processes around installation as well as ongoing use. They also publish specifications for how their software looks when you use it so that if you are familiar with one product, then another should be easier to find your way around as well. Of course this costs money & you pay for that.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some really good software packages in the open source world. OpenOffice comes to mind as a good alternative to Microsoft Office and it is free to use. It looks different to Microsoft Office and some of the features work in a different way. My family experiences with OpenOffice are probably typical of using open source & other free software:
My eldest son got to grips with OpenOffice almost immediately. He found his way around it quickly and used it to produce a lot of documents including some high quality camera-ready brochures ready for professional printing. But then he did study Computer Science for a year at university as part of his course so I’d expect him to be pretty savvy at this stuff.
His younger brother could use OpenOffice but found that the differences to Microsoft office were enough to put him off. He just wanted to get on with working, not with trying to find out how to do something when he’d already learnt once elsewhere. He gave up and bought Microsoft Office as he felt he was faster working with it.
My father-in-law took one look at OpenOffice and declared it so different to Microsoft Office that he gave up in confusion.
I try to think of who is using the software and what they want to spend their time doing. Microsoft Office skills are widely taught now so getting staff going with them is easy. A major organisation, like the one that the CIO above represents, may well have in-house training and support teams that are able to get staff up to speed with other products cost-effectively. For them open source software could offer significant savings, that’s why we see some local authorities taking this route. However for a smaller business without access to that sort of infrastructure then the cost of mainstream products may well be balanced against the ease of using them.
That for me sums up the whole open software product portfolio. If you are prepared to spend the time (and indirectly your money) then you can get some very good products cost-effectively. Most come with no guarantee, and you don’t get a telephone number to call if you have a problem. If that is for you then go for it, just be prepared and recognise that the up-front saving may be eroded by the in-life costs.
As I said, “It depends”
PS. I use open source software at home
@eclipseinternet
Eclipse Internet
I think what you are actually talking about is replacing software from the incumbent supplier with *any* alternative, rather than just an open source alternative. I assume that the problem your family had with OpenOffice isn’t that it’s free, but that it’s not Microsoft Office. They would presumably have exactly the same problem with StarOffice, or Ability Office, or Corel WordPerfect Office, all of which are commercial paid-for software. So it’s a bit unfair to pitch this as a problem with open source, when it’s pretty much a problem for the whole of the software industry outside of Microsoft and other monopoly players.
It’s a good point Richard, especially taking the viewpoint of a home user.
However, I was trying to give a perspective on the learning effort as one of the cost factors that you need to consider. others include cost of finding support, potential business risk of using software that possibly hasn’t been subject to the same rigourous testing that a more mainstream product would recieve.
I’ve had quite a few experiences of seeing small businesses look at product X at cost £ABC; and then at free product Y; and decide that they can save £ABC, then later ask why they are not getting that saving.
If you are a large company and can afford to develop the training & support infrastructure then you can make savings with free or open source products. Smaller companies on the other hand cannot, and the publicly available support (local colleges providing trained folks familiar with Microsoft products for example, and local PC shops with a small tech support service for Microsoft Office) isn’t available for the non-mainstream products.
I think the summary was that £ABC vs £0 spend was not necessarily going to give a saving of £ABC.
Regards
Russell
I hope I am not going to be controversial here as we are a software developer and obviously I am biased!!
The benefit for me of paying for software is mainly around trust, support, documentation and development of the product. Free products may have bugs that will never be fixed, incompatability issues and also you don’t always know what may be hidden in the code. Questions to ask:
Who wrote it and are they reliable?
Can you take a chance with your business with free code?
What is the cost if there is something hidden in there that causes system problems?
If I have problems, how do I get support?
I am not against free software and I have researched companies and used their software, but not in a commercial environment. As an example primo pdf is a brilliant piece of software for creating PDF’s and Adobe Acrobat is very expensive for the same task. However, creating a pdf document is a little different to using a piece of software that is either business dependant/critical or customer facing that may have adverse impact on a customer experience. What is the cost of that?
The learning a new piece of software as a reason to not use free software is valid for both free and paid software, so it’s validity as an argument is negated.
I have been supporting SMEs for 6 years now, I have been successfully installing and supporting Open source products in several clients for many of them for most of that time. I take issue with the complaints about lack of support on this simple basis, Microsoft do not supply free support for their products throughout the product lifetime and in that six year period I have had no more issues with Openoffice, Firefox, Scribus and Thunderbird than I have with my microsoft dependent clients, indeed I have had very few occasions to actually seek fixes and workarounds for either.
I wish the same could be said of the operating systems, Windows XP and Server 2003 are prone to equal amounts of periods of stability and instability whereas the Linux clients and servers suffer no such problems.
The savings on open source software are real and quantifiable, sure if a client needs complex macros and integration between apps open source is a difficult solution and Microsoft would be better, but if the open source apps are used as is they work fine.
More than that though is that Openoffice has moved up 2 whole versions while MS Office has lurched from the bug ridden XP to the stable 2003 with 2 service packs to the dumbed down mess that is 2007. Openoffice has a clear upgrade path with no costs, Staroffice is a supported version of Openoffice the kernel being the same, I have never encountered any other office package in use in the last six years so cannot comment on them.
Usability is an overblown issue in my experience, MS has removed usability whereas Openoffice has the potential for it to be added. Conversion was easy with a few questions but that is it. I have never had to cross-train anyone.
Open source is here to stay and hooray for that. If someone was to start a business tomorrow I would probably suggest a completely open source solution, after all why waste money in tough times. Any good IT support person does both, only the trained chimps cannot get their head around linux and openoffice, it is not rocket science.
Tim,
I agree with your views around the supportability of the open source products you mention, and I think it is good to see the availabilty of open source software putting pressure on established vendors to produce and support better products.
What I was trying to highlight is that it is quite reasonable for IT people to get to grips with the differences between open source products & the established vendor offerings. However the world of business is not 100% populated by IT people & we have to accept that the majority of users will need some support (learning & usage assistance) in mastering those differences. It is the cost of providing that usage support that tends to be overlooked.