Van Eijk’s view: buying open source

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Van Eijk’s view: buying open source

Written by Robin Muilwijk Sunday, 08 March 2009 19:38

A lot of organizations are interested in open source software, but do not succeed in giving it a fair chance compared to proprietary solutions. A reason for this is that the usual invitation to tender process puts open source at a disadvantage. Open source, as it happens, is made in a different ecosystem.

The software acquisition process often focuses on licenses, and this is where the first mistakes are made. Recently a (Dutch) municipality burned its fingers because they asked directly for Microsoft Licenses in an invitation to tender. It is also common that organizations ask for experience with licenses that represent a certain turnover. But how many vendors have ever earned money on licenses of open source? None. So who has the money to respond to such invitations to tender? Nobody!

Beyond licenses, an organization wants software support because this guarantees the continued useful deployment of this software. For proprietary software it is necessary that those vendors provide long term support, because no one else provides the software. The management of this risk demands that you ask for guarantees of the relevant vendor. Organizations that still run on Siebel or IBM OS/2 will still have a problem by the way.

Open source does not have such vendors (yet), and demanding long term support will then put open source at a disadvantage and solves a problems that does not exist. If you, half way down the road, want another support vendor you just do it. Mature risk management of open source will lead to the question for example if there is a good and functioning community of supporters, and will remain so in the future. We then find that there are large differences between the various Linux distributions, for example with regards to the size of reference implementations and the speed with which security issues are patched. Different ecosystems, different risks, they ask for different measures.

This article appeared earlier in Computable.nl magazine, JFoobar is translating and publishing a selection of open source related articles by Peter van Eijk. Peter van Eijk has an English blog on http://feeds2.feedburner.com/PetersGriddle and a Dutch website at www.digitalinfrastructures.nl.

Copyright Peter van Eijk

About the author Robin Muilwijk

Robin Muilwijk, born in 1969 in the Netherlands where is still lives, is a true Open Source enthusiast! During his years on internet he gradually got more and more involved in Open Source projects. With his blog posts he hopes to bring you interesting news, reviews, case studies and more.

More about Robin Muilwijk

There are 2 comments posted.

Re: Support is the missing link

# 1 - Posted by: Michel van Agtmaal on 2009-03-09 13:32:17

Professional support for Joomla and other open source solutions is frequently the missing link for its successful utilization.

With OpenSourceSupportDesk.com we bridge this gap and offer a solution that allow individual and corporate users to run a business critical web site using an Open Source CMS like Joomla, knowing that they have guaranteed support whenever needed.

A Support Contract with an expert team, including a strict Service Level Agreement (SLA), gives companies (large and small) the opportunity to launch an open source solution at the service level they require, up to 24/7.

With large corporate clients as a user, open source projects may benifit as well, since these projects will get professional feedback and feature requests.

Re: Van Eijk’s view: buying open source

# 2 - Posted by: Ian Maclennan on 2009-03-09 16:28:58

Just curious - what are you doing to contribute back to these projects?

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