BusinessTechFeed » opensource http://businesstechfeed.com For The People Feeding Business With Technology Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:09:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Can Opensource Save a Business Money? http://businesstechfeed.com/2008/10/can-opensource-save-a-business-money/ http://businesstechfeed.com/2008/10/can-opensource-save-a-business-money/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:10:59 +0000 Benjamin Ellis http://businesstechfeed.com/?p=146 It seems an apt question for the current times. Some businesses have fully embraced opensource, others have steered well clear of it. The pros and cons have been hotly contested, usually by people with an agenda, if not an axe to grind. Regardless of your historic stance, now is the right time to be looking at how to cut IT costs.

A blogger-in-technology that has much to say about the matter is JP Rangaswami of BT Design, and rightly so. His confused of calcutta blog is a firm favourite of mine, and of many others. “Learning about why people don’t adopt opensource” is a long, but worth-while read that circumnavigates many of the issues around open source software. It is in two halves. The first speaks to why people don’t use opensource:

  1. They hate the principle.
  2. They believe it’s insecure.
  3. They’re out of their comfort zone.
  4. They know a better way.
  5. They don’t know about it.
  6. They can’t do what they want with it.
  7. The move represents serious operational risk.

The second half covers a case study that will make your head spin. As an IT manager and MD/CEO, the issues at the top of my agenda would be around skills and support.

  • If there is a fault that affects my business, can I get it fixed?
  • Do I have access to the skills to install and support it?
  • Do the users have the skills to use it, or can they be trained?
The answers are surprising. The nature of opensource means that you have the source code, and can hire a programmer for the day (or week!) to fix a problem or add a missing feature. A number of companies are springing up to provide support for opensource software and bridge the gap between ‘commercial’ applications and opensource, and people like RedMonk have been providing analysis on the space for a long time.  Many of the applications are similar in usability to their commercial counterparts, tackling the training issue.
Version 3.0 of OpenOffice has recently been released, and received a very significant number of downloads even in the first few days (3,009,832). For other companies and applications to watch, I’ll refer you to this list back in September, from Jeff Nolan of Venture Chronicles as a starting point:
  • Zenoss - Network and system monitoring software.
  • Enomalism - Build your own private elastic compute cloud.
  • rPath -  Virtual appliances.
  • Qumranet (part of Red Hat) - hypervisor technology.
  • OpenAir - Project management software for professional service organizations.

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