Let’s just start with setting up correct accents.

Open-source industry is not charity at all. It’s a huge business.

- Why?, some might say. I’m just going to the open-source community website, download the latest version, all free.

And that’s when the fun begins. Marketing rules this world, like the free samples distribution in the supermarket, this is – the first step to winning your loyalty.

The principle of free distribution to those who either want to see and touch before buying, or those who wouldn’t have bought it anyway has two main objectives:

1. Increase brand recognition.
2. Expand to market with a future returns in payments for support/customization activities

Open-source market gives jobs to a huge army of programmers who 8 hours a day, 5 days a week convert standard open-source packages into relatively unique sites, forums, shops, portals, communities.

Why develop from scratch, or pay for a commercial license if your idea matches exactly with the open-source product proposed on market? The answer depends on the depth of your understanding of your future project and whether the business problem you need to solve is relatively simple, not associated with a unique business idea. If you have no clear idea on every single detail of your future project, and the task is simple enough – the answer is – use open source. Just use it.

And this is perhaps the only case you should not invest your time and money into this. It simply never pays off. Why order Custom blog, if there is Wordpress? Why pay for the forum, if there is phpBB? If that is not going to be your profit center or is not intended to directly support any of your profit centers, use open-source.

Let’s turn to the most common myths:

1. Choice of open-source promises substantial savings

As we have seen, open-source products can save money in two cases – when actually spending money at all was unnecessary, and when the required solution to a large extent is covered with an open-source product. In case you need customization, even if it’s minor at first glance, costs can easily run over your budget. Equation gets dozens of new variables which would need a whole book to discuss – the quality of the selected open-source solution,vendor’s experience with this particular solution, the conceptual compatibility of the requested changes with the architecture of the selected open-source solution, the ability to make changes preserving compatibility with open-source solution updates, and so on and so forth.

2. Choice of open-source gives a more stable and predictable result

One should understand that open-source projects and written by the same kind of people as those that are working on your Custom product for the third year, and with each new delivery supply you with a set of new defects. Of course, the level of stability on average is higher comparing to random custom application on the initial stage of project’s delivery. But the fact that the programmers’ work is still used for fine-tuning and customization of open-source solutions, makes me say that stability in the delivery on the initial stage is inversely proportional to the depth and complexity of customization.

3. Most kinds of jobs that are required already exist in the world of open-source

They do. But again and again we are confronted with a situation where the temptation to pay less is so great that one starts thinking – why not collect all the existing solutions as ingredients in the soup, and get a completely custom project at the output, which combines the best of all worlds, and all this at virtually no cost. Well… It does not work, and it doesn’t work SO BAD, that the risks of the project may exceed the original budget. An attempt to integrate solutions written by different teams with different approaches, architectures, or God forbid on different platforms, takes first place in our today’s contest of hopeless projects.

- What do we do then? you ask. Look into commercial products? This isn’t so simple either. Let’s talk about this next time.