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 COLUMN
Who controls your biz? WHEN PEOPLE TALK about the benefits of open source, certain pluses inevitably head the list. Usually the first to come up is the cost of acquisition. The fact that open-source software is typically available for free is notable, even if it is not the most important aspect of the software. This inevitably leads to arguments over total cost of ownership, which can also be a potent reason for using open source.
Consider this scenario: You are building a corporation with the intention of eventually dominating your market. You set out to build the best team you can muster. You carefully hire expensive, top-level managers who know the industry, know the competition, and know the customers. You painstakingly gather the technical talent necessary to create the products and services that will define your company. And you instruct the team to implement a plan that will put the corporation on the road to success. As the plan gels, the requirements are fed to the IT department. Unfortunately, IT responds with bad news: "We can do 85 percent of what you want, but we cannot find a product that will give you the final 15 percent." Now you have a problem. Either you can pay an extremely high cost and lose precious time while your IT people hire an expensive team to produce the custom software from scratch, or you can drop some of the requirements created by your highly paid management team and resort to using a standard commercial product -- the very same product, as it turns out, that your competitors use. Your competitive edge is in peril. The best-laid plans of your management team and the success of your company are being jeopardized by the limits of your software. Either your costs skyrocket and time-to-market suffers, or your business processes must be dumbed down to match your competition. Open source gives you a third option. You can take an open-source solution that provides 85 percent of what you need and extend it the additional 15 percent with only minimal custom coding. The cost of development drops dramatically, because most of the solution is already implemented and tested. The delay in time-to-market is likewise minimized. And the task of maintaining the code can either be brought in-house to protect new and novel processes, or the code can be shared (in whole or in part) with the original open-source project in order to minimize long-term support costs. The bottom line is this: You know your business. You are responsible for your business. You need control over your business. If you use software products to meet your business objectives, that is wonderful. But if these products keep you from implementing your business plans, something is gravely wrong. Open-source software gives you the choice to do things the way everyone else does it, or do it the way you want to do it. It is your choice -- and that is a good thing. Russell Pavlicek is an independent open-source consultant. Contact him at pavlicek@linuxprofessionalsolutions.com. Discuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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