Open Source has an infinite budget
As I discussed in Part 1 The Community, the open source community is not the source of this infinite budget. In fact the Open Source projects are overrun with bugs and security breaches and as such are turning to various Clopen models to generate revenue. Most of the Clopen Source modes are failing. (The notable exceptions are using a variant of Clopen Source which can be called Corpen Source which I will address in another post.) So if the infinite budget is not in the community where is it?
If you have allowed a free reign of open source in your company then it is coming from you. And it is being spent in a way that should alarm you.
Suppose your company allows the use of any and all open source tools. To the developer this is functionally the equivalent of an infinite budget for open source tools and software.
Whenever the developer wants a tool it's purchase is automatically approved because the price "free" does not reduce any budget.
He then can start using the tool and all is well.
Provided of course that it stands alone and has no bugs or security problems. Oh and provided of course that he does not need to learn how to use it. But if it needs to be integrated or bugs need to fixed then the budget that pays for it is hidden from management.
The developer will be spending hours integrating or fixing or working around bugs. These hours come out of the finite number of developer hours available to you. Note there is no check or limit on how much effort will be spent on supporting open source in your company, as such the budget for open source that you are paying is infinite.
So what is the moral? Never use open source software?
No, the answer is harder than that. What is called for here is management. Management means monitoring and making some hard decisions based on facts. Some open source software, NUnit would be may favorite example, is almost defect free and can be easily used with little integration or learning ramp up time.
But keep an eye on these, even if you stick to solid open source software, the integration costs increase at a factorial rate as the number of components increase.
There will come a time when you should opt to use a development stack and pay a flat fee instead. MSDN is a great example. For a few hundred dollars a developer (partner pricing) you can get access to all the software needed and at the same time the integration costs disappear.
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