Build Your Business With Open Source

PCM2 writes "InfoWorld this week is running a ten-page guide to building your business entirely with OSS. The guide highlights OSS alternatives for many enterprise applications categories such as CRM, ERP, content management, and so on. It's not exhaustive, but where it skips the obvious categories like databases and Web servers it includes some others that you might not expect."

Comments

An interesting demographic

[rob_squared]

I've dealt with management at different companies I've worked for and the biggest issue they seem to have is that it will upset "the order of things." It seems that this is the perfect market for F/OSS. If you're already using it, its not as big of a headache to start. Now you just have to worry about the technical level of those that are starting their own business.

Who is listening?

[bogaboga]

While I appreciate Infoworld's piece, I wonder whether anyone relevant is listening. My boss for example will not even take a look. He says, M$ products have been doing fine for him for more than a decade and can still do more for another few years.

Question is: Are the people who matter reading these kinds of reports?

Re:Who is listening?

[hikerhat]

Your boss could be right. Transitioning from one platform to another can be incredibly expensive. It doesn't matter what kind of license the software has. Invariably, the new software doesn't do something the old software did, so you have to re-implement existing functionality. Data gets lost in the transition. The customer might see a few delays as you work the kinks out of the new system, costing very valuable customer confidence.

Replacing existing working software is a huge risk. If the transition doesn't go perfectly you've racked up more costs fixing the problems than two or three years of licensing the old product (compare the cost of a few IT people working on a problem full time over a few days to a one year MSDN subscription, for example).

Re:Huh?

[ucahg]

The solutions are as obvious as the categories.

Does anybody with the required knowledge of databases not know about Apache and Postgres/My/whatever SQL?

It's more than just choosing applications

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep this in mind: a big-ass list of "open-source replacement alternatives" sort of implies that the closed-source path is the "normal way to do it" in the first place. If you're starting from there you've already lost. Every alternative choice will need to be justified to death and most will lose.

Better to bring the philosophy in this way: "We will use the best tool for the job. We strongly prefer open source for reliability and flexibility reasons; we will consider commercial products where appropriate." And then do the best job you can do with the tools you've chosen. A record of excellent results, even a very short one, is the best way to give open source a toehold.

Home Office

[doombob]

The company I work for always provides me with Non-OSS supplies like Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, MS Office, and Windows XP. But my work at home involves various types of media projects including audio, video, and web. Right now I use Nvu for development, Audacity for my audio editing, and I'm trying out Jahshaka for video editing. And of course Open Office for everything else.

Excellent Fit...

[wgray8231]

My department at a research hospital/university was recently (almost 2 years ago) formed. (Formerlly a division in another department.) The new chair moved everyone to GNU\Linux (Debian) because he hates everythin M$ stands for. It works out great with limited funding b/c the department spends less on software and many of the tools used in the field are available as OSS anyway.

What doess XPPro and Office cost for 20 or so computers, anyway?

Re:Alternative option.

[TheRaven64]

You are not paying extra for ease of use, you are paying more for vendor lock-in. The choice is:

1. Buy a single-vendor solution and hope that vendor keeps supporting it. It won't really fit your needs, but you can pay someone else to customise it and then be locked into using two vendors. Next year, support will run out on the solution you paid for, and you will be required to pay more for the upgrade.
2. Start with a Free solution and pay someone to customise it. Require that they release the customisations to you as Free Software (usually by assigning copyright to you). Next time you need to migrate systems, you have all the rights you need to employ a different contractor to do the work. You might stick with the old one, since they are more familiar with the code, but you are not forced to.

No system lasts for ever. Eventually you will need to migrate to something new. The cost of migrating away from a platform should always be factored into the initial purchase decision.

Re:All well and good...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Until something doesn't work, then who do you call?

Umm, your vendor or whomever you contracted for support.

...in a corporate(business) environment, if something goes down, it has to be back up fast and without support, how does one accomplish that if it isn't withing that admin's realm of expertise?

If your admin can't manage a recovery plan and/or can't figure out how to run and install the software you need then you need a new admin. This has nothing to do with open vs. closed source or commercial vs. free software. Do you work for the government or something? That is the only place I've heard of where decisions are made that way. "We wanted to build a concrete building but the contractor we hired only knows how to build log cabins, so the building will be made out of logs." You choose your employees and your software based upon their strengths and weaknesses. If you can save 100K a year by using Apache instead of IIS across your whole enterprise, but your systems administrator can't figure out Apache, fire his ass pronto. He's got to be incompetent. It's as bad as those correspondence school programmers who want a job at a real development shop but can only program in visual basic and are completely unable to learn any other languages. It's just sad.

Actually...

[bobalu]

if they're smart they do what works for them given their employees, time requirements and other resources, regardless of the prevailing fashion.

Re:If a company was smart...

[YrWrstNtmr]

If my company was in the 'insanely huge search engine' business, I'd likely do it pretty much like Google does it.

As we're not in that business, what works for Google (customized Linux distros running 10's of thousands of servers) may not work for me.