I am doing some research into the open source culture and open source license terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) for the first time since mid 2008. It's to support an annual review and analysis of open source in business process management (BPM), an excerpt of which will appear here on ebizQ in July as a feature article (similar to this recent excerpt of a study on process discovery).
In the process I was surprised to find how much the conventional wisdom that "open source Ts&Cs equal lower cost computing" still exists out on the web. Of course it helps when the media, especially the UK media for some reason (as in these recent articles in The Economist and Computing) keep repeating the myth with no data to back up their reporting. (To be fair, the ComputingUK "article" may be a paid advertisement. At least it reads like one.)
I had pretty much explained to clients in 2006 and 2007 about the strengths and weaknesses of open source as well as its total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) aspects. But I had had to do it with theory. Now some hard data is starting to emerge. Specific to the BPM article, I have been provided numbers that prove the theory that buying a service contract on a specific open-source-licensed BPM toolset actually costs more after 36 months than licensing a specific closed-source BPM toolset in the typical way and paying the subsequent annual 20% maintenance fee for four years. In my theory, five years is the average cross over point.
The numbers I reviewed are only specific to the products I was discussing and the results are in no way an endorsement of the license/maintenance fee business model over software as a service (SaaS) or an indictment of open source Ts&Cs. But it's just common sense: open source software service providers have to make money too. It's simply that they offer a value proposition that says "pay me more later rather than pay me more now."
"Try it you'll like it" has been a great marketing method since King Gillette started selling razor blades that way.
The counter to that sales argument when it comes to open source Ts&Cs is that you don't have to pay anything for service if you so choose. You can depend on bulletin boards and the community. And that's OK for some usage situations. But my research sources also pointed me to an IBM-sponsored July 7 webinar that really fleshes out the numbers at a level higher than my simple theoretical model of typical license/maintenance vs. open-source service contract over time.
The IBM-sponsored speaker is Matthew Brown of Forrester and the subject is portals rather than BPM but the findings and the underlying thought process can be applied to any project. The message is simple: open source Ts&Cs are like any other license Ts&Cs. And license Ts&Cs are only a small fraction of your IT project costs whether it be for BPM or anything else. And sometimes open source Ts&Cs can dramatically increase the rest of the IT project costs. To the caution of "pay me now or pay me later," add the caution "what I give you with one hand, I take away with the other."
Again that's not an endorsement of one approach or an indictment of another. It's simply a reminder to do your homework before buying into mythical conventional wisdom.
-- Dennis Byron
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