Commercial or open source software?

Most people have used some form of commercial software, but have you considered open source software? Some companies have considered this and evaluated what we call the TCO or 'total cost of ownership' which includes not only software price, but cost of conversion and maintaining the software. This may include software upgrade pricing, training, helpdesk, or other support that may or may not be included in the software price.

Fortunately, there are many popular open source projects that are obtaining commercial support and/or sponsors. For example, with operating systems, most people are familiar with Microsoft Windows as well as Mac OS, both commercial operating systems, but what they may not realize is that Mac OS X was actually derived from an open source project called Darwin. In addition to these, there are many versions of Linux such as Redhat and SUSE which also have commercial sponsorship now. Many of these include numerous additional software packages required to run web servers, business workstations, or more.

Many popular commercial desktop software applications also have an open source equivalent. One of the more popular examples of this is Open Office, a Microsoft Office equivalent. Although not perfect, the open source developers of Open Office have been pretty good at keeping up with changes to basic Microsoft Office formats making them very interchangeable. A couple of popular programs from Mozilla is Firefox, a web browser similar to Internet Explorer, and Thunderbird, a mailer similar to Microsoft Outlook. In addition to these, there are similar basic replacements for Adobe Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and many other popular software packages.

Even small to larger websites use popular open source projects such as Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, or another of the 100's of popular open source web-based projects available. Some of the types of web-based projects include content management systems, forums, blogs, shopping carts, groupware, photo galleries, wikis, and more. Opensource CMS has made several demos available for people to try many of these web-based projects without being required to install them on their systems.

The downside to open source is that many of the less popular projects don't have much support and may therefore need some internal support from the company using the software and/or outsourced support at an additional cost to owning that software. Although this may want to be avoided, some companies may have a particular niche that requires a specific type of software and partially developed software may be worth the additional cost compared to complete custom development and/or a commercial product.

As an open source supporter, Enterprise Effect, and it's related companies have moved to almost all open source software. In fact, after supporting Microsoft Windows for decades for other companies, the company's management decided to not even do 'Windows' anymore. The websites have been moved to Linux servers and all of the company workstations have been switched over to either Mac OS or Linux, both being open source based. And since switching a few years ago, not only has there been less support issues, but both Mac OS and Linux have been more stable and made more efficient use of their hardware.

Fortunately, with all of the open source options, many open source end products can be produced to either be nearly as functional or practically indistinguishable between their expensive commercial counterparts. So it becomes a matter of whether it's cost effective for your company to stay all commercial, go all open source, or provide a combination of both. It may be cost effective for businesses large or small to invest in some open source. But where a small business may be able to switch to all open source, it may be too costly for a large corporation to do the same.

Computer Contour, an Enterprise Effect company, provides technical services for those who choose to use open source based operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux. This may include Linux and/or Linux/Windows dual-boot or virtual systems and more.