Blog: Mark Madsen

« Open Source Means a Lot Less Build vs. Buy | Main | Open Source and Dowward Price Pressures »

Innovation in IT: The Real Value of Open Source

The real impact of open source is the chance for IT to try new technologies sooner and with less risk. With open source, a group can bring a technology in house, experiment with it, and then decide whether to engage a commercial vendor or continue with the open source software.

If you want to experiment with new technology in the commercial software world, you first have to talk with a vendor sales rep, After a long involved process, you’ll usually get some sort of trial license for a limited time that allows you to use their software.

These sorts of trials require management involvement and multiple levels of approval. Often the legal department is involved since there’s some sort of trial license agreement. The process is really not under your control, the schedule isn’t entirely yours and the process requires extra work.

Contrast this with open source, where a developer can download the software when they want, work with it when they have time, and without the same level of management review or oversight. It empowers developers and IT managers by freeing them to do things that otherwise would be too much trouble.

Even if you later buy a commercial product for deployment, open source allows you to try things out in a relatively safe way at the start. It also removes some of the deployment risks since you can deploy in production on a small scale. You can’t do that production deployment with a commercial product on a trial basis. At some point you have to pull the plug.

Being freed from some of these technology acquisition constraints means you can try new things and be more creative when coming up with solutions. In management terms, you can be more innovative, which is why IT management should be embracing open source.

Share: