Blog: Mark Madsen

Main | Innovation in IT: The Real Value of Open Source »

Open Source Means a Lot Less Build vs. Buy

One of the questions that comes up often in IT is whether to build or buy software. It’s in generally in one of three contexts:

• new technology where the products are expensive or incomplete, so it may be more cost effective to get what you want by building it in house
• expensive technology where the products exceed IT budget constraints, often a consideration in small to mid-sized IT shops
• applications with a high degree of integration, where the key to success is integrating the new software with the existing environment and applications and thus involves a lot of programming

Open source offers a third alternative to the traditional decision of buy versus build. When you find yourself in one of these situations, your first option should be to look for open source packages that might meet your needs.

There is a lot of innovative work happening in the application space, particularly related to web tooling and applications. You’ll find a lot happening here that you can use to build custom solutions faster than if you were to build from scratch, and you will still get exactly what you want.

Where the initial acquisition cost is a concern, open source brings an obvious advantage. The real question you need to answer in this situation is whether the cost of ongoing operations combined with the acquisition cost is significantly different than buying a package. Assuming there is an acceptable open source solution, it’s pretty clear that you will save time and money over building your own. If expensive mainstream IT software is out of reach, open source can save the day.

When software requires a lot of work to integrate into your environment, labor costs typically trump software costs. Open source alternatives may help here because open source is typically built with open standards in mind, meaning it’s (often) easier to integrate.

The other area affected by integration concerns is integration software itself. Even if you choose to buy a package with heavy integration requirements, you can use open source integration software to do the systems integration work and avoid hand-coding.

It’s worthwhile considering open source as the third alternative when you’re looking at a buy versus build decision.

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