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State of the nation

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 15:59

Simon Brock looks at the future of open-source software in light of the economic downturn, but warns that not all free solutions are best.

Finally, there are the enhancers, those users of open-source software who do open the box, do look inside, do figure out how it works and then make it work better: they do take the time to download the source code and make changes to it. Perhaps this just takes the form of glueing a couple of whole products together for their own use, or it may stretch as far as major new versions tailored for their own custom application. There are now many large organisations that do this all the time, modifying open-source software as part of their everyday work. It would be fair to say that these enhancers fall into two camps, the "good guys" who pass their changes back to the community - examples being Google, IBM and others - and the "bad guys" who don't (no names, no pack drill).

Why does this all matter? Because as more people begin using open-source software, attracted by the potential for lower start-up cost, some will use the products as black boxes, but I believe many of them can become good-guy enhancers rather than bad ones, for two reasons. Some people will accidentally enhance a product just by contributing relevant support questions or bug reports: in essence, they'll use a product, find a problem and then ask the question that will get an answer. This process helps others and the product will get better as a result of their interest. Some more of these people will actually be developers of some kind and will make changes to the products themselves, and then donate these changes back to the support community.

Open source for the recession

If you're going to take up open-source software for the first time in order to save money during these straightened times, it doesn't require an economics degree to understand that such savings come in two forms: direct and indirect. I'm actually making a direct saving by giving up on open-source email software, but in other applications that will not be the case. However, it's often quite hard to find cases where a simple software swap can lead to direct savings, and far more likely that changes to the way you work will bring about indirect savings. And here it's often the open-source business tools that make the difference.

At the most basic level keeping the books for a small business is hard work. Accounting packages cost a lot of money and can be tricky to use. There are open-source alternatives, of which GnuCash (www.gnucash.org) is probably the best - with a bit of effort you can get it to handle VAT - but this isn't really the kind of product that's going to make a huge change to your product cycle. What very well might do is some kind of Enterprise Resource Planning product, of which there are several good open-source examples. Of these, webERP (www.weberp.org) is one of the best, and the best-known, but do also check out phpBMS (php Business Management Software, www.phpbms.org). These products can really alter the way you manage your business and resources, by bringing all the information together in one place, in a single software package. These packages lead into bigger and bigger systems, crossing over into the world of commercial open-source software where the best system is SugarCRM (www.sugarcrm.com), which really can do everything you want.