The choice of an application whether open-source or commercial-source depends on needs of the organization. The key advantages of open-source are license and code is free, often times the source code allows for customizations and extensions, and some form of basic support may be available from a wide community of users. All of these may be compelling reasons to save money upfront and go open-source. But open-source is not free. The costs for implementing and supporting an open-source product may be almost same as for a commercial product.

Maturity and Adoption

The adoption of open-source has been growing. Many large enterprises have standardized their infrastructure on open-source, especially Linux, Apache etc. This is because open-source “infrastructure” components have evolved and matured. However the same is not true with but the “packaged application” products. Many of these are still on their road to maturity. Though there are many open-source ERP, SCM, Rules Configurators, Collaboration Applications, and Content Management Apps etc., few of them are able to compete with Oracle, SAP and SharePoints of the world especially for enterprise wide deployments. Though the adoption of such open-source applications are on the rise, commercial applications still continue to dominate a large portion of the Enterprise Application market space at least in the near future with open-source apps dominating the SMB marketplace.

Technology, Skills, Support and Maintenance

Also choice of an open-source product depends on the technology the product is built on (PHP, J2EE, Ruby etc.), the skills available in-house for any extensions or customizations or integrations, the size of the community supporting the product, and the capability of the product to support the near term and long term needs of the organization, the risks associated with migrations and upgrades. Such a needs-analysis may suggest the need to go with more than one open-source product for fulfilling an organization’s requirement, whereas a single vendor supplied commercial application suite might fit the bill. Most open-source software is developer centric and thrives only when there is a large user community. Hence we do not see open-source for typical narrow industry specific solutions such as for pharmaceutical clinical trials, Drug Discovery, R&D applications etc.

Cost considerations

Though open source software itself may be available for no-cost, the costs for implementing an open-source product could almost be similar to implementing a commercial product, unless the organizations have sufficient skilled resources available in-house or are able to tap into a large community of users. Open source is free - in the sense of freedom of speech, it does not imply free of cost.

Some lessons learnt

For example in the CMS space, I have tried Joomla and Drupal. While Joomla and Drupal in are good for individual websites, organizations needing a multiple sites with content and asset sharing across them may better opt for other technologies. Neither Joomla nor Drupal has the capability to publish content to multiple end-points running on different technologies such as Microsoft .NET ASP, Java JSP or sites running on other technologies such as Ruby. Bear in mind this is different than hosting multiple siloed sites on a single install.

Also, today content management encompasses areas such web content management, document management, support for digital asset management (for images, audio, video files), and ability to stream these as required, collaboration, records management and often times some sort of digital rights management etc. Also, typically a large organization or an enterprise interacts/communicates with its constituents across several touch-points such as through the web, emails, direct mails, audio/video Podcasts apart from other traditional media. One has to weigh in and see if chosen product would address such diverse needs such as publishing to multiple end-points.