Open Source Software Is Not Free

July 1, 2008 · Filed Under Estimating, General, Project Management  - 1 Comment(s)

There is a great BLOG entry from someone who went back to Microsoft after a year at Google.  Some of his observations are very relevant to the use of open source software.  He points out that at Google there is little of project management or testing. 

“On the other hand, I was using Google software… there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week – the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.”

I know it drives me crazy when software that worked last week suddenly doesn’t.  Of course the same thing happens to some extent when my Windows system kindly updates itself each week.

Don’t get me wrong.  I use some open source software.  This BLOG, for example uses WordPress open source, installed by our web site hoster.  It is pretty tender. It crashes regularly when I am adding files or other items that everyone doesn’t do every day.  And the spell check doesn’t always work unless you spellcheck the html version (I didn’t know that until I saw one of my posts full of spelling errors… I can’t spell but I always run a spell checker.) If I had paid for it I would be hopping mad.  But what can I say for free.  At least here we replicated the code and will not be victims of untested updates.

We are also using some open source c# widgets.  Again, we control the version being used.  And we have all the source.  If there is a critical problem we can (hopefully) fix it ourselves.  And Microsoft is behind them.

We tried the Google collaborative spreadsheet to manage to do’s for a diverse team.  It pretty much worked.  But it was frightening that we didn’t know how it would operate from day to day.  So we need to separate the questions to at least two kinds of open source:

  1. Open Source where You Control
  2. Hosted Open Source Where You are Not in Control

SEER shows a probable variance of over 181,000% between robust off the shelf software with good support and previous experience versus open source that is not well tested and supported.  I realize many open source products have support for a fee which mitigates the difference by almost 40% of the total.

The following lists SEER key drivers of cost and schedule for off the shelf software:

  •   Application Type Financial
      Functionality Required
      OFF-THE-SHELF PRODUCT CHARACTERISTICS
      Component Type
      Component Volatility
      Component Application Complexity
      Interface Complexity
      Product Support
      USE
      Component Selection Completeness
      Experience With Component
      Learning Rate
      Reverse Engineering
      Component Integrate and Test
      Test Level
      COSTS
      Recurring Cost
      Non-Recurring Cost


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Comments

One Response to “Open Source Software Is Not Free”

  1. Ben on February 17th, 2010 7:14 pm

    Google is not open source. There’s a huge difference between free and open source.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software

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