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New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

blogs.worldbank.org

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Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#31

Post by ftlio »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #28
ftlio wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially 1) Why on Earth would a company spend a considerable amount of resources on doing something that isn't good for them financially? That's their thing, and in the whole scheme of things seems like good separation of concerns. Companies make profits. Other things do other things. 2) Figuring…

Yeah I phrased that poorly. I think open-source is good for companies financially because it makes a more valuable product for end-users. And I wish THAT was the focus. What is typically the focus (although admittedly, is not really the focus in this article) in presentations trying to get companies to do open-source is, "look - people will do a bunch of free work for you". I think that's both unlikely and beside the…

That makes much more sense.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#32

Post by harrisi »

dqv wrote: post #16
TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple. I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on h…

>it's just a douche bag move to sell software and proactively prevent users from having freedom to understand, fix or modify it for their needs I work in an industry that has a particularly nasty case of vendor lock-in. There are only a few vendors and they all do things the same way: no API and no innovation. They are causing things to stagnate for the whole industry . I don't get why they don't realize that even ju…

Do you mind saying what industry you're referencing?

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#33

Post by dgacmu »

pirocks wrote: post #24
seanhandley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".

n00b here. Can someone explain to me how this works. I imagine a good developer is fairly expensive, so letting them do something unrelated to there job must be pretty expensive. How does this make business sense?

In addition to the other answers you've gotten, it's often the case that: (a) Developing what you need as a modest extension to existing OSS is cheaper than doing it all by yourself; and (b) Contributing those changes back to the community means that you've shed the burden of having to keep your local patch's changes in sync with the OSS version going forward.

("Hey, we wanted to use MAAS to maintain our cluster, but it doesn't support our particular power controller, so let's send the patch upstream...")

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#34

Post by knz »

Animats wrote: post #3

Three blogs deep, there's a link to the actual paper.[1] It's a study of one project, a geospatial database: "Starting in 2009, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and its partners developed GeoNode: web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data. Today, GeoNode is a pu…

> This is an unusual situation; many people need geospatial databases, and contributing their local data is useful to them. The value here is in the data, not the code.

I disagree. Every organisation with geospatial data needs these types of applications and tools like GeoNode are viable alternatives for organisations that are invested in FOSS GIS or that can't afford ESRI.

I've worked in GIS at national, state, and local level government and have fought the same battles to bring open source GIS tools into the enterprise at every level - IT leadership are almost always enamoured with COTS products (i.e. ESRI) and resist the FOSS approach of having to assemble something equivalent to ArcServer/ArcPortal etc. Having solutions like GeoNode allow FOSS to actually compete with ESRI when the decision is being made by IT leadership who know nothing about GIS and are impressed by "solutions".

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#35

Post by dqv »

harrisi wrote: post #32
dqv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's just a douche bag move to sell software and proactively prevent users from having freedom to understand, fix or modify it for their needs I work in an industry that has a particularly nasty case of vendor lock-in. There are only a few vendors and they all do things the same way: no API and no innovation. They are causing things to stagnate for the whole industry . I don't get why they don't realize that even ju…

Do you mind saying what industry you're referencing?

Right now I can't :(. I can't risk the potential retaliation from my current vendor.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#36

Post by watwut »

pirocks wrote: post #24
seanhandley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".

n00b here. Can someone explain to me how this works. I imagine a good developer is fairly expensive, so letting them do something unrelated to there job must be pretty expensive. How does this make business sense?

1.) The task usually needs to be done, but is not business advantage. E.g. you wont sell more because of it. The developer asks the company whether the thing can be released and company does not care so it says ok.

2.) The developer has high status in the company and thus can do what he wish (up to the point). The company ends up tolerating it.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#37

Post by richdougherty »

Animats wrote: post #3

Three blogs deep, there's a link to the actual paper.[1] It's a study of one project, a geospatial database: "Starting in 2009, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and its partners developed GeoNode: web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data. Today, GeoNode is a pu…

Summary: open source allows costs to be shared between parties. GFDRR got $2-3 million of software, but only had to cough up half of that because it was open source and there were other contributors.

Re: New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies

#38

Post by pythonaut_16 »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #28
ftlio wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially 1) Why on Earth would a company spend a considerable amount of resources on doing something that isn't good for them financially? That's their thing, and in the whole scheme of things seems like good separation of concerns. Companies make profits. Other things do other things. 2) Figuring…

Yeah I phrased that poorly. I think open-source is good for companies financially because it makes a more valuable product for end-users. And I wish THAT was the focus. What is typically the focus (although admittedly, is not really the focus in this article) in presentations trying to get companies to do open-source is, "look - people will do a bunch of free work for you". I think that's both unlikely and beside the…

Many more enterprisey, open-source averse companies still seem to have a woeful lack of understanding of what open source actually is.

Just yesterday I heard someone saying a down side of open source is that you're relying on people's (contributor's) free time for any feature to get done. He somehow overlooked the fact that the largest and most popular open source projects tend to have full time paid contributors (often at Microsoft or Google), or in other cases have an active community with a far better delivery record than just about any enterprise software team.

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