Obviously when you hear someone talking you have to consider who's paying the bill ... but at the same time there
is a valid point, well worth remembering, that OSS is
not 'free', and
not necessarily even 'cheaper' or 'better' than proprietary alternatives. That is to say, "there is no 'bright line rule' that hinges solely on the availability of source-code."
It's been my experience that VARs are always hungry, always looking to make
their sale, and much too quick to severely under-estimate the actual costs of their deployments in order to get one. The "free beer people" being only the most-extreme example of this. I dunno if they're intentionally
dishonest (I doubt it), it's just that maybe they don't quite know, themselves. Lotsa geeks, y'know, folks who really do this for
fun, and when "the clock is ticking" they think "income" not "expense." It seems to me that, no matter
what you do with a business that involves a computer in any way, you're gonna be dropping
at least $10,000, especially in labor-cost, opportunity cost, and time spent by the customer's own personnel. License costs are only a drop in that bucket.
Personally, then, I feel a
lot better going into a preliminary project-discussion with a customer (my first two hours are free, and I keep it to that) when I sense that the customer doesn't expect to get "free beer." I like to present source-code availability as a bonus,
if it seems that the customer's situation would actually benefit from having it. But, more often than not, I don't.
If you say "source code" to some seasoned ITers, they think "escrow." Software companies often establish source-code escrow agreements with their big customers which guarantees that they'll receive an up-to-date copy of the source if the vendor goes belly-up. It's the
last thing that the customer wants to have happen. The main reason for a "build vs. buy" decision going in favor of "buy" is that you're never going to have the "fix the program" monster land in
your lap... So they think, somewhere in the back of their minds,
"why are you proposing to use a product that either doesn't have a 'real company' behind it, or that you (or we) might have to fix?" Sure, you can counter that... but you'd really better be
prepared to counter that! The risks of software are real. If a project goes south, the costs can be
much worse than "100% sunk."
If the source-code is simply going to be an enabling technology for
my company to use, then it might concievably be a factor for my strategy, and in that case it's not going to be something that I'll mention to the customer at all. After all, I may approach and use that product
strictly from pre-compiled binaries; certainly I will do so if I can. And "fixing" a problem isn't going to be something I'll want to do
at all, because I've had profit margins evaporate .. and go
badly negative
.. when faced with even one occurrence of that. It actually makes a
lot of sense to buy a product from a company which makes it their full-time
job to build and deploy their software: you get the
entire benefit of their efforts while paying only an
amortized portion of its cost.
My
of course. And I think you all understand that I am
not a "Windows-head."
