The Hidden Cost of Free

Posted by lee on March 4, 2010

In the open source world free has a double meaning – freedom and zero cost. For any business, open source is never zero cost.

As an employee, do you work for your firm for free? Time is money.

Usually, your CIO/CTO’s freedom of choice is constrained by their team’s skill set, the project’s requirements and the support capability of the vendor who supplying the business application. The business buys applications – never operating systems.

As open source professionals – our challenge is to stop talking about “free software” to business leaders – who know instinctively that there is no such thing as a free lunch. You will never change that mindset.

The hidden cost of free could be that your open source initatives are derailed before you even begin. I’ve picked up a few strategies and talking points that I’d like to share.

There are always costs, assuming otherwise destroys your credibility instantly. If you struggle to get open source into your business – consider that point.

Talking about the Total Ownership Costs is more productive – in which case, you need proof. Talking about an ROI is often helpful. Just have facts and figures – at hand – to justify your claims. 85.34% of which can’t be made up on spot

Think about accelerating time to market & increasing the agility of IT to respond to the ever-changing demands of the business.

As professionals, we must arm ourselves with verifiable facts that open source, in our chosen context, has a long term business benefit – not simply short term saving in licensing/subscription fees.

Whilst we’re on the subject – why would a business care about access to source code? Are you ever going to patch the code, submit it back to the maintainer and offer to support your contribution in the future?

Perhaps, you can make the argument that open source is a form of software escrow that confers the capability to innovate without being held hostage to another firm’s agenda.

It’s all well and good for the hobbyist community to promote “free” – but it does not serve our professional agenda – to grow the adoption and credibility of Linux inside the enterprise.

I totally agree with Shad – we need to stop talking about free. Please.

Or we will all find ourselves discredited and under employed.

Long live Linux. Long live free software