On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 14:48:51 -0700 Charlie Blanchard <charlie@blanchardsite.com> wrote:
since i'm about to have to make a pitch of oss/zope on a major project to a verrrry skittish ceo, i'd be real interested in any expansion of this point you'd care to make... :-)
I think the party line goes something like: "For any given open source solution that's broken, you can fix it yourself if you really need to. This is a level of guarantee that no closed-source solution can offer. As a result, it doesn't matter as much if the publisher of your open source software goes out of business as it would if a publisher of your closed source software went out of business: the software by definition cannot be orphaned. You should be able to purchase commercial support from any number of places. Additionally, even if you *can't* find anyone who offers commercial support for the software, you can pay someone to figure it out for you 'from scratch', because he's got the source." I'm not sure if I buy the party line 100% because paying someone to figure out an obscure, complicated piece of software for you "from scratch" is expensive and you might be better off repurchasing something. But the party line holds true for at least some classes of customer and some class of software. I definitely think it's true for Zope, because, though people complain about documentation, it's getting pretty good, and most of Zope's code is quite well-understood even outside of Digital Creations. Python is a strategic advantage here because it's so easy to learn, and usually easier to comprehend than an equivalent C or Perl.
2) That there are hundreds of consultants familiar with Zope/[insert other open source solution here] that can take over that 100% when the one who sold it to you goes out of business. This is also a marketing problem.
t'would be lovely if there were some statistics on the zope.org site to point at to help salve management's fears. the arguments often go along the lines of "where do we get qualified developers" and "they've got to be more expensive" yadda yadda yadda...
Not sure about statistics, but you can point them at the Case Studies and Solution Providers pages (both under Resources) to get an understanding of who uses Zope and who sells Zope services. I would also ask them "expensive for what?"... one of the biggest problems with this whole vendor-choosing process is that the customer has absolutely no idea what he actually wants to do. The only way to get a meaningful price from a software development firm is to scope a project accurately, or to pay them to do so. It doesn't really say much that "ASP developers are about $125 an hour". How many hours will the project take? Usually this question pisses CEO-types off, though, because they know you're right but they haven't got any way to estimate or do preengineering, they just "want it done" (however ill-defined "it" is), so prodding too deeply at this area may backfire.
got any case studies or white papers that detail the trade-offs between closed/open source and what factors succeeded in turning the client to the open source solution? inquiring minds want to know... <g>
Well, although it's somewhat frothy, http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.html is I think likely a good resource. If you're more a GNU-GPL hardliner, however, I unfortunately have nowhere to point you that I think is appropriate for a businessperson to read... perhaps someone else does. - C