[Zope] A Tale from IBM land...

[Chris McDonough]

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