RfIs and Open Source
A couple of weeks ago we met a company behind one of the more successful open source projects in terms of making money on services around a free product. They had a to me at that time rather interesting approach to RfIs: “We don’t do RfIs. If someone is interested in using our technology they shall download it and find our themselves.” Matt suggested the same in a more elaborate way January this year, calling RfIs and RfPs time sinks.
As a provider for services and solutions we can not afford to take such an approach. Or at least we have not come to this conclusion yet. On the one hand we face a lot of opportunities where proprietary software is at least also a valid option (in most cases we are already happy if it is just other way round). But we also do a lot of education around open source and how to benefit from it - so the RfI and the processes around it are sometimes part of the game.
After having submitted a couple of answers to RfIs of serious size projects I tend to agree with some of the above - but for a different reason: You can not compare the two in one go - or at least not if open source is just an additional alternative to a broad field of proprietary solutions. Seth pointed me to an article in the latest issue of Enterprise Open Source Journal by Edmon Begoli (”Strategies for Success with Open Source Projects”) on selecting open source software. Edmon starts by explaining that, like with commercial software, you need to consider your requirements. After that, he suggests some additional steps that apply to examining open source - But these then do not apply to the commercial world, do they?
In general I see that open source is not taken for granted partly because of the seriously lower license price I guess and the real advantages of open source software usually don’t show well in comparison matrixes for complex product evaluations because they look for typical features that clever sales people of proprietary software have made everybody look out for.
What about the primary advantages of open soure in general? Like Eric Raymond points out nicely in his musings on Linux and open source:
<..> the open-source community has proven far more effective on that score [the ability to adapt to changes in technology and economic context during the project lifetime] (as one can readily verify, for example, by comparing the 30-year history of the Internet with the short half-lives of proprietary networking technologies—or the cost of the 16-bit to 32-bit transition in Microsoft Windows with the nearly effortless upward migration of Linux during the same period, not only along the Intel line of development but to more than a dozen other hardware platforms, including the 64-bit Alpha as well).
This and values around quality, extensibility, standards support and vendor independence do not always compensate for missing abilities like to execute by deadline, or on budget, or to all features of the specification, but the weighting - if at all - is definitely different in open source that in commercial software.
I guess we will be answering RfIs for some more time and we’ll be struggling with the lack of comparability of the two worlds to some extend. I will be happy the day that open source becomes the standard to define the structure and the core content of these requests and proprietary software will get the chance to qualify as a valid alternative - if it can prove that the model behind works and the fit for the problem justifies the cost. A move in this direction will definitely improve the overall quality of the outcome of such initiatives.
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