Long live open source

[Mira Bangel]

Open source platforms will become more important in the near future. Companies will increasingly look into minimizing their spendings and it therefore makes sense to go for opensource rather than for a tailor made system.

It is evident that open source will boom in the recession (read this related article).

[Nebo]

... if OpenSurce can satisfy clients. Maybe is some existing commercial software is better to client? Open source have good points but with security, modules, support, upgrades have problem. .net magazine in issue 185 have good text about difference between CMS and WCM platforms (Web Content Management platform). Guy who wrote that text work for www.sitecore.net.... So I think open source is not important. On first place is how money client need to spend for solutions. And after that second first place (after client is satisfied they don't bother about that) is they achievement his goal on that solution. We need to find whitch tools (sowtware) can achieve more goals, all other is theory :)

[Philip Weiss]

Over the past few weeks, I heard an additional reason for using open source. This was actually the original reason for us trying out our first open source platform: lock-in. Like many clients I meet today, there comes a time in a relationship with a supplier when things go wrong, service levels are not what they used to be or the strategic focus of the company that provided you the original platform shifted. The client then discovers that he really doesn't much at all of his site. Even if he has a half decent contract (which more often than not is not the case), if the supplier has not properly done it's contracts with all the coders of its propriety application it might not even fully own the property it is selling. This is most visible when you have a supplier going bankrupt. This is the time you really need to figure out who owns what. It is always a mess and it is complicated and painful. With an open source platform however, you can minimize this kind of problem and avoid a complete lock-in situation with a single supplier, because at the end of the day, no one really owns open source.