Ian Dickson on Tue, 19 Aug 2003 05:57:24 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology |
A further note. Some proponents of Free Software think it is synonymous with Free Solutions. To which, (assuming that functionally either will do) there is one very simple question that they need to consider:- Is the likely IT overhead, in term of time, expertise or money involved in implementing and keeping upgraded a Free Software solution greater or lesser than that involved with a commercial one? Only if the TOTAL COST is lower (including looking to the future, you might donate your time for free, but what happens when you move on, what is the market price of an appropriate expert to fix/extend, taking into account the learning curve for the deconstruction of your incompletely documented code) is Free Software actually a cost effective deal from the clients POV. However Free Software does serve to keep commercial prices realistic by providing an alternative. Eg if an OS option has a total internal cost of say $50 per seat (implementation, training, upkeep) then this caps commercial alternatives (which work out of the box, are intuitive to use and auto-upgrade) at around $50 per seat, instead of the $200 that they might have aimed for prior.... By way of concrete example, we find that some IT people think they can use PHP and MySQL to deliver their clients our solution. They could, but it would require months of work, probably go up several blind alleys etc, and since we charge less than $1 per person per year it would be cheaper to buy our solution than build their own with current OS tools, at least for communities of up to 100,000 + members. (For the only serious OS project in this field google Augmented Social Network. They need all the help they can get). Cheers -- ian dickson www.commkit.com phone +44 (0) 1452 862637 fax +44 (0) 1452 862670 PO Box 240, Gloucester, GL3 4YE, England "for building communities that work" # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net