Is All Open Source Software Really Free?
May 6th, 2009 Rick Kotermanski, Chief Technology Officer
When software developers and architects select open source software over commercial alternatives, there is often a premise that because the software is free, (as in beer vs. speech) there is zero cost associated with the choice. Sometimes this expectation is indeed true. In some cases, open source alternatives are even better in quality and lower in long-term costs than commercial alternatives or custom developed components or frameworks. It is however a fallacy that this premise is universally true. It is important to take into account all of the perspectives that in addition to obvious switching and testing costs, a system architect or software engineer should consider when making critical design choices and use true TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as the decision basis.
Focusing on true TCO over the full projected lifetime of the application is the best way to establish confidence and consensus in choices - especially in medium to large deployment environments. Considering cost implications of architecture attributes (or as many know them - “ilities”) is more difficult and not as fun as playing with new tools/toys - but a large / real factor in making choices. See the table below for examples of trade-off discussions that impact quality and cost from post-development perspective..
As an example of these considerations, Summa has just released a new study performed for IBM that compares commercial to open source middleware against the backdrop of true total cost of ownership. The report which is based on a TCO model and a number of tests compares cost factors of WebSphere Application Server to JBoss Application Server under a number of common usage scenarios. The study focuses on operational costs in medium to large deployment scenarios where middleware costs are a significant factor in the overall total cost of ownership. Also see Sandy’s Carter’s Blog Post from Wednesday May 6 for additional discussion about our TCO study.
For discussion of TCO in the context of your environment, drop a note to Summa at tco-assessment@summa-tech.com
Operational factors in analyzing TCO of middleware and application frameworks
| Key Quality Attributes | Examples |
| Reliability and availability | Consideration of factors such as uptime requirements, downtime costs, failover and disaster recovery capabilities |
| Manageability and serviceability | How easy is the environment to manage? What sorts of skills, training, additional tools, custom development is needed to provide monitoring for problems, deployment of applications, configuration management, problem diagnosis |
| Maintainability and supportability | Patch management, application deployment, product support costs and capabilities, ability to substitute alternatives |
| Security | Not just for the application, but infrastructure and connectivity to databases, other application, proxies, cluster peers. |
| Performance and scalability | How do supported applications behave when the transaction volume and dynamic load change needs. Will the addition of capacity be predictable and cost effective? |
| Extensibility | How easy is it to add new features / functions without disruptive and expensive efforts. |
Entry Filed under: Architecture and Design, Process and Governance
3 Comments Add your own
1. A Practical Use Of Open S&hellip | May 7th, 2009 at 6:59 am
[...] Is All Open Source Software Really Free? [...]
2. redsolo | May 8th, 2009 at 7:40 am
This is applicable to ALL third party software regardless if its open or closed source. The price of a library is never the net price for using it.
3. SOA and Authorization (Pa&hellip | July 30th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
[...] or whether it can be happily embedded within normal business logic code. In an email comment from Rick, he suggested that a good litmus test is the requirements around manageability - e.g. who is [...]
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