This morning, I relived an old pleasure with open source technologies. I am used to using all kinds of commercially available software programs to manage projects. I am used to having our CRM system setup to manage marketing campaign work flow. There used to be a neat little project management tool to setup new projects, calculate them ROI's and track completion of activities. In my new world, I am starting up a business on my own and I really dont have the cash to burn on software. Thats when I turned to open source again after many years. The last I depended on open source for actual work was when I was in college. Between then and now, I have used plenty of open source tools to build my own products, but have almost never used a product that is totally open source. That in itself is a little bit of an oxymoron. There are thousands of companies using open source technology to create their proprietary products. For example, there is a whole suite of technical tools available to download at www.apache.org. Companies use these tools all the time to create commerical products. However, they balk at using customer facing open source products due to only one reason: "They are open source and hence there is no performance guarantee". Its true, many IT managers find it risky to use open soruce products because there is no guarantee of performance.
The fact is, that there is no guarantee of performance for any software product period. I mean a technological product can fail and will fail on some aspect or the other. What really is missing is the accountability. I think what managers really want is the comfort feeling that when something goes wrong, they can call a third party who is said to be an expert at a specific technology. They like the fact that there are legally binding contracts which make vendors liable for performance failures. This is a very valid point. I will find it very hard to communicate to my clients that there are no bigger business risks with open source technologies than there are with proprietary technologies. However, once there comes a critical mass of vendors who can support products with legally binding contracts, the playing field will become very level and open source could compete with proprietary technology pretty fairly.
Going back to my experience this morning. I wanted to replace my old features management product with something open source and low cost (ideally free). On the features management function, what we do is we write "stories". Stories are nothing but an imagined day in the life of our customer (or our staff) that is written out in a easy to read format. This story then becomes a starting point for our staff to create software. This mechanism is part of the agile software development paradigm. I looked at a few vendors including our older vendor for this system. All fo them have great offerings. Many of them have free offerings that have the basic features or are bound to work only until a certain "trial period" ends. Then one of my friends suggested I take a look at bugzilla. www.bugzilla.org. I took a look at it and at first glance, it looked an awful lot like a software test support, bugs management tool. However, it was VERY easy to get it running. So I got it and installed it anyway. After a few customizations and some configuration, I had it running and I had almost identical features to what I had before. Now, I can write up my user stories, provide priorities on those and assign people to work on them. Admitted, it still looks a lot like a bug management product. It even says so everywhere it can say so. However, it works great, is easy to maintain and is zero cost solution. Works great for me in my little startup business.
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