Many people have wondered whether running a company using Open Source software is possible. The answer is “yes we can”. Does it make sense though? Well, it depends.

There are good alternatives for almost every important commercial software available today. Are they able to beat the commercial proprietary software? Maybe yes, maybe no. Are they good enough? Most of the time, yes. But of course it depends on the actual requirements.

Let’s take an example that is often discussed. Can you replace SAP with Open Source software? For some companies this is possible. If only finance and HR is used from SAP there may be a good alternative in Open Source. If the company is small in comparison one of the Open Source solutions may do the job. But there’s no Open Source package that can compete with the depth of functionality offered by the whole SAP product range. Many companies don’t need this depth though, even if they don’t know. They might have a more cost efficient solution by taking different technologies for finance, HR and operation/planning type topics. It may even mean to develop some of the software and doing some of the integration needed. What can a company win, when going the ERP assembly route? Freedom, self-management, independence, control, efficiency, etc. It’s worthwhile to think about this before following the competition and just picking SAP because it’s the “standard”.

So, while it takes guts and good long term thinking to make a choice against industry leading packages like SAP, other areas are much easier to pick an Open Source alternative. It’s a nobrainer to select an Open Source CMS technology or to develop using Eclipse. So, the recommendation is, to look at the alternatives before making rapid decisions against Open Source.

And, to come back to the initial question. Yes, the Open Source software only supported/enabled company is possible, but few exist and commercial proprietary can make sense when it does what is needed.

For further ideas look at the table below.

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This entry was posted by Bruno von Rotz on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 1:40 am and is filed under Enterprise open source, Open Source projects, SME adoption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.