The other day I had a nice chat with a colleague about the benefits and pitfalls of using an open source platform. I know this subject has been discussed deeply on various forums articles and blogs. I’ve personally done research for Alcatel-Lucent and the University of Texas at Dallas on the subject. For businesses, the bottom line is cost. Their are certain scenarios in a business where switching platforms, whether its open source or not, does not make sense. The scenario I discussed with my colleague revolved around the cost of switching from a Microsoft platform to a Linux platform for its custom server applications.

My colleague’s business faces two main hurdles before considering a migration: the time it will take to migrate custom applications and the expenses incurred during the migration. If the current system is meeting customer needs and does not need further changes, then migrating over to an open source platform may not be the best choice, especially if the lifetime of the system is not close to expiring. Open source software is best used when continuous scaling is demanded. Because of the licensing fees incurred when scaling can become astronomical, development of the system needs to consider the benefits given to a proprietary solution over a open source solution. For example, Microsoft’s Visual Studio has excellent tools for building .NET applications. If the time saved from developing on this platform is justifiable and the scaling needs do not supercede the cost  saved using an open source platform, then using a Microsoft solution may be warranted.

Despite my overall excellent experience developing on the Microsoft platform, I still have a hard time recommending it as the platform of choice, mainly because of cost and time savings. These savings are not obvious to people who have not used an open platform before. One way to explain the cost and time savings incurred is the notion of barriers or hurdles towards completing a goal. When developing or deploying a system, one of the hurdles towards completion is paying for licenses, which incurs some amount of expense in time and money. If the entire application stack is free, then you eliminate that expense altogether for the rest of the system’s lifetime. This allows the complete application stack to be cloned or deployed multitudes of times, whether in a test system, developer system, or production system, without incurring the expense of time and money you would encounter in a purchased product. Removing this hurdle has changed the way entire systems are deployed and general deployment of systems in both open source and commercial projects. One simple example is Debian’s software distribution, ‘apt’. A user can script out the default software configuration for a server with one command line. For example, installing a web server, office suite, browser, a couple of games, a couple of compilers, and a IDE with one shell command. Removing the purchasing barrier also paves the way towards completely automating the scaling of a system’s infrastructure. For the small software vendor, you just can’t do that on a Windows platform.