SwampFox

The Closed Source Dilemma

Submitted by: Adam Gautsch on Oct 02, 2005 at 10:21 pm Tagged with: Economics, Featured Articles, Innovation, Internet, Tags Source: OrangeCoat

Should closed source programmers be worried?

By: Adam Gautsch. OrangeCoat

OrangeCoat's first meeting with John Warner about revamping Swamp Fox was similar to many first meetings with John. Discussion about the project was short, but discussion about innovation, entrepreneurship, and business in the innovation corridor were long. After four hours we had a good idea of what we were going to do with the Swamp Fox and a white board full of ideas. What I didn't realize until I sat down to write this article was how much of what we did with Swamp Fox had to do with one of John's rants... I mean, lessons.

Here's the thing, Swamp Fox is run on a completely open-source frame work. The programming language is PHP, the database is MySQL, the web server is running Apache, and the Content Management System is WordPress. Every piece of the foundation of the new Swamp Fox is free to the public. Now, we extensively customized the design and software to achieve our goals, but the foundation was free, available for anyone to download

If John was writing this article he would say that using an open-source application to create Swamp Fox was a classic example of the innovators dilemma, and he'd be right. Open source applications allow for smaller faster moving companies to provide a new product to customers that are either over served by the current products available or are not in the market for the product at all.

If my business hinged on running a proprietary solution and there were comparable competing open-sourced solutions, I'd be shaking in my flip flops. Most customers don't need 'enterprise' level web applications and are delighted to have the power an open-source alternative provides. Moreover, each week open-source alternatives are growing more powerful and more useful. As the ability for disparate contributors to collaborate increases, so does the product quality and viability. In many cases, the out of the box open source applications are on par, if not better, than their closed source brother.
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In the software world, the new round of innovation is clearly happening in the open source arena. People are making money by offering their expertise in customization, design, and implementation of the applications. In many cases, those same people turn around and give that expertise right back to the community for others to benefit from. We can debate about the economic incentives of this sharing, but the bottomline is that the start up cost for using an open source application is only as large as the time it takes to learn and master the software.

Why should companies pay for the proprietary solutions? Why should customers be forced to pay that extra cost as well? There are reasons, some good, some not but I encourage people to sound off in the comment string to explain why proprietary, closed source solutions are better for both business and innovation.