This is a post in a series on the importance of open source. If you are not familiar with term "Open Source", I recommend you read this blog post first.

I previously discussed why open source is important to businesses, but one thing I (purposely) left out, was how open source can save you and your business money. I left this out because "Ultimately people who have been using open source for a long time will always come back to greater strategic control, not cost" Jeff Waugh, 2007.^[1]

There are many advantages to open source software. These can be ethical, moral, flexibility or licenses^[2], but to most newcomers to open source, it is the price. A lot of open source software, if not the majority, will set you back close to $0 upfront.^[3] While there can be expenses in training and maintaining, the benefits greatly outweigh these costs.^[4] Having most open source given away for free is an excellent way for individuals and businesses to try and test out solutions before committing to one. This means companies can experiment and migrate slowly over to a new system instead of diving head first into a multi-thousand dollar venture.

In the average Information Communication and Technology (ICT^[5]) budget for companies and enterprises, software only makes up about 5-10% (the rest is hardware and physical requirements). So even if you go pure free (gratis) and open source you may only be saving 5-10% on your total budget. That said however, there are many other advantages to utalising open source software that can also save you money. For example open source is well known to be much more effecient with hardware. Be this due to the large community of developers or otherwise, open source is leading the market in scalability through visualisation and clustering. A great example of this is thin clients. If you were to set up a classroom in a school with 20 computers, you could buy one big main computer and 20 screens + keyboards and save on not having to purchase individual machines or licenses. You can also expand your networks and server power more efficiently, for example, by adding new servers to a cluster rather then upgrading your mainframe once a year and hoping the new one works.

While I have avoided talking about Linux and Unix^[6] so far (since I wanted to keep to open source software in general), they serve as great examples in both cost and maintenance. There is 1 Linux administrator to 100-400 Linux machines compared to 1 Microsoft Windows administrator to 40-100 machines.^[7] This shows how much more efficient it is to administer a Linux based machine. One Linux administrator can do nearly 10 times as much as one Windows technician. This enables a company to invest their money more effectively or have their technical staff work on more important and interesting ventures.

Imagine benefiting from hundreds of thousands of incredibly smart and wise people collaborating on the one problem or product. Imagine the quality of the product. Imagine the superb documentation, stability, security and support. But ah... where is the support? Large open source companies such as Redhat, Canonical and Novell are dedicated to providing enterprise support and services. Thanks to these vendors, corporations are able to adopt open source software without having to worry about sustaining it internally. This is also something Open Technology Solutions offer. Where appropriate our solutions and products are built around open source so you can save money and benefit from all these great things. We are also able to offer support and services to businesses who wish to start using open source software.^[8]

So overall open source doesn't just save you money upfront, but the quality, the flexibility and the choice in open source software allows you to save much much more.

Read more:

• http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.8249
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FOSS_A_General_Introduction/FOSS_Success_St...
• http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;444981959

1.

10^th Oct. 2007, The open source roadshow (Hobart).

2.

http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Advantages_open_source_soft.html

3.

For example Linux and Apache, two of the most common pieces of open source, are completely free.

4.

See the benefits of open source

5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_Communications_Technology

6.

The two mainstream open source operating systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

7.

Refer to The open source roadshow.

8.

To learn more about how Open Technology Solutions uses open source in their products, click here.