Continuing my brief comments on Free and Open Source software (FOSS)….as customers we buy software because of the competitive advantage it will bring our business. That could be as simple as improving document distribution (an intranet portal) or easing communication (email) to analysing and streamlining customer experience (CRM tools). The problem is that, in general, if I can afford a software product from a vendor my compeditor can also afford the same product. Hence it can’t provide any reasonable competitive advantage, or the competitive advantage is provided by the local customisation rules (the “value add” component).
With FOSS you can install applications and build local cusomisation rules on top of it. Macros in OpenOffice.org are an example of this. However with FOSS you also have the opportunity to build in competitive advantage from the ground up. You can take the original source and modify it for your needs. So to a small to medium size business FOSS provides a way to customise the software, but for larger companies and government FOSS provides an opportunity to build competitive advantage from the ground up.
As a large company you could take control of a Linux distribution and ensure that you only have a major platform change every three years. Or you could choose a continuous update policy. The competitive advantage is that you control the whole platform and use it in a manner that benifits your bottom line.
Another major advantage of being able to tinker with the innerds of FOSS code is that you can mix and match different apps to get a killer app that does something very specific.
I’ll give an example, I am planning a killer, highly customised web portal for a group of astronomers, they want Wiki, Bulletin Boards, galleries with special astronomical metadata for the images and a few other things. If I user all FOSS I should be able to have one login system and tie it in to a BB system, a gallery system and a Wiki and also tweak each of the separate apps so it does exactly what we need. This gives me one highly customised killer app out of a collection of three or four FOSS apps from different people/companies. You just can’t do that with closed source software!