Pass the (Open) Source

I have been slightly freaked out recently by the extremely positive feedback I've been getting around a project I've been working on that is based heavily on an open source solution.

I've been down the open source path many times before - almost exclusively as a consumer or indirect contributor (offering suggestions to the project owners) - but not as a contributor with a major enhancement, say. It's just never happened. Most open source "does enough" for what I want to do as is.

At first I was intrigued that my manager showed such excitement that I could take something effectively free & get it to a point where it was actually useful for the project. As I said, I've used enough projects before to expect a non-perfect solution, but usually something viable comes up.

Then, she started getting excited with the idea of me sharing my experiences with other teams to encourage them to think in terms of not just using open source, but doing so with the intention of contributing back to those projects from the outset.

Again, not that radical from my perspective ... until she explained that the company - a financial services giant in the market - never thinks of open source as an option, let alone thinks of being a part of the community of dedicated IT professionals who spend their spare time, or else contribute from their company's development time, to make stuff for other people to just find & use as they see fit.

Admittedly, there are two very different software worlds out there - vendor world, & open source world (plus some blurry bits in the middle). Those two worlds only differ in their attitude towards licensing, not in their attitude towards quality.

In fact, there is a massive industry out there effectively being the consulting services, bespoke development or customisation, or support arms of open source projects. These people are an important part of that open source community because they get direct customer feedback on what makes better product (as opposed what sells better). They drive the development in the same way that vendor product is developed from marketing strategy & product leadership.

Yet many service sectors that rely on IT professionals to provide infrastructure (in financial services, telecoms, utilities) "feel more secure" out-housing the mitigation of their technology risk to the very people providing the technology, that is, through licensing & maintenance agreements.

Once upon a time, banks in particular used to have massive in-house development creating bespoke solutions that worked exactly the way they needed. That's out of favour. What's in favour is getting in the same consultants as the competition did to build something sufficiently different .

I know that my company is not one-hundred-per-cent happy with that arrangement. Very few companies are. I can name very few enterprise solutions that "just work" to the point that you can believe the marketing hype.

So, now's the chance to try something different. Start small & look to see if there is a way to introduce open source solutions into a project - cost it out in terms of support. If that works for you, try enhancing an open source project & contributing to the open source community to become an influencer of the development of such solutions, rather than just a consumer.

The "cost" of transforming thinking may be less than you think. The benefits may be more than simply financial. The end goal is to be able to provide a better service to your customers by owning more of the knowledge around the service & being able to make your service better under your own control.