Dick Moore Says - July 30th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

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Lots of issues there Ken

I would first like to tease out a little more of your thinking around the connection betweensupporting individual users that expect a unique experience and using open source software

    Hmmm while there is no direct connection, using open source software has allowed us to build highly resilient infrastructures that scale. We have a finance and Management Information system that provides performance data a week in arrears.

    Using OSS and commodity hardware has meant that that the system has had 100% uptime over the last two years and we are able to scale horizontally keeping pace with demand (downloads have never taken more than 10 seconds)

Here is my first assertion. It seems that the “customization” criteria in the above mix is mostcritical, after all, high volume and high reliability are pretty typical reasons to out source.

    It's not the customised end user experience that makes in-sourcing important, it's the degree to which we wish to customise the end user solution that is the driver. If your solution is subject to minor change then our-sourcing is a good option. Our e-learning platform is our business and we want to be able to make significant changes on a regular basis. Trying to contract manage third parties to both provide 99.9% uptime AND process lots of change is not easy, contracts by their nature are all about defining risk in advance. In-sourcing has allowed us a finer grained management of risk.

Through your experience, what advantages does OSS potentially provide that proprietary optionsdo not?

    In many respects using OSS has a similar risk profile to in-sourcing. As a purchaser you always take the risk. Using commercial software you are buying into a solution with the intent of reducing risk. Of course this is often, (though not always), a chimera, commercial software comes with a service contracts and SLA's though when one hits an significant incompatibility, it's either very expensive or impossible to have it customised for your application. Don't misunderstand me, we use commercial and OSS database software. For all critical data I use the commercial provider. Our open source database software provides fantastic value for those applications that require read-only access.

    And, when you are evaluating OSS options, what are some of the evaluation criteria that youprioritise?

Good question, we would use much the same criteria that we would for commercial software.

Using the above criteria to evaluate Apache, against other web servers, we decided to use apache :-)

    Hope that helps Dick