Last week we introduced the topic of open-source or “free” products in the corporate environment, and this week we are going to identify and address some of the reason for resistance when it comes to adopting free solutions in a business environment and how to overcome them.
“It can’t be free, there must be a catch.”
Corporate America has seen behind the curtain, they know that when they advertise something as free there are hidden costs. They are ridiculously paranoid that they may inadvertently drink the same Kool-Aid that the peddle to the rest of us. It is very difficult for them to truly believe that someone would give something away and not ask for anything in return. To them, ‘free’ is an aberration.
You can throw whatever words you want at the various forms of ‘free’, or intellectually free software, you can have a discussion about what it means in terms of ‘markets’ and business models, you can go on and on and on, but I carry with me the idealistic hackers source book, and from it I have learned one thing – Everyone benefits from free information. If the DOD hadn’t created the initial investment in / foundation for the structure / reliability and workings of what is now the Internet and OSI where would we be? Entire markets wouldn’t exist, I wouldn’t be writing this now, countless amounts of economic growth would be unseen. People who are long-sighted enough to understand this have all the motivation in the world to release something that is truly free in every sense, no ‘catch’ involved.
“If it is free, it must be inferior.”
I use a product on my home network called LEAF. This free product is present in enterprise class-firewalls. Several companies took the source code without crediting the authors and built their firewall products off of them – Cisco was even found guilty of borrowing source code in old Linksys WRT54g routers. I find it interesting how a single individuals’ investment in time and intellectual property yielded profits for so many other industries. They certainly must have seen some merit in his work.
Google allows employees time each week for them to work on whatever pet project they want because they know something about human nature: passionate people make the best products. Ask yourself what your pet project would be if you had the time. That’s what open-source coders are doing: they are building what they are passionate about, doing what they love, not because it is their job, but because the want to. Add to that the fact that most open-source projects are team-driven so you have a lot of accountability built in and you’ve got a perfect system for ensuring a good end product.
CNN has this show “Big Idea” and like most news shows, I detest it, but it goes to show you how corporate individuals seek and understand success. They see it as a formula. There is a process and a manner in which effective ideas are created and executed. The execution part may have some validity but the creation part really doesn’t. I can’t remember the last time a board of directors decided that they wanted to invent or refine something technical, then tasked their subordinates with doing the work, and the end product was anything I could even call an original idea/invention. I’ve never seen this happen at the corporation I work for, and my experience the red tape of the corporation inhibits creative thought more than it sustains or helps it. Some would say this is a management problem, but the fact of the matter is that despite leadership or management, intellectual fortitude, willingness and character to do what it takes to understand something on a level where new ideas and thinking can be fostered is rare, and it is a trait of character, not a trait of business.
One of my points to this story is that bodies of individuals or organizations of individuals sought for purely financial reasons do not ‘invent’ – it just doesn’t happen, not on the percentage that any corporate would like you to believe it does, just like NASA didn’t invent Teflon, Tang, or Thermal Tape – BP probably won’t be responsible for the first cellular organic battery, or decentralization of energy supply, someone in is garage will.
“Using free tools is cheating, it’s just not how business works.”
All you have to do to silence a critic is ask them when the last time they were charged to use mathematics was. Modern math as we know it is a system, a set of tools that have been developed by many many people over the years to deal with numbers. It is, in a sense, an invention used to describe a set of greater laws. Should we all be taxed a royalty every time we use it? If you refuse to believe that free products serve a purpose then you also have to refuse to believe non-profit organizations exist for any reason – I’m not making a comparison on a business level, but the dynamics still apply.
With the advent of the GPL license structure, corporations can have a clearly defined set of parameters in front of them when it comes to what the should and shouldn’t be able to do with open-source software, which can alleviate some of the legal “fair use” concerns.
“What about product support and documentation?”
This can be a tough one. One of the biggest arguments in favor of open-source in this regard is that just because you pay for a product doesn’t mean you are going to get good support. In fact, odds are that the vendor you are using be so unwilling to admit a failure on their part they will place the “burden of proof” back on your company anyway so you better have some really agile, tech savvy administrators on your own staff regardless . (Check out this post for a great example of that!)
It is also striking just how many mid and even large technology vendors out there rely on their customer community to provide de-facto support for a product as a crutch for poor product support anyway.
Ultimately, the question here goes back to what I mentioned in the first article in this series: Intellectual Fortitude. Does the corporation that is looking to adopt an open-source solution have the caliber of people on staff to take the bull by the horns and address any issues they may find?
As far as documentation, open-source projects generally have a large community base of knowledgeable people by definition. Odds are if you can’t find an answer in the online documentation, you can at least talk to somebody who helped write the thing, and that beats sitting in a phone tree waiting for somebody from another country to pick up the line and walk you through a canned flowchart they have sitting their desk.
Conclusion:
Open source is not always the best solution, it is not always the right solution, but it has it’s place, it serves a purpose. Whether for viral presence, startup buzz, willingness to share, desire to contribute, advertisement profits, or any other reason, intellectually free software has it’s purpose and it challenges markets to innovate.
People who refuse to see outside the limitations of current technology will never gain the fortitude needed to change it. Some may look at an idea and defeat it immediately deeming it as wasteful or intellectually useless. Just like Bill Gates didn’t think you’d ever need more than 4kbytes of memory, most individuals won’t choose to believe that battery technology is arcane, or a revolution in binary compiling technology is about to take place – they look at what is and don’t imagine it any differently. Now I’m breaching the doors of the creativity bus, and unfortunately, without evangelists like us, the closest the business world at large may ever get to riding it is getting their hand stuck in the door.
So how about it? What objections have you faced when presenting a free alternative instead of a proprietary solution and how have you overcome them?
