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One point you made that caught my attention was that 'cost' of open source may not be as important to a company as how well the functions map to their requirements. We've all been down the road where we have to change our business processes to work with a particular commercial software package and I've never liked that too much. Can you give us a couple of examples where open source provided a valid alternative and how that worked out over time/upgrades etc? Does this become a big burden to maintain?

The classical problem when it comes to processes of course is ERP software. However, the trend of moving to open source ERP systems is fairly new which is why I'm hesitant to talk about long term experience. The experience we made in the last two years are very positive though.

Another classic is the fairly common update scenarion. Let's assume you're using software A and B with both of them needing system component C. Now you want to update A for whatever reason, but the newer version of A needs a newer version of C which in turn is not compatible with the old version of B that you wanted to keep. In the proprietary world you can either update both, A and B, or none of them. In the open source world there is no problem to either compile A against the old version of C or run the old B against the new C. This works flawlessly even in a very long run. Some Linux distributions even offer new software versins for their older stable releases, cf. e.g. Debian's backports.org.

Two more? Did you ever think about adding home offices with employees being reachable under the same extension at home as in the office? Or even on their cell? Or how about your company running a groupware system, a CRM system, a PBX, ... that are ideally suited to your needs but do not share the same customer database?

Depending on what you do to create your solution the maintenance burden varies. Sometimes it's just configuration and integration which doesn't add to maintenance at all. Sometimes you need the software to figure out some format details to write let's say a conversion tool. Again no additional maintenance needed unless the format changes. Last option is a change inside the code. If this change is useful for other users as well you can give it back to the community which in turn reduces your maintenance to close to zero again. If your solution is only useful for you you will have to adapt it to each new version that you update to. Experience shows that most of the time this changes do not cost a lot of effort to maintain either. The worst case we've had was a couple of days per year.

KGB wrote:

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I am just curious as to (approximately) what percentage of companies you work with are reluctant to contribute back to the community? Has the percentage of companies that think this way decreased with time?

Yes, it decreased over time and is down to almost zero right now. It happens now and then in a security environment that customers want to keep the work to themselves, but other than that people are fine with giving back. Now if they are willing to spend time/money to get this accomplished is a different story, but even here people understand the dynamics better and better and see the commercial advantages off giving back.

scarr wrote:

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Dr. Meskes can you share with me the price points for purchasing a service level support agreement with your organization? Do you sell support by the incident or by hour or my the month or year?
Thanks

There are minor differences between pricing for our offices by country, although for the most part the offerings are very similar. I'll answer for Michael since I manage credativ USA for him, and I presume that is where your focus is. In a nutshell, the answer is "all of the above".

We are frequently asked to provide support by the incident, in which case we quote an hourly rate. However this type of support does not come along with any service level agreement -- i.e. we do not service ad hoc requests on a 24x7 basis, nor guarantee any particular response time.

We do sell monthly contracts in which case we agree to a specific response time (e.g. 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours) and either standard work hours or 24x7 coverage. These contracts come with a number of support hours included at our best hourly rate, and we allow those hours to rollover if unused, subject to some limits. As an example, at the moment the entry level offering is $305/month, which buys you up to 2 hours per month, with 8 hour response, during normal work hours.

A major difference between the way we do support compared to others is that we will use those monthly hours to perform monitoring and hands on administration of your systems if you allow it. We will become familiar with your systems and help you manage them, not just give you someone to call when they break.

Another major difference is that we do not charge by the application, by the CPU, or by the server for our monthly contracts.