David Aden On Is Open Source Free

David Aden has written a really good article for Government Technology entitled Open Source -- Is it Free?. This is not a technical article, rather it focuses on business decisions, and measuring the true cost of "free". David presents the arguments clearly and fairly, and this one is worth the read.

5 Comments

Michal March 10, 2009

Well for me the article invented nothing. There is nothing free today, maby for small projects technology is free but for big ones it costs properly to the size. Maby it can be free for all the time but the time you spend learning / extending / upragding it is never free time.

Ben Forta March 10, 2009

You sure can. But, it's a very hard case to make for a very mature product. I am not saying I don't like the idea, but I am saying that when we run the numbers there is no way we can get close to CF revenue by selling tools. And we do revisit this regularly. --- Ben

Adam Reynolds March 10, 2009

Ben, Whether you like it or not, the real benefit of open source is the size of the developer community. This promotes the use of the technology. PHP isn't great, but the immense size of the developer community means that employers have a better resource to call upon. It also vitally means developers have a huge coding resource to call upon. CF as a technology is limited by the size of the developer community. An obvious example of where Adobe did do it right is Flex and this is reflected in the available developer community. Adam

Adam Reynolds March 10, 2009

Ben, I wasn't trying to say you did or did not agree. Basically he is saying that no matter what technology you choose, you will need good people that understand that technology. The problem is with CF you have a small pool of people to hire from. I was just discussing this point :) Thankfully Flex doesn't have this issue and is already being demonstrated in the job market. Well done Adobe! (Can I switch this into a "make CF free" and charge for the dev tools post?)

Ben Forta March 10, 2009

Adam, I did not say that I did or did not like David's comments. I just said that he presents the arguments and that this one is worth a read. I do agree with you that there is strength in numbers, and many open source projects benefit from that greatly (although, to be fair, it is not the fact that the projects are open source that usually causes this, but the fact that there is no cost to obtain the software). --- Ben

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