Every few months the same argument comes around: open source or commercial? Usually it ends up as a fight between two camps, the “free software or nothing” crowd and the “just buy it, nobody got fired for buying the big name” crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both are wrong, because neither is universally right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is the honest starting point: if a commercial product does everything you need, the way you need it, and fits your budget, buy it.<\/strong> Your time is worth more than the licence. Building something yourself just to avoid a cheque is a false economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that sentence is carrying a lot of weight, and most of it sits on one word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Commercial software sells one thing above all else: it works out of the box.<\/em> And it does, until your environment has something in it the vendor never planned for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been through this. We moved to a commercial platform that promised to cover everything we needed straight away. For the standard kit, it did. But our estate is large, varied, and includes systems we built ourselves. We still spent months<\/strong> of development time getting it to work with the parts that didn’t fit the vendor’s idea of a “normal” environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The integration work didn’t go away. We did it anyway, and<\/strong> paid the licence while we did it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And “fits” isn’t permanent. It fits today. Then you take on a new client, acquire a business, or bring in some obscure system nobody’s heard of, and suddenly the perfect fit has a gap in it. That gap isn’t yours to close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me this is what the whole debate really comes down to. It’s about control<\/strong> more than cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a commercial product, a missing feature is a request<\/strong>. You raise it, you wait, and the vendor has every right to say “that’s not in our vision.”<\/em> You could be waiting months. You could be waiting forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With open source, a missing feature is a decision<\/strong>. You might not have the time. You might have to pay a developer to build it. But nobody can tell you no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a second catch as well. Everything you build to extend a commercial product sits on someone else’s foundation, inside their plugin model, and it moves at their pace. Build it on open source and you own it. You can lift it, move it, and keep it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the part that catches people out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Say you need a custom check or integration for one type of device, and you’ve got one server that needs it. Building it yourself is a one-off cost. You write it once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now say you grow and a thousand servers need that same check.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a per-licence model, your own growth is what pushes the bill up.<\/strong> The more successful you are, the more you pay, forever, for something you may have had to integrate yourself anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most organisations look at this wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A headcount request goes in front of a committee. People question it, push back on it, and treat it as an expense. A subscription just sits on the operating budget and quietly renews every year. Nobody asks whether it’s still earning its keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at it like this: if you’re paying \u00a350,000 a month for a product, that could be three full-time members of staff.<\/strong> Three people building something that fits your environment exactly, rather than bending your environment to fit someone else’s product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s the same money with a completely different level of scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also why some of the systems I’ve built for myself work better than the commercial alternatives. Mine aren’t more polished. They were designed for exactly what was needed<\/strong>, and nothing else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Development work is a one-off cost. Once something is built, it’s built. You maintain it, but you’re not buying it again every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A subscription never ends. Even if you never write a single line of integration code, you are paying for it forever<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So something that costs three times as much in year one can still come out ahead. By year three, the build has paid for itself, and from then on the subscription only ever falls further behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this means “build everything yourself.” Open source only wins if you actually have the people to back it. A half-finished in-house tool that one person understands is worse than either option. When that person leaves, you have neither a product nor a vendor to call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every few months the same argument comes around: open source or commercial? Usually it ends up as a fight between two camps, the “free software<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":913,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-fullwidth.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-rights","category-opinions-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":912,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions\/912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthonyparkes.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}“Fits”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Who Owns the Roadmap?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Scaling Is a Deployment, Not a Negotiation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The Accounting Illusion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Build Once, or Pay Forever<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Honest Caveat<\/h4>\n\n\n\n