Have been reading some lively posts lately from Phil Wainewright and John Carrol about Microsoft's recent announcement that they are going to start offering their office applications as an on-demand service funded by ad revenue. Our friends at CRM Mastery also brought an excellent article by CTO online about open source to our attention. So what to make of it all? Here's my humble opinion, in which I will state my ideas clearly and unemotionally as possible while keeping my elbows down (hockey metaphor for those of you unfamiliar with the great frozen game). I agree with Phil Wainewright that there is a big difference between content and applications. You can fund good online content with ads, as is proven day in and day out by hundreds of online news sites. The most amazing of these is Google which figured out how to make sacks of cash without any content at all and a lot of ads. But applications funded by ads? I need to see the full business plan before I sign on to this idea. I know that I tried to get my dad to use a free ISP with a banner ad and it was so intrusive that I finally pulled out my credit card and bought the service at 14.95 a month - and that was 3 years ago. I don't know if I want to be looking at an ad for online cruises when I'm trying to finish payables and receivables at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. Wainewright nearly came unglued because of the confusion in the blogosphere about the difference between content and applications. Likewise, I would like to point out that there is some confusion about the differences between open source and proprietary software. If I have read it once I have read it a thousand times, "Open source code - which (you) can access directly ... something not possible with proprietary software where the code is tightly held by the vendor." This is just not true. I worked with Oracle software applications for 9 years and it was always possible to look at the source code. All of the pl/sql was open to us, and if we wanted to hook in our custom apps we were certainly able to do so. In fact Oracle took many steps to make the integration easier where possible. The real distinction is that in open source you can actually change the source code if you want. Then there is this magic cloud that appears and your custom changes are somehow published to the open source community - otherwise known as developers who work somewhere else - and the world is a better place. It's interesting that the argument is always framed in this manner though, as hidden source code versus open source code: The people who love open source do not want to admit that it is really the great prodigal son of IT shops - custom development - returning for an encore performance. Make no mistake, IT shops at large organizations hated the 1990's. All of their custom work was flushed in favor of standardized ERP applications. Millions of hours of custom billing applications gone, replaced by a standard ERP system, supported by a 25 year old business analyst. What work was left? Report writing and tweaking creaky interfaces. The CEOs who demanded these changes were not all idiots. They had seen the IT shop grow unwieldy and become inaccessible to the business; the tail was wagging the dog. Right now CEOs are hearing that all this open source stuff is free so they have no natural inclination to question its adoption. But when they realize 5 years from now that what they really have is several large custom systems that they have written and continue to support and maintain themselves they are not going to be happy. Sure, the independent software vendors have a pricing model that makes any decent person blush and putting some pressure on it is not a bad thing, but to return to custom development is not a good idea. Whatever changes you make to open source you own. It may work great today, but how about ten years from now when the original team has moved on and you are trying to manage the custom code without the value of documentation? This is not to say that open source doesn't have a place. As a platform it has a lot to recommend it. Linux, Apache, MySQl and PHP, the LAMP stack, are useful tools and for infrastructure they make a lot of sense, since individual companies can use them as is without any custom modification. So you don't want ad supported applications? Well then how about open source? Beware a wolf in sheep's clothing, at least when it comes to applications. | 
