I’m planning the risk management strategy for our business and decided, together with my daughters, to only use open source softwares. There are several reasons for this decision. One is about money, we don’t have enough money to use on expensive software. Another reason is about control. We have the knowledge needed to evaluate, install, learn to use and even modify the open source applications we need, and therefore it is better for us to use a type of software that we have full control over.

When you start a small business, and invest in expensive software you take a risk. You give the software developer the power over how you run the computer based processes in your company. You need software and systems that make it easier for you to run your business, giving you the time to do what you do best, working on your core business. You need stable, reliable software that will be around for a while, and to be honest, there are a lot of commercial softwares that fulfill that criteria. There are also a lot of open source softwares that are both unreliable and buggy, and they haven’t been around long enough for you to know if they will stay. In open source everything is based on the energy and resources of the developers working on the project.

Why do I think using commercial software is a business risk? I’m going to start a small, web based business, with limited resources. We are only going to be four people working on our business plan, and we have planned to do business on two continents, Europe and North America. With the limited resources we have, we will not be able to serve the whole market, instead we have to find our own niche and build our costumer base from there.

What we need is a CRM/ERP/E-commerce system that can be managed both from Finland and USA. We need a document management system and a supply chain management system too. These systems need to be able to work together to avoid duplicated information. A commercial system doing all this is expensive and it takes time to implement and use any of the available systems. The problem is that once we’ve put the money and time required to implement a commercial system, we will pretty much be stuck with it for a long time and that means we’ve put our business in the hands of the system developers. We will have little control over how the system is developed and what to do with it if it doesn’t fulfill our needs.

With an open source system we will be able to test and run the system before we decide if we want to use it. We have full control over the source code, and if we want to, we can hire someone to develop the system for us. We only need to get the knowledge to be able to choose a good system to begin with. To keep the open source project going we might have to donate money or time to it, but we only have to invest if the system is worth investing in. Time is money, but this is time I think is worthwhile spending.

I will be sharing the knowledge I gain while investigating the softwares we are going to use. I have a couple of projects I’m following with interest and I’ll post more about them later.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!


This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Business, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.