A more open approach

Choosing open source software for your arts organisation is a cultural as well as a financial decision.

But what is free open source software (or FOSS)? A common answer is that it is ‘free as in beer, and free as in speech’.

What we mean by ‘free as in beer’ is simple. There is no licence fee to use the software.

‘Free as in speech’ means that the software’s code, and any code ‘derived from it’, is available for anyone to read, copy, re-use, rebrand, and alter. Anyone who finds a buyer can even sell free software, provided they pass on those rights.

The most popular software for creating websites is the open source content management system (CMS) Wordpress. While the base software is free, many of the extensions which add functionality have a ‘licence fee’. Those selling open source software often say that what they are really selling is support

Cultural benefits

Using open source software well does come with financial costs, but in most cases your choice will save money over the lifetime of your project

A key benefit of open source software is that the savings are shared among clients. By using software from an open source project, you contribute to its viability. The new features, bug fixes, or security fixes you pay for will often be published for all to use.

This means that by investing in open source software you would be – indirectly – contributing to the work of other arts organisations who choose the same solutions, including the tiny organisations who depend upon volunteers to make their websites and software systems.

The culture of open sourcing has ripples beyond software. People talk about open sourcing books, or data. An example in the arts is Audience Finder, the audience data and development tool which collates anonymised box office data from around the country to help arts organisations understand trends and guide audience development.

Considerations

There are other benefits offered by open source software; one relates to data. While much proprietary software comes with licensing that gives its owner the right to read your data – such as Google Analytics collecting information about visitors to your sites – open source software has no such contractual requirement.

But paid proprietary software does have some advantages over open source. It should come with good marketing and presentation, and usually includes support. You have someone to sue if it goes wrong (although liability is almost always limited to the value of the licence fee).

In the case of premium suppliers, the brand and high prices should come with an assurance that the product will meet expectations.

Financial decisions

What about costs? Proprietary software, such as Mailchimp and its competitors for email marketing, or Salesforce and its competitors for customer relationship management, may start cheap for small operations, but grow in cost dramatically as you expand.

Open source software is not, in practice, free, but it should have much lower lifetime costs. It is realistic to expect an open source CRM to have 60% or 70% of the lifetime costs of a proprietary solution. Much larger savings may come if your organisation scales up, using more resources, although maintenance costs of open source do grow with the volume of data or traffic.

If you look for providers offering a project set up cost of around 10% of a proprietary solution, you will probably receive several credible-looking offers, often from low-wage countries. But in most cases you’ll face disappointment and frustration in the long term.

The underlying economics are simple. When you use open source software, none of your money goes to enrich the product owner. Clients collectively cover the costs of the programmers who write the software and most of those programmers are in some way making a living from the software they write.

Selecting software

When choosing open source software, it can be difficult to determine what is a reasonable price and to find a provider you can trust. The field is fraught with uncertainties. For example, of the two products called ‘OpenCRM’, the one at the top of Google results appears to be not open source at all, whereas the other is open source, but marketed so badly that it is almost impossible to find.

It is worth paying for some consultancy at the outset, to find the right open source product and to work out the best architecture. Such advice could save your organisation a lot of money and trouble later on.

Using open source software well does come with financial costs, but in most cases your choice will save money over the lifetime of your project. Plus, you will help other organisations in your sector by adding to the momentum of a software project that is free as in speech and, up to a point, free as in beer.

John Birchall runs Digit Professional, a boutique web shop delivering digital solutions for small and medium third-sector organisations and businesses.
www.digitprofessionals.com
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