"There is no such thing as a free lunch" you might think – and you are right because there are many hidden pitfalls that you might get trapped in.
A myriad of options
The first one is the vast amount of free software that exists. Anybody may create and distribute software – as skilled or unskilled the author may be. A user trying to choose the best fit for current and future use cases can get easily overwhelmed. Evaluating all those software solutions can take up to several months – especially because installation and operation is seldom painless and user-friendly.
Poking around in the dark
This leads us to the second shortcoming: human-computer interaction. Despite the author's good will, he or she is usually no usability expert. Frequently, the user experience is dissatisfying due to an inconvenient UI, missing functionality or unavailable documentation. As a programmer, you might invest your time reading or even adapt the source code – it's free, after all – to solve your problems. However, apart from the simple fact that you must possess the skills to do so, this adds up to the time that you wanted to spend working with the product, not on the product. In the end, pure source code can never be a replacement for technical documentation.
"The documentation will be available in the next release"
Providing good documentation is crucial for the user experience, notably when dealing with sophisticated use cases, big deployments, and high scalability. Writing good technical documentation is another story – it's an art in itself. Technical writers are highly trained people with a skillset encompassing analytical skills, didactics and language, empathy, typesetting, and more. In short: such people cost a lot of money – which most OSS projects lack.
Initial investment vs total cost
The crucial part in every open-source project is the community evening out the lack of money by providing a corporate skill set and supporting their users. Unfortunately, in reality about 80% of all open-source projects have less than three active contributors . You might be lucky getting support from such people but in the end you are gambling and do not even think about SLAs.
If you're convinced open source is the way to go, you could succeed in finding a company offering services and support for your open-source software, at a premium, of course.
Open-source software might be a good fit for your scenario but there is more to it than the initial investment. Eventually, you will have to pay – one way or another.
Thank you to Hendrik Degener from Infosim for the article