Nonillion

Why are the concepts of “open source” and “free” so strongly connected? Is it because you can go to an open source website and just download the latest version?  But the whole industry knows that software developers, PCs and offices are far from being free. Then how can software be perceived as free?

The basis of open source is community and the scale of numbers.  A huge number of developers contribute to each of them small bits in order to build a total and continuously evolving solution.   And the same huge number of developers starts to promote that same software on a huge number of places.  The open source model is born.

Behind all this lays a well developed marketing strategy.  The same marketing strategy which is behind the free samples of chocolate you get in the supermarket.  The absolute goal is to get the customers’ loyalty by letting them taste the product and judge it by trying.  With one big difference to chocolate though - in the case of open source the huge number of producers become the advocates of the product in a huge number of IT decision meeting rooms.  Genius in its simplicity.

And here is where the money pops up.  If you have done your analysis and your requirements match (more or less) an open source solution then you need the specialists.  Although the source code might be free this doesn’t mean that with simple “next-next-finish” the product will be up and running. You need to pay specialists to install, implement and adapt the open source solution to your requirements.

And when you need specialists Nearshoring becomes an option.  Since the main driver of outsourcing and more specific Nearshoring is cost saving, it’s obvious that many open source projects are being build in nearshore destinations such as Bulgaria.

But there are some other reasons why nearshoring should be taken into account.  The above mentioned model of community and scale of numbers is a changing spread between popularity of the product and the availability of resources.  This means that if the popularity of the product grows steeply the community grows accordingly but always slower than the popularity.  In consequence you have a constant shortage of experienced specialists for the products.  Nearshoring Development can help lower the pressure on the market.

In nearshoring destinations developers very often don’t have access to the more expensive commercial software.  So by economics they are forced to dive into the open source where all the code is available at arms length.  Another very important factor is that developers love to dive in source code.  Developers are by nature code-driven.  They want total control and they hate it if some “black box –software” messes up their application.  It is the combination of these 2 arguments that makes a lot of Nearshore development destinations very attractive.

As a conclusion we can say that only the open source code itself is free.  If you need to implement the open source application you need specialists and it’s at this point that Nearshoring is a solution between free and too expensive.

Rudi Van den Bossche (nonillion.bg)