09-10, 15:30–16:00 (America/Chicago), Grand H
Companies are familiar with traditional Build vs. Buy decision making, but are much less familiar with how Open Source fits into that discussion. Is it the best of both worlds, the worst, or something else all together...? Let's talk.
As a custom software solution provider, our most common competitor is an organization's desire to build a solution in-house. We offer a license free, open source geospatial processing stack called FilmDrop that is used to maintain tens of petabytes of production commercial and open geospatial data. In our interactions with both customers and potential customers we frequently need to help them navigate their build vs. buy decisions; often finding that they're aware of open source but unsure how exactly to evaluate it or incorporate it into their plans.
At one extreme, they consider open source to effectively be a "build" decision. There may be fewer lines of code they have to write from scratch but they'll still need developers and for all intents and purposes they'll need to keep up with the open source components just like any other. At the other extreme, customers may consider open source the equivalent of free shrink-wrapped software and can't they simply "Download and use it"?
Our experience has been that an open source based solution can provide the benefits of a custom solution with cost reductions typically associated with COTS software. For many customers, an open source based solution provides an ideal balance between business specific flexibility and cost and maintenance. Furthermore, depending on the business needs of an organization, an open-source based solution can provide the best route to standards compliance and broad interoperability, bar none.
In this talk, we'll discuss:
- Some of the benefits of incorporating open source into your solution space
- That not all open source is created equally. There are various open source "delivery" models and your business needs and your team may benefit from one model more than another; some models may simply be unworkable for you. (e.g. the Linux Distribution model vs. a library or framework vs. a complete product such as QGIS)
- The importance of determining whether standards adoption and interoperability are dimensions of your build vs buy decision and the role open source plays in that.
- A few models for incorporating open source into your approach, starting with simple component adoption, through clean architectural layering with open source foundations, all the way to evaluating having an outside firm help with your open source selections, implementation, and maintenance, effectively treating your open source components largely as a COTS buy but with much greater visibility and control.
- Cost factors to consider in the decision making process including your role, if any, in supporting ongoing development and maintenance of the open source components, internal knowledge and expertise necessary for solution maintenance, and realistic risk assessment of long term viability and security considerations of your approach.
- Open-source anti-patterns that, regardless of your best intent, have been demonstrated to produce less than optimal outcomes including unintentional forking of open source code, intentional forking, hero coders/architects, and misplaced expectations of support or roadmap alignment.
Throughout this talk we'll reference our experiences with FilmDrop as a case study along with the components and specifications widely used throughout our industry including STAC, stac-server, and more.