Why pay outright for web software ever again? Open software has become so professional and reliable that it is becoming harder to justify the high price of products from the big name companies. In web, there isn’t much that can’t be done with the LAMP set-up (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and this is usually my first choice when it comes to creating quick and stable web applications. My choice for large web applications is always Java/JBoss – and this is only because of my experience using the Java language. Truthfully though, JBoss is an awesome product and by using the SEAM lightweight framework, you get a very powerful platform for creating scalable web applications. SEAM is now my first choice for large scale projects and is exactly what our first service is going to be using. One very useful feature of SEAM is the ability to write web applications with multiple workspaces that behave like a multi-window rich client due to the amazing session handlers it has. This feature will become very very useful to me in the near future.

I believe that there are still scenarios where paid for software is worth every penny and this is where companies want stable services, but do not have the IT infrastructure to enable them to use the open source solutions that might not come with any kind of support. After all, “free” is not actually free and it could end up costing more in the long run just to keep it up and running. I suppose another advantage to off-the-shelf software is that it offsets your required expertise in a certain area. For example, if I do not know something in PHP I guarantee that there is someone who works with me that does know it and this share of knowledge occurs for almost every piece of software that we use. Now this share of knowledge is an excellent thing and it allows us to each specialize in an area to learn new technologies with great speed. The down side is that if you ever lose a person, you have a big gaping hole in your company knowledge that could lead to problems if you are relying on software in that area. Included in the cost of most high end solutions is support (maybe good, maybe bad), and this allows companies to offset most of their knowledge to the support company. Now this obviously has a lot of negatives, but in the eyes of the “business” people, they have basically reduced their reliance on a single point of failure. There is more of a chance that a bunch of employees will leave than Microsoft going out of business, and this is reduced risk in the eyes of management.

So basically, if you are an IT company that writes and manages its own software, it seems crazy to me to pay for big name software unless of course your product is a supplementary product or as such. If you are a company that mainly does business outside of IT industry then it most probably makes sense to go with some paid for off-the-shelf software, so you do not have to create your own inner IT and support departments just to manage it. If you are small company it makes sense to use some of the managed open source projects that provide off-the-shelf solutions using open source technologies. These products usually come with excellent documentation, a good user base and are very expandable. Oscommerce, Zen Cart, phpmyadmin etc etc are many examples of this. Thanks to the web, there are also many useful online services out there that might reduce the need to have any software running locally at all – but this is an issue for another post all together