Why Open Source Fails for Consumer Applications
I recently read an interesting blog on Open Source and ERP from Derek Singleton at https://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/enterprise/can-open-source-erp-succeed-1012111/, titled “Can Open Source ERP Succeed?” His blog focused on the ERP segment of the market and why no open source solution has succeeded. He presents SugarCRM as the alternative but argues that the product is not really open source and is not much different than any other commercial solution; I will leave that discussion open for another day.I wanted to comment on his post by expanding from ERP to all customer-facing applications in open source. At this time, I can only think of Mozilla as an open source application that has succeeded in the marketplace. Open Office, Gimp, and other open source solutions have done well but are not making an impact at all in their segment. The areas where open source applications have succeeded is the infrastructure services such as operating systems with Linux, hypervisors with Xen and KVM, webservers with Apache, etc. You could even argue that Mozilla is an infrastructure solution as the browser is similar to an operating system for many users. So, is there a reason why open source fails in the customer facing application space? Perhaps it has to do with developers being more interested in the technology and its creation than the actual users who leverage the product; perhaps it has to do with limited customer interaction during the development phase as most customers don’t engage with open source technologies until after it has shipped. Derek lists several thoughts on why the ERP space is failing but I don’t think the issue is money, strategic control, or where the application is running. To me, the answer is that developers don’t use computers the way users do and without a team of professionals between customers and developers there is a critical missing ingredient in the design and development processes. This element is not commonly found in open source projects and is what I believe is the problem. What are your thoughts?
