Open Source

A number of you mentioned that you were interested in how/if the Church uses or contributes to the open source community.

The promise of open source, I guess, is free software which is more stable because the world is helping to find and fix your bugs. What's not to love? We'd love it to work out that way more often. We've had some success using open source stuff, but we've also had some problems. Following are a few random places we've dabbled.

1) Java Stack. We use several open source components for our java stack (including Hibernate, Spring and others). It has been painful for us to integrate these all into a common stack, and we've done most of that work ourselves. Now that it's done, our developers are extremely productive in it. You have to ask if the money we've spent developing and the money we will spend keeping it up-to-date is worth the "vendor independence" we gain from not buying some commercial offering. To date we think we're still on the right path, but we'll be watching carefully as tools mature.

2) Linux. Linux is free! Or we wish it were. We pay for libraries we need, we pay for integration services and we pay for support. We hope we won't end up paying for using the IP in Linux, but one never knows. "Free" just doesn't mean what it used to mean.

3) Nagios. We use Nagios for monitoring in our data center. This has been a pretty good experience for us so far. Some of our developers have contributed back to this project (see next point).

4) Contribution. I'm conflicted on having developers contribute to open source projects. On one hand, it's the polite thing to do. You take from the community--you should give back. In addition developers think it's cool to contribute to open source projects. It's a badge of honor, in a way. On the other hand, there are some downsides. First, you risk legal & intellectual property issues if people aren't careful. Second, it can be a massive productivity drain. If you have developers on staff (or if you're a developer interested in getting involved) be cautious. You'd be shocked out how much time can whir by as a developer gets involved in both downloading and contributing to open source projects. It's one thing to download and use the binaries. It's another thing altogether to download the source, modify it, build it, test it and then check your changes back into the sky.

5) Feature Sets. I've found the feature sets wanting in some of the open source software I've played with. OpenOffice is getting much better, but still misses some of those key little features I'm used to in MS Office. I'm hoping it catches up. I've yet to find an email/calendaring systems that comes close to Exchange & Outlook. Open source ERP? Don't we wish? It seems like almost all of the Open Source we might care about is "getting close" or "almost there."

To be clear, I love the idea of Open Source. However it's not the panacea that many would claim. There are hidden costs and feature/service tradeoffs to be made. We carefully weigh each option (both the proprietary and the open source alternatives) and try to make decisions on the merits.

There is an interesting place we'd like to use the open source concepts, however. If you're like me, you've developed a number of spreadsheets, databases and simple apps to help with various callings you've had. We'd like to make that easier for developers to do and to share what they've done. Stay tuned. I'll be talking more on the blog about how we're going about making that happen...