Open source integration

Well I’m shocked and I don’t know what to think! Just two weeks ago you were bagging out open source in a blog post which I vehemently disagreed with. Now today you’re describing the exact value proposition for the hosted systems we offer to our small business clients! This week I agree with you completely.

Of course those systems are built, in part, using open source products such as Joomla, Magento and SugarCRM – a fact which I gather you’ll view as a negative, though I see it as the opposite. Leveraging the efforts of the open source community lets us offer our clients software that is more functional, more mature and less buggy than if we’d had to write every line of code ourselves. As you note, software is becoming less expensive to the point where SMEs can now afford very sophisticated solutions. Open source can and does play a key role in driving down those costs.