“The typical independent software developer is a hybrid mix of
hacker and business person, packing more technical knowledge than a
haberdasher and a better business acumen than the average game
coder. To operate successfully in both worlds, developers writing
and marketing customized enterprise software must be conversant in
more than the programming language du jour; they have to talk
intelligently with chief financial officers, too.”
“Fortunately for developers using open-source tools, MBA-buzz
terms, such as return on investment (ROI) and total cost of
ownership (TCO), are hard-hitting selling points built into the
open-source equation. The bean counters sit up and take notice when
they hear they can have a new, powerful, fully-integrated
e-commerce and back-end system for a fraction of the proprietary
price. You can almost hear the gears whirring inside their heads as
they cubby-hole the savings into better hardware, more programming,
slicker design or some non-technical aspect of the company. Of
course, they can always tack it onto the bottom line; after all,
money earned and not spent is profit.”
“Ron Lazarus, chief operating officer at Just Sports in
Irvine, California, made a leap of faith into the unknown when he
opted for open-source tools to create his company’s new
transactional database management system. But it was also a smart
business decision. Just Sports saved itself a boatload of money by
using the Linux operating system and PostgreSQL, a powerful
open-source database management system, all running on
Apache-powered servers. The final product is fast and highly
customized with functions not available to users of Microsoft,
Oracle or other proprietary software.”