“Continuing where we left off yesterday–careful assessment of
integration and customization costs in many ways is the key to
avoiding an open source nightmare. Unlike commercial products, open
source projects are not usually created with the modern IT
infrastructure environment in mind. Integration with single sign-on
or support for monitoring protocols such as SNMP might not exist.
Support for databases might be narrow and limited to a few choices
or to one database. Support for standards might be lacking.“Most of the time, the same problems exist in emerging
commercial software that is early in its life cycle. But as the
commercial program is installed in more and more IT environments,
smart vendors seek to productize the most common integrations so
that the same work is not required again with each new
client…”
Related Story:
IT
Manager’s Journal: Open Source for the Enterprise(Oct 11,
2005)