Demanding Free Software in a business context
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2012-01-09
People who hire companies or freelance programmers to write
code for them should demand a Free Software license. This
time not even because of ideology, or the higher goals of
Software Freedom. Nope, just because it makes sound business
sense and saves a lot of money!
There are many non-IT companies who pay other self-employed
programmers, or companies to program for them. Most of the
time they have some sort of issue, or specific need that's
holding back their normal business operation as it is. So
they decide to throw some money at it and voilà, the problem
is solved with some code tailored to their need, sitting
cozily on their server. Oblivious of the code's license, the
customer is happy with another fixed "problem", not aware of
the future issues this approach might impel.
Let me describe a typical work day:
A customer rings me up. After months and months of
neglecting their webshop, they noticed that it's time to do
something about the situation. Their Magento site needs to
be upgraded from version 1.3 to 1.6 and since there's no
"click here to upgrade" button in the backend, they need me
to do the job. "No problemo", I say. "I'll migrate your
webshop to my development server and upgrade it bit by bit.
Any issues, or installed modules that resist the upgrade
will present themselves easily and they'll be fixed before
you can pronounce 'gelegenheidsgorgelaar'. After this I'll
just migrate everything back, making sure no orders and
sheep are left behind and Bob's your uncle."
I wish it was this easy, because more often than not I find
myself held back by proprietary Magento modules that simply
refuse upgrading. Sometimes these have been purchased by the
customer, looking for a quick solution, but quite often they
have been coded by a former contractor, to tailor fit their
situation. Finding proprietary software on top of a Free
Software stack can be very annoying, but one situation,
which in my view could be fixed easily, strikes me the most.
When people hire programmers they rarely inquire after the
license the code will be under. Most of the time the
resulting code (in case of scripting languages like PHP)
will mention no specific license at all, which means it's
thrown in the bottomless pit called "All rights reserved".
This is a shame, because when you need someone else to code
on your software stack in the future they can't build upon
this code. If the code breaks when you upgrade your site it
is rendered utterly useless, and in the meantime you've
literally flushed hundreds of euros down the drain, because
all the work needs to be done again, from scratch. It's like
getting a contractor to build you a new bathroom, only to
find you'll have to break it down completely when he's
unavailable to fix your leaky bathtub a year later.
So the next time you get someone to code for your, demand
they use a Free Software license. You'll find that most web
developers are actually happy to do so. Most of them are
using Free Software anyway, and you'll find that many of
their websites actually promote the use of Open Source by
sporting the Open Source Initiative logo (most of the time
not knowing where the image came from). Often they recommend
the use of Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, you name it. It's of
great added value to web developers to use FLOSS, and the
business owners could even help them further by demanding
their entire IT-stack is Free Software, head to toe. This
will create a beautiful world for webdevelopers like me.
Websites will be easy to upgrade and change, it will be more
easy to swap contractors, and business owners will have more
money, aka time, to watch their little children blow
bubbles!
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Tags: english
