The Power of Open Source

The Remote Working Age

In today’s era which is driven by internet every business requires some or other software to be able to efficiently execute and grow their business. Think of some of the things that an average office employee may be doing on a day to day basis e.g. email, chat, taking notes, preparing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, managing customer relationships, digital marketing, social media management, invoicing, and payments, inventory management, photo/video editing. Almost everything that we do in the context of running a business requires software. More so in this pandemic induced remote working world.

Increasing Software Spends

Most office software are available at a license cost and there are a wide variety of available software too for each of those functions. For revenue-generating or well-funded businesses, this software cost can easily be translated to a cost per employee and thus considered the cost of running a business. But what about the millions of small businesses which are boot-strapped or run by individual entrepreneurs or as small family businesses? Gone are the days of software being installed once through a CD and being available for the lifetime of the computer. Now almost everything “software” is moving to the cloud and the license costs are monthly fees – often per user per month. As a business owner or senior manager, you soon realize that the cost of software to help an employee be productive soon far exceeds the cost of the desk and hardware (laptop and peripherals) for that employee. This is all good if you have the revenue or the funding to pay for it. What if you don’t have much in revenue? How do you stay productive while still saving on costs?

In the early days of founding NeuroByte, me and my Co-Founder were struggling with this very challenge. We were still working on acquiring customers. We were a two-man operation working out of a makeshift office in an apartment, with no revenue and meager seed capital that came out of our savings. On the sales side, we had to convince our potential customers (mostly startup founders and small business owners) that with our strong technology background we could help build products and solutions for our customers using software. Given our limited seed capital, we had to ensure that our fixed costs (e.g. software license subscriptions) were minimal.

Open Source to the rescue

One of the great things about the Software industry is the availability of a huge number of great quality software as “Free and Open Source” (FOSS). What does FOSS really mean? Basically, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users. With a background as a programmer both me and my Co-Founder were familiar with the software landscape and the variety of software available. I had already written software using Linux, Java, MySQL, Tomcat stack – all open source software. However, when we started looking for business software for our use, we wanted something that was readily available, easy to set up and learn, and production-ready. A bit searching and I was simply amazed by the wide variety of business-ready software available. Over the past couple of decades, the availability of software under open-source licenses has simply exploded. Since then looking for open-source software options is a key step in any software procurement that we do. This has allowed us to keep software costs reasonably low and still continue delivering our services to our clients

We already wrote about DIY websites using WordPress which is another open-source software. In our upcoming blogs, we will share information about Open Source in general and also write special blogs about specific business processes that can be managed using open-source software. Watch this space.