Open source is cheaper, right?
A short time ago Charles Arthur published a post on the Guardian Technology blog that asked the question of whether the UK Government was planning to mandate the use of open source technology for its websites. The suggestion that website development costs in government are spiralling and going over-budget was highlighted. It used the example of the UK Supreme Court website that, along with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council website, had footed a bill of £360K. This website was built by Logica using the OpenText WCMS (RedDot). Charles and the government may well be hoping that open source would be “slightly cheaper”, but would it? I’m not so sure.
How free is open source?
I am sure that most, if not all, readers of this blog will have heard and be familiar with open source to a greater or lesser extent – at least familiar enough to understand why the government may be interested in replacing closed-source commercial software with open source alternatives; open source is ‘free’. To be clear though this is ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’ not ‘free beer’! Open source mainly refers to the licence agreement that the software is distributed under. There are a number of open source licences – one of the main ones being the GNU General Public Licence. GNU define free software as having four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Sourced from the GNU Free Software Definition
This boils down to the premise that with open source you have full power to do what you like with the software, even modify it, but you must also ensure that these same freedoms are granted to everyone else (including potentially, any work that you have done with the software). Of course this also means that as open source software is free to acquire and use, there is no licence fee to pay. This differs quite considerably from closed-source commercial software where the software is owned by the developer and the customer pays a licence fee to use it. The accompanying licence then defines what rights the users have over the software (and if you have ever read a software licence agreement you will know that these are very few). Organisations that base their business on open source may charge a nominal fee for packaging and distributing this software, but they often base their business model on ancillary services such as support, training, documentation etc.
Total cost of ownership
Sounds good so far doesn’t it. And let me say before I go much further that I am a fan of open source and there are many excellent uses for open source software. But my original question was about how much money can be saved on website projects by using open source. To answer this, we need to look at the total cost of ownership of a website solution and build, and in particular, how big a part are software licence fees in the TCO? In my experience it is quite small.
The licence costs of software such as Content Management System (CMS) in a website build form a relatively small amount of the overall build and ownership costs. By far the biggest cost in any website development project is the man hours required to plan, design, build and support it. With the day rates of website design and build being in the region of £600 to £1000 per day, a £30K licence on a CMS is equivalent to 30-40 man days of work. So the question becomes is that £30K better spent on a commercial CMS or on man hours, or in other words would using an open source CMS mean that 30-40 man hours of cost could be saved on a project?
Almost certainly not!
To explain why let me ask another question: would an open source alternative to a commercial CMS provide the same features and quality as a commercial CMS? In certain circumstances it may. If a customer wants a blog there are few commercial offerings that will do the job better than WordPress, and the number of good quality free extensions to WordPress is large, allowing a functionally rich blog to be built relatively quickly and cheaply. But a public sector website is often bigger than a blog. It may require features and functions specific to the public sector, such as online services. It may be required to integrate with a back office, CRM or other B2B channel. To support these in a solution based on WordPress, Drupal or Umbraco would undoubtedly require a hefty amount of bespoke development work. This would of course ramp up the man hours required for the project and therefore the cost. On top of this a solution that requires a large amount of bespoke development often has increased support costs as future work must be undertaken within the custom framework created, increasing the risk of vendor lock-in or a high cost of training if moving to another development agency.
Software designed for the market
In my experience the best way to make substantial cost savings on a website build project is to look to reducing the number of man hours required to build it. This naturally leads to looking for software that will work, more or less, out of the box with minimal customisation and bespoke work. This is where commercial CMS software often beats open source as the manufacturers of commercial CMS will also build plug-ins and additional functionality to support the public sector market (and others). Many of the CMS systems that Redweb work with offer modules with local authority specific functionality, ecommerce, CRM integration and many other common features required in website builds. Reduce the man hours required to build these elements and you reduce the overall cost of the solution.
Politics again
At Redweb we work with many government departments and organisations and we will always strive to offer the best value for money and the most cost-effective solutions.
Of course if the government really have got their sights set on open source as a means to cut costs then whether or not its use can cut costs may be irrelevant. Politics is all about perception and open source is synonymous with the idea of low cost, free software. I for one hope that the government have a good hard look to see where the bulk of the money on a website is really spent. I suspect it’s not on the licences.
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