Had an interesting chat yesterday with some friends over the pro’s and cons of open source as a solution for Saas and CRM service providers. The main advantage (as I see it) is of course the breadth and scope of creativity from the development community. Even in terms of beta testing this must represent a huge saving in development costs. The main drawback is, among other things, quality control. Have you gone down the open source route? And, if so, what persuaded you do so? Was it the right move for your organisation?
I think a advantage is pricing. Most proprietary software packages are very expensive to embed into a SaaS offering – especially proprietary software that is licensed based on named users.
While is quality control an issue? In many cases the quality of open source is higher than that of proprietary software. In addition, is it much easier to unit test open source software since you have access to all the APIs and the source code,