Which costs will you be facing when implementing OSS within your company?
Don’t be misled by the fact that the source code is freely available. The implementation of an enterprise application is expensive as well as end-user and administrator trainings.
If you plan to implement OSS you should expect the following expenses:
- Charges for the right to distribute the software. You should expect dual licensing costs in case you want to resell the modified product or to distribute it as a component. You can ignore this if you use it just internally.
- Certified platform support plays a role in case you want to install the software on a certain hardware/operating system and want to assure that the software is running on that system.
- Furthermore companies earn money for a managed release cycle. Usually OSS will be periodically updated within short terms. Nevertheless for a company it is all but impossible to update their ERP system every other week. For this reason many software vendors offer one special release per quarter targeted at business users which includes any recent changes of the regular releases.
- Even with OSS, support agreements do cost some money. You should anticipate expenses in that field since enterprise applications are mission critical per se and a 24/7 support is mandatory if you want to keep loss low in case of system crashes.
- Due to beneficial licensing of the software there is no legal coverage of vendor liability. If coverage of this liability is necessary you need to enter contracts with the vendor or an external service provider. In addition it is possible to become indemnified against all liability for intellectual property infringement claims. Several insurance companies provide custom-built insurance products for that case and some software vendors offer it as part of their support subscriptions.
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