“100% Free Software”. Does it matter?

As many of us see, Technology has become a blessing in disguise for businesses, encouraging them to discover new grounds without settling to what they already have. However, Technology can also become a curse for some businesses in many different ways because of the intensity of its affection, which ultimately pushes many into a state of a gamble. When a new hype pops up with a set of completely new jargon, it may thrill technology evangelists and technical consultants — but the same might create a tremendous amount of stress on who is accountable for defining the technology roadmap of his/her company for the next five to ten years. When making choices, they cannot fail themselves by choosing something which looked promising at the beginning but would fail after just one year. But what choice do they really have?

IT Budget & Organisational Cultures

There was a time that organisations probably did not see an actual application of technology, yet they invested in it believing that it was necessary to be on the right track preparing for the future. The typical process was to allocate a certain budget for that financial year on technological upgrades as an organisational policy. But no one bothered to set solid business-level expectations on that budget in a sense of accountability. The IT department members only have to utilise that budget in order to prove that they have started something good in good faith and utilised that allocated the sum of money before the next cycle of budgets.

Although that sounds funny, you will actually see many organisations that ended up purchasing so many unnecessary software products which they haven’t even used until the same product vendor paid the next year visit asking to upgrade these software tools to their latest and greatest versions.

Digital Transformation

If you remember correctly, in earlier days, technology and software were mostly used to just facilitate businesses with cool things like reducing cost by going paperless, save time and costs on logistics or streamlining certain business processes (by guiding the employees to stick to a few given screens with input fields etc). With the emergence of the concept of Digital Transformation, many existing organisations started to rethink of what they have achieved so far with all the assets they already had compared to those digitally formed new organisations such as Uber. This means, at least the industry learnt what to expect from technology to make a real impact on their revenue and profits, thanks to the pioneers of the concept of Digital Transformation.

As it has been proven that lucrative businesses can even exist in digital form, Digital Transformation can be treated as the langskip for an existing business to discover new business grounds — the langskip powered by their very own existing assets including those of digital.

Photo: HBO España

Nowadays, the expenditure on IT assets isn’t just a tradition. In fact, the project idea itself start based on its revenue potential. As a result, everyone naturally expects a lot from their IT divisions and any technology teams.

Accountability that comes with Reward

When a new project starts being branded under Digital Transformation, sometimes the word “Digital” in this can be misleading. This can easily make us try to start the process by evaluating the technology that is available out there. Because we think that we would have a better chance with whatever that worked for someone else before. By doing this, however, we are not only limiting ourselves to the narrow scope that a particular technology or vendor could accommodate but also we become prone to fail at any point that particular technology, trend or vendor fails.

Accountability obviously is stressful. But the reward that comes with it leads you to the ultimate satisfaction.

If you are accountable to make a wise choice by carefully evaluating things, you will not obviously like to deal with such a feeling of uncertainty.

The Warship isn’t the War

Even if this is about something Digital, the digital still remains to be your delivery mechanism but nothing else. The actual product for which you intend to build a new market for still is your business-idea but not any formation of software products or anything digital. Then what makes you making choices within the dimensions defined by some product or a trend that a certain unity of software vendors promote?

Sometimes, you worry about whether there would be tools to build a software solution to support your idea. Or else, you don’t know for sure whether the features of the available software could meet your expectations and what are the missing features until you actually start to evaluate them. But the problem is that you have to make some sort of a commitment in order to obtain the Enterprise Editions of these tools from the relevant product vendors. Or at least there is a trial period within which you have to end the evaluation. Even after the evaluation process, you do not have the freedom to use those tools if the costs don’t meet your budget limits. This makes you reactively follow someone else by trusting on case-studies and referencing. Unknowingly, it also makes sure that your space would remain within the very dimension of theirs.

“100% Free Software”. Does it matter?

If you are keen on focusing on your business idea while using any available tools for the proof-of-concept work, “100% Free” software does matter. In that case, you do not have to make any commitment towards any external party unless you are certain that it is necessary. If they work for you, you keep using them; if they don’t work, you dump them; if they work up to a certain point with a few missing features, you extend or customise them as you wish. But in order to extend or customise them, you have to make sure that these free tools are “Opensource” too. Once you know that you have this level of freedom, I am sure that you would spend more energy on polishing up your business idea rather than occupying your brain with potential technical limitations, commitments and the budget.

WSO2 as an example

Let me take a realistic example to explain what your experience would be with WSO2 products. We all know that many organisations have already started thinking of their future API strategies. Based on each person’s creativity from a business angle, their ideas can be different—but almost every one of them looks for some existing API management or API gateway product for their internal brainstorming and proof-of-concept works. If that person’s choice happens to be WSO2 API Manager by any chance, he/she would simply

1. Download the Enterprise-ready WSO2 API Manager for Free.
2. Run on any platform of their choice (Windows, Linux, Docker etc)
3. If really necessary, write extensions in Java (by design itself the product are extensible)
4. Use it even in Production without any restriction
5. If necessary, move the solution to a different infrastructure (e.g from on-premise to Cloud)
6. Only if interested in Enterprise Support, contact WSO2 and get into the commercials.

You probably would find so many papers, articles or marketing material that explain the benefits of choosing WSO2 products. But I wouldn’t repeat anything from those here as I am not discussing WSO2 products but one particular case which WSO2 products also can compliment being 100% Free, Opensource and Extensible tools.

Freedom is valuable

Ideas are important, but, every idea may not succeed. To try out something you truly need a proper combination of brainstorming and trial-and-error kind of practising. Think about a situation in which a certain party waits expecting you to come up with a conclusion within 15 days, if not 30 days. Would you not see that as an unwanted commitment which puts some additional stress on your brain forcing you to make choices between red and green wires while listening to the ticking clock? Even if it doesn’t cost any money as you haven’t signed any contracts with anyone, won’t you still feel that it would disturb the level of freedom that you need? Based on your own opinion, you will find the answer when someone asks “Do 100% Free Software matter?”