IT Manager's Journal

To understand the role FOSS plays in independent consulting, we talked with three typical consultants at different stages of their careers: Steve Bougerolle of SEB Global Intertech, who began FOSS consulting in Hong Kong in 1998 and has since moved his business to Canada; Vivien Anayian, who has run VG Universe Design for four years; and Rastin Mehr, a recent computer science graduate who has just become a full-time consultant under the name of rmd Studio. Together, they paint a picture of the growing acceptance of FOSS, and of the advantages and potential problems that FOSS consultants face today.

Choosing FOSS

For these consultants, choosing to work with FOSS was an easy decision. Both Bougerolle and Anayian branched out into consulting after working with FOSS in mainstream jobs. Similarly, Mehr chose to work with FOSS because "when you study computer science at school, you're dealing with open source all the time. After that, I had all the tools at hand, so I just didn't see any reason to move to proprietary." Mehr had a friend at university whom he describes as "an avid .Net developer," but he was never tempted to follow his friend's lead. "I realized that everything he could do, I could do with open source," Mehr says.

Their decisions were made easier by the fact that most clients are more interested in results than the technology used to achieve them. Although Bougerolle describes working as a consultant in Hong Kong as "bloody tough" at first, and characterizes his business as "a desert" when he moved back to Canada a few years ago, he attributes his problems more to the challenging economic environments and his inexperience than his specialty. "Nowadays, I get clients calling me up every week or two," he says, adding that he is unafraid of losing clients because "people don't look for me in the first place unless they want [an open source solution]."

Nor does being a FOSS specialist handicap Anayian or Mehr. "My clients don't really care what software I work with," Anayian says. "Of course they would care if I said they were going to have to pay for something, but since I don't ask anything extra, they're happy. In most cases, they don't even know what software I'm working with." Business is brisk enough, she says, that "If I see that the client needs an ASP or ColdFusion Web site, then I don't take the project. I can always find something else."

Even Mehr, with less experience than Anayian or Bougerolle, says that if clients want a proprietary solution, "I hand them to someone else, because I have enough clients to do only open source. I'm in a position to pick and choose."

Business advantages

As you might expect, all three of the consultants are strong FOSS advocates. "I don't really find anything except benefits when working with open source software," Anayian says. In particular, she cites the ease of learning new technologies and the ability to find quick solutions to her coding problems on the Internet. The other two are more cautious, but are in general agreement about the business advantages of FOSS.

Talking to customers, Bougerolle stresses that FOSS is "cheaper and better -- reliable, specifically, in the context of better." Mehr takes much the same approach, saying, "If you look at an open source project with a good history and good community, the quality is usually pretty good." Speaking specifically of his experience with Joomla! during last year's Google Summer of Code, he adds, "It's state-of-the-art project management, what those guys do."

In addition, Mehr says, "a lot of the patching and security is done by the project, so clients don't have to work so much." From his experiences, he is also convinced that well-established FOSS projects respond faster to bug reports, citing cases in which problems were fixed "in the first six to eight hours." By contrast, he says, "In proprietary software, you have to wait for the company to act, and you're lost until it decides to release a patch for you."

However, Mehr, who does much of his work with content management systems, finds that the main advantage of FOSS is the diversity of readily available applications. "I don't have to build everything from scratch," Mehr says. Instead, he can offer a variety of mature solutions at no additional cost to the client. "I want to wrap the software around the business model of the client, not wrap the business model around the software," he says. "It all boils down to what the client needs."

However, offering a variety of solutions does require him to "know all I can about the architecture and the features to know which [solution] meets a client's needs." He doesn't advertise himself as a specialist in any particular software, since he expects the tools he uses will change over time as projects develop or come and go.

The challenges

Despite their obvious enthusiasm, the three consultants were candid about the challenges of their specialty. While Mehr praises advanced FOSS projects, he also suggests that, in the initial stages of a project, "the process of maturation is a lot longer" than for proprietary software.

In addition, for all the improvements in FOSS offerings in the last decade, some gaps remain. "Sometimes you just can't find what you want," Bougerolle says. "For instance, if someone wanted an open source publishing system, I couldn't honestly tell them I could do that."

Another challenge is keeping up with the latest developments in the face of FOSS' diversity. Contrary to popular opinion, Mehr says, programmers spend only half their day writing code. "The rest we spend reading online manuals and wikis, and scanning forums and interacting with other people. That's the process we face every day. There's so much out there that it gets overwhelming."

Anayian suggests that Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and content management systems have helped the business community to understand FOSS. However, explaining the philosophy of FOSS remains an ongoing concern for FOSS consultants. "I had a client who was giving me a check ask, 'So how do you guys make money in open source?'" Mehr recalls. "And I was like, 'You just gave me a check.'"

More than anything else, Bougerolle says, "You've got to keep an eye on licensing terms. There are people who think they can just grab stuff from the open source community and sell it. They don't know the difference between public domain and GPL, for example. But if you're trying to sell a solution to a business, they are going to need to know [the licensing conditions] upfront. They won't know the details, so they won't know what to look for." If clients do not take the trouble to understand the licensing issues, then compliance becomes an additional responsibility for the consultant.

Mehr says much the same, noting that "I've had a lot of customers who want to own the software." In such cases, he notes that they are get for tens of thousands of dollars what would require millions of dollars to develop from scratch, and emphasizes the client's freedom to alter the software.

As the popularity of FOSS continues to grow, Bougerolle also finds himself spending time debunking popular myths about it. "It's still surprising how many people automatically assume that [FOSS] is more secure," he says, although "just the fact they're getting most of the stuff from downloads should tell them it's not."

He also finds that clients continually overlook the need of maintenance and its cost. "The problem is they usually don't believe me."

Being candid about these challenges may seem to be counterproductive, but the consultants say it's not. Many executives, Mehr says, "don't learn about the business model of open source [in school], and, because they don't know it, they completely deny that it exists." In many cases, consultants need to save their clients from themselves.

Even more importantly, Bougerolle suggests, honesty helps to differentiate him from those with less expertise. "A lot of people doing Linux are starting to make claims that are totally unprofessional. But if you do that, you look totally unprofessional yourself."

FOSS consultants may have concerns that their proprietary counterparts don't share, but those interviewed report that, in the end, the extra effort generally pays off in the form of satisfied clients, repeat business, and growing word of mouth reputations. Clients, Mehr says, "just want their problems solved so they can do business as usual. So,once you have passed the education stage, if you have done a good job, you'll have many happy customers."

Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist who writes regularly for NewsForge, Linux.com, and IT Manager's Journal.