By Ulrike Mueller, Demandware Engineering

I understand there are some concerns about the "hype" surrounding open source ecommerce software and how it could become a "trap" for some retail businesses, but I think it will be only a "trap" for those businesses that don't understand basic principles of IT—like total cost of ownership and return on investment. Companies who understand these principles and know how to use them are able to make an intelligent decision for their business. Any diligent analysis will factor out the pure software aspect—which encompasses the functionality and features—from the service aspects—which encompasses operating the software and providing capabilities like scalability and availability. It is important to remember that these are two separate aspects and just looking at open source software as a single "download-and-run" task does not tell the whole story. Looking at both aspects separately and analyzing them individually really shows the benefits of open source software for businesses as well as the software industry as a whole.

Let's look at the benefits of open source. But first to clarify something, when we look at the benefits, let's only consider open source software, which has an active community and is maintained by the community. We won't address open source software that has been uploaded to a code sharing website by a smart engineer because of altruistic motivation. This type of open source software is very important for the software development community, but not immediately for enterprises. However, open source software developed and maintained by a community has many benefits for enterprises.

Transparency is probably the most important benefit of an open source product. By transparency I am referring to the feeling of having access to every detail, the feeling to be able to control and adapt everything. In reality probably very few companies will ever peek into any detail or will touch a single line of code. But the option gives companies the feeling of freedom and not being strangled by a "black box." The transparency also nurtures a crowd of experts, who actually use this level of insight. They are part of the transparency value system: I don't have to look into details, if there are others who can do it for me. One type of experts are companies and individuals who will help enhance and evolve the software through direct contribution and contribution on all levels. It's probably the most efficient form of customer feedback in a software product. It can happen in a small scale with a knowledge base posting on a blog, with a bug fix or in large scale with a new feature. These mechanisms are how open source software evolves through crowd innovation. A special form is probably the concept of a plug-in or module ecosystem, found with open source products like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. These are software products built from the ground up as an ecosystem. Another type of expert in the community will help and commercialize operating the software or even completely provide this as a service.

Transparency also helps improve the quality of open source software. The best example for this is cryptography algorithms, reviewed by thousands of eyes in the community. Transparency and community together build some things that can be called crowd trust: it's not just me using this software, there others using it, there are experts around it, who can peek in every detail, these experts help others, these experts can help me. I can Google for expertise and find support from others. This also shows that success for an open source product does not come from a single benefit. All these benefits interact and nurture each other. Transparency brings trust, which brings community, which brings crowd support and crowd evolution, which leads to more adoption and larger community. The mechanism can be best called a viral vortex, once ignited it brings a growing community and benefits for all participants.

But keeping that "viral vortex" successfully running is not easy. Some people might also have the perception of open source as a chaotic process of creative people who write lines of code. Instead successful open source projects are very often controlled with a strong regime of values and vision by a few core individuals. The most prominent example is probably Linux and Linus Torvald. The strong regime and the core individuals are the guarantees for consistency and vision. It's also the reason, why very often successful open source products are associated with a company. Companies like Zend, MySQL, and Redhat are examples. They are the "keepers" of the product vision, the center for a community and also a guarantee that the community and the software product will not become fragmented. I would say it's even one of the success factors for an open source product. In today's world of growing adaption of SaaS and cloud computing, there is also a huge opportunity for a software company to specialize on delivering the operations, scalability and availability as a value-add around an open source product. Well executed and well managed, it really combines the benefits of a classical IT service business and the benefits of an innovative crowd-sourced open software product, and benefits both the software company and the user.

The benefits described above are actually all fundamental values, which companies should adopt regardless of whether they deliver open source software, deliver closed source software or deliver a pure service. They are fundamental values to achieve "openness" for any software company. The transparency, community and customer orientation can have many forms. It starts from the company having an open dialog with their customers, to a community writing knowledge base articles and documentation, driving localization, developing free SDKs and providing access to the source code. Java is probably the best example of the latter example, which is perceived as open, without being open source from a licensing perspective. But this openness has really helped with the adoption of the technology, with innovation happening around it and with community building. Open source is often not possible, because of complicated legal aspects, but even then a software company should incorporate the underlying fundamental values into their vision and management principals.

We at Demandware have always been a customer oriented company and as a service company we live and breathe everyday with our customers and partners. Being open is a path we will and must follow.

Ulrike Mueller is Demandware's Chief Software Architect.