Roasting my own coffee and Open Source

About five years ago I was on vacation and read about people who roast their own coffee beans at home. They were raving about the freshness and lack of bitterness and the enjoyment of achieving the perfect roast. When I came home from vacation, I purchased a Fresh Roast II online and started roasting my own beans. I was not very good at roasting beans at first. Blogs about it weren't as numerous as they are today. In the past five years, I have gone through three roasters and probably 300 lbs of coffee. Today I use a an IRoast 2 from Hearthware and have a few favorite profiles

How does that apply to Open Source? Once someone tastes a freshly roasted cup of coffee, most people become aware of how bad the coffee they have been drinking all their lives has been. Truly, it really is that much better. Yes it is more work than buying coffee either in beans or ground. But it is cheaper and tastes better.

I think the same thing about open source and commercial software. Today's open source offerings are excellent, I suspect that once you 'taste' them, you will have a hard time going back to commercial software.

My introduction to FOSS was a small project we had to keep track of about 2,500 publications that needed to be created, proofed, sent for regulatory approval printed and re-printed throughout the year. It is a lot of little steps on each document and lots of little corrections. The price of getting it wrong could be an inconvenience of a wrong phone number or could be expensive when a price was significantly wrong.

We looked into the standard solution for corporate project management, Microsoft Project. But to make it work the way we wanted we would need Project Server installed. All in all, the price was approaching $70K to put up this solution, far more than the solution justified.

That's when I discovered DotProject. In about 1 week, we had a DotProject Server installed on OpenSuse with MySQL on a spare workstation and started training the users to create templates for the publications. For the first time management could actually see just how much work was going on in the Business Communications department and why there was so much turn over there.

Even 5 years ago, I was amaazed of the quality of the Linux implementation, Apache Web Server, the DotProject PHP application and MYSQL. It was eye opening coming from a world where databases and applications are licensed for hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. And these guys were doing it for fun and recognition!

It has been an excellent five years of watching the FOSS industry, grow and mature to the point that companies should really be thinking seriously about how FOSS fits into their long term strategic plans.