Open Source vs. SaaS
Let me be the last to post about “Open Source vs. SaaS”. Two excellent posts have been put up recently (O.K. not so recently.) Anshu Sharma’s and Dave Rosenberg’s. Both are very well written, and I agree with Anshu’s arguments. That said, they both are essentially missing one essential point: all applications will be Web Applications (I think I’m going to say this in every post from here on out.) It doesn’t matter how they are developed, people won’t use them unless they can access them on the Web (my three kids don’t even know what a disk drive is.) The question is why aren’t more Web Applications being developed specifically as Open Source projects.
Let me say first, that the entire argument “Open Source vs. SaaS” is facetious. Open Source is a development model, SaaS is a delivery and usage model. Open Source applications can be delivered as SaaS and SaaS applications can be developed using Open Source methods. The argument arises because so few true Open Source apps are actually delivered as Web Applications (I use SaaS and Web Applications interchangeably.) Instead they are developed as single instance applications that a user installs.
Some companies then take this Open Source base and add Web Application functionality such as multi-tenancy and scalability as well as business functionality and flow to it. (We did as much with Dave’s tremendous MuleSource product when we created the OpSource Services Bus.) But to say these apps are Open Source is the equivalent of saying SalesForce.com is Oracle since they built an app on top of an Oracle Database.
So why aren’t there more native Open Source applications that are run as true Web Applications. Most are single-instance enterprise software that someone installs to use. The most compelling apps of the last 15 years, from eBay’s bidding app, to Yahoo’s Portal, to Google’s Search and SFDC’s CRM are all proprietary apps. Some say that SugarCRM is a Web App, but I think of them as a hybrid company selling both installed and SaaS versions of a single app (and we know what I think of hybrids.) Ruminating with John Rowell, the only one we could come up with was Wikipedia.
Why is Wikipedia the only Open Source/Web Application? Because running a Web Application costs money. You have to pay for servers and power and network and security and backup and so many different items, and that takes the Benjamins. Usually only commercial enterprises have the Benjamins to make that work, and Open Source communities don’t want to develop for commercial enterprises. They’ll do it for Wikimedia (the organization behind Wikipedia), because it’s a charitable organization, but who wants to develop an app for Google or SFDC?
So back to my earlier thoughts. If the Open Source development model is a good one, but all apps will be Web Apps (memorize this people) we need a platform where all of the expensive stuff is taken care of for the high-minded developers to start making apps. Then we can find a whole new non-topic to blog about
Posted: October 3rd, 2007 under SaaS - Software As A Service, Web applications, open source.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from Steve Bobrowski
Time: October 10, 2007, 6:44 am
Treb, you state above “… Some say that SugarCRM is a Web App, but I think of them as a hybrid company selling both installed and SaaS versions of a single app (and we know what I think of hybrids.) …”. No, I don’t know “what you think of hybrids” because there’s no reference, nor does a search of your blog for “hybrid” turn up anything. I’m interested in your viewpoint. Please provide a link. Thanks,
Comment from Matt Robinson
Time: October 10, 2007, 11:22 am
Here at Rollbase we couldn’t agree more. The fact that OpSource understands this so well is one of the reasons we decided to build out our infrastructure using OpSource. One can perhaps think of Rollbase as an apps platform on top of the OpSource platform — not only is all the expensive stuff taken care of behind the scenes, so is the actual application development and deployment:
http://www.rollbase.com/betademo.html
Matt
Comment from Treb Ryan
Time: October 11, 2007, 9:11 am
Thanks for your comment, Steve. To answer your question, a hybrid is a company selling both a licensed software and an on-demand web application. For example, Business Objects sells Crystal Reports as a packaged app and CrystalReports.com as a SaaS app. It’s very hard to be a good hybrid. You need a lot of money and a team focused solely on on-demand (like BO did). For smaller companies, I usually recommend they focus completely on SaaS as soon as they can.
Comment from Bob Dolezal
Time: May 8, 2008, 1:04 pm
Being a late-comer to this conversation, there’s another situation in which open source is challenging besides costly resources, and that’s where proprietary IP is involved. We’re developing a behavioral targeting analytical engine that has beaucoup IP and we’re considering using open source on the other side of our API to allow fetches and responses of our analytical results without opening up the world to our technology. This gives the open source developers something to build on and sell, and it gives us access to uses and sources of income that we wouldn’t other develop. Ours is a micropayment environment–the developer’s app sends us data that is formatted to our API’s needs, and we send back valuable ad and content targeting information they can employ.
Comment from Sushant Nayak
Time: October 1, 2008, 2:17 am
I have been searching for a SaaS related blog and finally, i reach this resource when i was approached from Astadia (http://www.astadia.com), who are incorporating the SaaS deployment strategy. Since i am a technical consultant, i am inclined to ask the implementation aspect and what will be the cost factor, for providing a solution as a service. If anyone can shed some light on this, i would be obliged.
Thanks.
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