Make it easy to purchase open source software
When I saw this quote in twitter from Michael Chilson, I had to laugh:
"using open source software is like driving a car with a million mechanics who have each had a turn."
One of the problems people have with open source software is too many voices and too many choices. When you buy proprietary software, you have one clear choice. And you can go to that vendor and they'll give you a nice brochure (or web page) that describes your options and often they'll even help you figure out which option is best for you. As Matt Asay says "the industry knows how to buy proprietary software".
But when it comes to open source software, not only do you have lots of choices but you have to figure them out yourself and often it seems like there are no guiding voices or a million guiding voices. You can support the thing yourself (using the mailing lists), hire an expert, purchase commercial support (maybe) and if you purchase commercial support you have to figure out which company to purchase it from. Oh, and if you're a typical company, you use 50-100 open source software products so now you have 50-100 unusual support decisions to make. Wait, there aren't even commercial options for most of those … it's a whole new world and sometimes it's easier to just go back to the easy, known model. Which I suspect was Matt's point.
Of course, this is why OpenLogic is providing one stop, commercial support for 400+ open source software products. Let's make it easy for people to use open source software.
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We are looking for an open source floor plan software like Metropix. We want the source code to be GNU or we will consider contributing to an open source group that is building the software we need.