Open Source Opens Doors for Developers

Fortunately for developers using open-source tools, MBA-buzz terms, such as return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO), are hard-hitting selling points built into the open-source equation. The bean counters sit up and take notice when they hear they can have a new, powerful, fully-integrated e-commerce and back-end system for a fraction of the proprietary price. You can almost hear the gears whirring inside their heads as they cubby-hole the savings into better hardware, more programming, slicker design or some non-technical aspect of the company. Of course, they can always tack it onto the bottom line; after all, money earned and not spent is profit.

Ron Lazarus, chief operating officer at Just Sports in Irvine, California, made a leap of faith into the unknown when he opted for open-source tools to create his company's new transactional database management system. But it was also a smart business decision. Just Sports saved itself a boatload of money by using the Linux operating system and PostgreSQL, a powerful open-source database management system, all running on Apache-powered servers. The final product is fast and highly customized with functions not available to users of Microsoft, Oracle or other proprietary software.

Its vast and varied support system is another weighty advantage to open source. When Gavin Roy, president of ReadySetNet, Just Sports' system developer, found the new system running slowly during the shake-out, he ran a diagnostic and learned it was using only 80 megabytes of its two gigabytes of RAM. He posted a query on an open-source bulletin board and within two hours had the answer to his problem, which he promptly fixed. "In the proprietary world", says Roy, "That might have taken two years to figure out."

Despite open source's quick bug-fixes and other advantages, its lack of a corporate umbilical cord, and an attendant technical support number to call in times of crises, are a source of consternation for some clients. However, companies anxious over whom to call when the going gets tough (Open Source community bulletin boards and user groups notwithstanding, of course), can work through open-source vendors, such as Red Hat for the Linux operating system and Great Bridge LLC for PostgreSQL.

Like its proprietary counterparts, PostgreSQL comes with a base set of tools. The difference is, with proprietary software, if the tool you need isn't included, you pay extra for it--if it's even available. But the Internet is a goldmine of quality open-source applications and add-ons that plug into PostgreSQL; everything from Java database connectivity (JDBC) tools to plug-in authentication modules for lightweight directory access protocols (LDAP). In a non-open source environment, these extras would add a heavy cost to the project, forcing managers to choose between price and functionality.

When a click-and-mortar client opts for an open-source solution, they gain virtually limitless opportunities to turn their raw data into invaluable business intelligence. Just Sports, for instance, knew that if it could classify its customers' by their shopping habits, it could determine who was a holiday buyer, who bought only during sales and so on. Armed with that information, Just Sports could tap its customers' buying potential. The raw data came from disparate sources, on-line, off-line and phone-in sales--any way a buyer could access Just Sorts merchandise. By using PostgreSQL to collect, store and cross-reference its data, the company hardwired its point-of-sales program to build customer profiles and configure the information into a customized, individualized marketing tool.

Aside from price, flexible functionality is open source's greatest gift. Seldom will a developer have to tell a client, "Nope, can't get there from here." For instance, Just Sports runs a promotional free-ticket giveaway through its web site. It works like this: Just Sports gives a "winning ticket" to the customer. The ticket has a URL on it and some specific contest identifiers that allow the customer to go to the web site, type in the code and find out what they've won. This is possible through the use of PHP scripting language and PostgreSQL together, which makes the site capable of generating portable document format (PDF) files on-the-fly. A key technology in the system is the open-source PDF generator that prints in a specific pattern, irrespective of the browser in use. So instead of a badly formatted, imperfect reproduction (which could cause some problems when the customer tries to use it), each winning ticket created by the company's web site is a perfect rendition of what it should look like.

The uses for this function go well beyond promotions; the same on-the-fly PDF technology is used in Just Sports' point-of-sale module to create customer invoices. The PDF function is a good example of how, without access to the source code, developers and managers would be trapped between the impossible and the unaffordable.