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What does opensource mean for outsourcing?

By Skip Victor - Mar. 05, 2008

Is the emergence of Open Source going to reduce our increasing reliance on outsourcing to "cheaper-labor" outfits in India, China and the like?

The communities supporting OSS are global (with a large concentration in the US and parts of the EU) and the output, in many cases, rivals the best-of-class proprietary software being developed by the Oracles and MSFTs of the world.

With larger (Fortune 500) companies increasingly looking at OSS alternatives, will we see a decreasing demand for cheap programming/coding resources in India, Philippines, etc.??

Just curious to see what others think about this...


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  1. By Bryce Chechenco on Mar. 05, 2008

    I think outsourcing opensource is a terrible idea. I could on and on, but this post summarizes it - http://asay.blogspot.com/2006/04/outsourcing-open-source-bad-idea.html


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  2. By an anonymous user on Mar. 05, 2008

    Just having access to free software and the source code does not automatically deliver a solution! There is still a ton of work to be done, and often times, a lot of that work can be done very cost-effectively overseas. Not all work can be done by cost-effective labor, but there is still a lot of work that CAN be done more productively.


    We get work developed in India. The quality has sucked at times, but we now have a working model. All the work being done does USE open source, regardless of whether the project itself is open sourced or not.


    So, I think that, depending on the solution required, a lot of work may still require to be outsourced, but, as with any project, it needs to be done carefully!


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  3. By an anonymous user on Mar. 05, 2008

    How much of the code in OS comes from the countries that are big on outsourcing? 'nuff said.


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  4. By Skip Victor on Mar. 12, 2008

    Good points. I don't think we can discount outsourcing because these guys in India and Eastern Europe are sharp and have managed to build large organizations around the closed source packages over the last decade.


    While I agree that they wont contribute to OSS (I don't think they're the contributing kind!) I think they will still ramp up on these technologies pretty quickly and become established players in deploying and developing applications and more importantly, maintaining and supporting applications. Much to my dismay, though, because I have had nothing but bad experiences with outsourcing.


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