Comments on: To Buy, or Not To Buy. To Build? is the Question

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 03:07:52 +0000

Thanks Bikram, and happy holidays to everyone who’s part of our family at Tyner Blain. PS: If you’re reading this, you’re part of our family!

By: Bikram Gupta

Bikram Gupta — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:44:50 +0000

Scott, I was thinking of a few reasons like:

- Difficulty in maintaining home-built code.
- Writing quality, bug-free code in the desired timeframe and to ingrate it as well!
- Is this a common code to be used across product lines, or is it meant for just one product?

But all these reasons can be categorized into your top 3 reasons: financial, time and people constraints. In addition, this post and comments cross-reference some useful pointers as well.

Merry christmas and a very happy new year!

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 16:29:59 +0000

Hey Sam, thanks for reading and commenting!

I haven’t had the experience of extending any of the open-source products yet, although I expect to in 2007. There do seem to be a lot of extensions that make it back into the products, but as you imply, it may only be the tip of the iceberg.

Other folks – if you’ve worked with a team that extended an open source product – did your team push those extensions back into the community, or keep them? And why?

By: Sam at JBilling

Sam at JBilling — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:15:47 +0000

at times great additions come up in the building phase, mainly in the form of some brilliant brains within an organization. The open system will work in an effortless manner with simple clean coding. The sad part is that the open source community rarely gets back such gems.

don’t you think it would be nice if the open source is really open, even in the context a corporate house built it?

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:15:14 +0000

Thanks James, good general advice – I think that works as a rule of thumb – generally, that’s how it would play out for the companies I’ve worked with, when a purchased solution option is available.

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 16:54:42 +0000

I think companies need to buy that which will not differentiate them and build that which will.
http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/02/build_or_buy_or.html

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 16:01:19 +0000

Good additions, Carlin, and thanks for reading and commenting!

I really like the modular software approach for IT projects – the granularity of build vs buy is smaller, allowing for more optimal approaches. People can do a mix, exactly as you describe. It also allows overworked teams to easily subcontract “build a module” type jobs to third parties.

By: Carlin Svensen

Carlin Svensen — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:53:22 +0000

best TCO sometimes comes from a combination of approaches; there are many times when buying part of a solution and building ontop of it is the best choice.

IT as a whole, whether open source or enterprise, seems to move in this direction. now you see build vs. buy not just on internal IT projects, but customer facing products. examples are situations where one wants to build an online application that can scale: now companies have platform choices a companies like Apprenda, 3-tera, and ActiveGrid seem to provide solutions for this under different guises (grid operating system, saas platform, on-demand platform, etc.)