Businesses take it for granted that commercial software and hardware are necessary to reliably capture process data and other business items (such as contracts, customer information and shipping orders, for instance), manage it and format this information for (frequently, human) consumption, as part of their Enterprise Data Management (EDM).

Fortunately, there's always a counter-culture that seeks alternatives. In the business field, we can count on players such as Arduino, Raspberry-Pi, BeagleBoard for Open Source (OS) hardware and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) for OS software (among others): these organizations provide community-driven products and projects.

The acknowledged challenge businesses encounter is the fact that while the OS hardware is affordable and ASF projects are free (pending distribution licenses are respected), they require IT effort for development and deployment, and knowledge workers to make the different parts work smartly together. For their part, the cost of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions frequently does not include the service necessary to configure or customize it - a cost item that is, genuinely, difficult to assess without a minimal interview (also known as discovery or definition phase) with a product vendor.

As you can conclude, the brainware cost associated to OS solutions is obviously the cost to consider, when looking into OS solutions; that cost is baked into the COTS products. This being said, let's pick apart some objections:

  • OS hardware: "They're just for hobbyist"

True, these are widely available, they're affordable, and... are widely documented. Arduino has made a brilliant effort at documenting examples and guiding users through simple projects that can be daisy-chained for larger projects. Arduino add-on boards (called shields) have been at the core of the hobby 3D printer (additive manufacturing) revolution. Similarly, Raspberry-Pi and BeagleBoard have vibrant communities that exchange projects and ideas. A representative of BeagleBoard last summer, during the Detroit MakerFaire, stated that although their Beaglebone boards were prototyping board in essence, they witness many product OEMs including these in their value-added products, as COTS components. He followed this comment by stating that while it's not forbidden, he recommends the OEMs to open a supply agreement with component providers used in the Beaglebone, as there would be further economies of scale for the OEMs.

  • ASF: "They require more IT and developers"

Think of it this way: you either are paying upfront the necessary functions and features your business needs through a licensing scheme and service on COTS software - frequently having to rework your processes to fit within the off-the-shelf features of the software, with additional service efforts to accommodate Must Have processes that is not supported Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) on the COTS - or will be hiring the smarts (developers, IT, etc) to make all these moving parts work together. The latter part of that statement is what OS hardware and software boils down to.

How do Open Source projects and products tie together?

Armed with this information, you can then decide if ASF projects and open source hardware can be an option to manage your business data. Should you go that direction, the next step is to try to understand the interactions of these projects, as there is no single project that will do an all-inclusive data capture, processing and display of it. Here's a video that can help you figure out a few of the concepts I have just exposed, with solution elements you might need for your business.

There are many other ASF projects, as well as very involving open source hardware projects. The above presentation might be considered incomplete by some; it is an introduction, for you to investigate further. Note as well I did not address anything relevant to Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), which I covered in articles about the Circular Economy and your business data lifespan.

Why is this important?

  • Because ASF projects are used by many leading edge businesses, as well as traditional ones;
  • Because open hardware platforms enable you to quickly prototype your hardware solutions;
  • Because open-source products and projects have negligible upfront costs - your brainware and commodity hardware are your most significant cost factors;
  • Because COTS products always need configuration, and customization becomes invariably necessary when you cannot integrate your most complex processes into your COTS application using OOTB configurations wizards and features

(All views expressed in this blog are my personal views and do not belong to any group/organization I belong to. The blogger is not to be held responsible for any misrepresentation of facts, or data inconsistency. Abbreviations are used to lighten the reading - I don't intend to invent TLAs. Finally, all trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.)