Free as in a puppy : The hidden costs of open-source

In most enterprises, if you talk to developers, you will see that they have a natural inclination towards open-source. This is not only because of the ethos, and ways of working of open source projects, but also because of the cost angle. Most teams love the fact that they can just download a OSS library from a repository ( for "free", basically without having to give any financial information, etc. ), and then start using it the next day. That is why you often get this directive, "Why don't you use Open-source ? It's free"

I love Open-source as much as the next person, but the term that OSS is free is misleading. Because, in an enterprise setting, the cost of running a solution is more than just the bare license cost. So, even if there is no cost to download package X from a particular repository ( say nuget ), there is still cost involved to understand it, deploy it, fix any issues in the library ( especially critical security vulnerabilities ), train folks on it, and most importantly support it ( when something breaks in production ).

These are all hidden costs that the average developer does not think about when thinking of OSS. The idea of this session is to focus on the overall cost ( TCO ) of running OSS in enterprise projects, going beyond the license free. This will help listeners get a sense of all the different aspects that are involved in running OSS in production. With that knowledge, they can make a guided decision on what to do, and 9 times out of 10, the decision would be to still go with OSS, as OSS is really cool, and useful.

However, this time, they have taken this decision, not in isolation, rather in an enterprise setting, by ensuring that all the different aspects of using OSS has been considered ( atleast ), rather than being in an unicorn land, that the OSS software will fix itself within an SLA, if something goes wrong in production.

It is important for us as technologist to be transparent to our business stakeholders, and explain our choices, and the costs associated with them. In IT and software, there will always be a tradeoff, but it is better to know all the different angles, and nuances before making that decision. This talk focuses on helping IT professionals make that decision.

1. Understand the total cost of adopting an Open Source Project, beyond just the free licenses / source code.

2. Understand the different metrics, or use-cases that needs to be considered before adopting an OSS project

3. Buy Vs Build use-cases : When to do what ?

4. Actionable Steps on how to decide which way to pivot, calculate TCO, and implement execution plans.