I’ve always had to work in a heterogenous environment so I guess I’ve had the idea of having to make different manufacturers stuff work together for most of the 15 years I’ve been doing this. It’s definitely trickier not having a single company to blame, but it’s also more liberating. I’ve hit brick walls with all manufacturers products at various times in my career, because they hadn’t envisaged using their products a certain way, or in certain environments, and working around that is always a nightmare – reverse engineering, bolt-ons, or just jumping products entirely eats a ton of time and that remaining 20% can be very top heavy in terms of resources. I’ve found open source ‘takes the lid off’ so to speak and those barriers don’t exist. It’s more investment up front, but I feel my investment is worth more long term because I have more control over it, and can take it where I want without one company telling me what can and cannot be done, and what tools & server products I have to use.

There’s definitely pros and cons to both models.

Unfortunately the pace of development of Mircosoft seems to result in the free or cheaper products being lacking in documentation which is why I got into the problems I did. I guess you could say that leaves small businesses with a choice between more expensive licenses or high R&D costs.

My problem with open source systems is that there is almost too much choice and that there is far too much configuration and (in the case of linux) far too much compiling to be done. I’m sure that gives the user much more flexibility but (at this stage in my learning) I’d rather give up some of that flexibility if the system does 80% of what I need straight out of the box.