I commented on your new blog, hopefully adding some salt to the conversation, keep it going!

I have added an additional comment here (my new blog location):

http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=309

as a matter of fact customers want software working properly, either is proprietary or open source.

More than one year ago I wrote a paper about Open Source Franchising, showing Sun a possible way to turn all their OSS in a source of income. As I explained they are the perfect Franchisor, and I believe that they should seriously considering productized (consulting) services, as apparently they are starting to do. As you know this unfortunately doesn’t come for free (as in beer), and they eventually should spend time and effort to build an appropriate training program for the franchisees, besides some money for marketing, of course.

What is new? “Just” the approach, bringing to the market a different billing arrangement, with a different perceived value (results, quality, etc), from artisanship to industrial. Customers are supposed to appreciate it, as you also pointed out in one of your interesting posts:

Hourly billing arrangements are typical on IT projects. However, open-ended billing can create an incentive for consultants to work lots of hours, potentially increasing project duration and cost beyond what may strictly be required. In fact, unbounded billing arrangements are often a real contributor to the failures described in this blog. As a result, customers are demanding lower consulting and implementation costs, forcing service vendors to rethink how they price and deliver their offerings.

I see no difference whatsoever between open source services and traditional consulting services. Once the license is obtained, whether through payment or free, the software must be deployed.

At that point, integrating the new software into an existing technical and business infrastructure becomes the big issue.

I agree that fixed-price services are the right model, as I have written here.

However, I don’t think it’s specifically an open source issue.

Michael Krigsman
http://projectfailures.com

thank you to join the conversation!

Of course I agree with you when you say that we should consider software costs beyond the license fee, more important to me is the following statement:

Implementation costs are a major variable in the ROI equation, since service expenses are often unpredictable.

That is just what I believe Open Source Franchising should address, in short:

Open Source franchising is aimed at delivering to the market IT basic services using OSS, with a fixed-time fixed-price methodology meeting clearly defined performance criteria (SLA).

Your opinion is welcome!