Open source deployment masqueraded with paid product

Question

Has anyone ever executed a deployment of opensource software product masqueraded with a paid product?

Let's say a company had paid thousands of $$ annual licensing for a particular product. Every kludge that you designed could not get that product work according to the requirements of the project at hand.

However, you were able to deploy an opensource product in full satisfaction of project requirements (plus more) with relative ease.

However again, you were required by management, or corp HQ, to use the paid product by-hook-or-by-crook, for one reason or another.

So, you ran the two products in parallel, telling management that you managed to make the paid product work using an opensource appendix, when in fact the paid product was idling with its own ip port while the opensource product did all the work. In fact, sometimes you forgot to restart the paid product. And the operations of the company dependent on the project went chugging on happily oblivious to the "kludge" you pulled off.

Or, perhaps, while you could readily get answers from the forum of the opensource product, the publisher of the paid product required your company to pay additional "support fees" so that you could submit bugs that you caught as well as the patches to solve those bugs. But, your company only paid for a single "support seat" for someone at corp HQ who was too busy to be a support intermediary.

Have you ever pulled such a masquerade, or a kludge of similar proportions, and how long were you able to maintain the facade? Perhaps, it was a corporate piece of software your company had spent millions of $$ developing.

How did you manage to pull it off? Were you alone or was there a collusion? Was your immediate manager in the collusion as well?

Answer 1

You're taking a major risk. Even if the open source solution is cheaper, better, faster, more colorful, and makes fresh coffee, someone recommended the product. Now you've basically said they're wrong... and not just wrong, but they didn't bother doing basic research. If that person is just a random faceless name in your company, no problem. If it's a coworker or your boss or your boss' boss, be prepared for problems.

We ran into a similar problem about 2 years ago. We were subcontractors on a huge project where even our portion ended up huge. The prime made a recommendation that was ill-informed at best and completely wrong at worst and cost hundreds of thousands. After one month on the project, we pitched the prime on using an open source project that was faster, cheaper, more extensible, actually fit the requirements, but didn't make fresh coffee (it was instant).

The Prime threw a fit and forbid us from showing the client.. for all the reasons listed above. And realistically, the client was hesitant to switching anyway because "we've already spent $X on this product!"