In-House Propriety vs. Open Source

Question

Is there a reason not to use wordpress and develop your own blogging system?
Same goes with Durpal and our own CMS.

I am wondering since my marketing women disagrees with me that we should develop our own in house solutions because there are better solutions. She also says that we might even loose time and money on it since it is our responsibility to maintain it and solve bugs and we can't throw it on wordpress' dev team for example.

I don't want to invest time in something that might not worth it but I would really like to make more money.

Does it depend on the site's scale and visitors?
What are the factors of choosing one over anohter?

Answer 1

Really it comes down to this:

1. How much time/money would it require to roll your own?
2. Does the open source solution you're considering have the features you need (and do they work*)?
3. How would maintenance of the two solutions compare?

Some "common" answers:

1. A lot, particularly if you need (or want) a lot of features.
2. Most of the mature systems have some kind of plugin system and heaps of functionality. Generally if you want it they got it, perhaps some minor tweaks would be necessary.
3. In-house code may need some time to mature, after this they will probably be about the same. If in-house code is low on features then it may be easier to maintain.

She also says that we might even loose time and money on it since it is our responsibility to maintain it and solve bugs

How is that worse than an in-house solution exactly?

Answer 2

This really depends on your business model.

If you are selling services using an existing open source product can make a lot of sense. (And by the way, you probably can get the wordpress people to work for you - you'll have to pay of course, but you also have to pay your in-house team)

If this blogging system is only for your own usage it makes even more sense to use an existing solution, and the open source solutions stand out in that area because there are a lot of people available that could code some custom solutions for you.

Only if you are actually selling the software the situation with open source becomes a bit harder to get a grip on money-wise.

Answer 3

Good question, +1 :)

My Opinion:

Whatever the scenario, if there is a solution out there that meets your needs, it's open source and your team as the knowledge to make any specific change it might need to meet your purpose, it is probably a good choice to use it. It will save you time(time is money) that you could use to other tasks.

From a developer perspective, it is way more appealing to create something from scratch.

You just have to keep in mind that this is not something you are doing as hobbie, you need to have a product out there as fast as possible, with as few errors as possible, with all the features that the users would expect.

Answer 4

There's rarely a right answer to this fight. It's a question that has raged on since software was sold "off the shelf". Many pros are also cons.

Pro 3rd-party:

• They cover a vast number of features
• They (hopefully) look after security
• Open source means other people can fix your platform.
• You get improvements without having to work on your own platform
• They have existed a lot longer than your newly conceived project. A lot bugs have been driven out.

Anti 3rd-party:

• They don't have all the answers for every project
• By extension, it may take you longer to hack in what you need than it would take to just start afresh
• Unless you're using it exactly as intended, performance isn't going to be as good as it could be with a custom-built
• Larger target for hackers and script kiddies
• As they're older, they can be locked (via legacy support) into some bad habits (Drupal and Wordpress certainly have enough)

So if you're doing a blog, unless there are features or platform issues, I'd seriously consider WordPress. If you only needed a very simple blog attached to a much larger system that was completely non-blog, I'd probably write my own as part of that system.

Just to blur the lines, the modern frameworks (Cake, Symphony, Django, Ruby, etc) handle lots of the security, database, usability and let you develop the application without having to worry too much about anything. You get exactly what you want and you get it fast but it probably won't be as polished (eg for blogging) as WordPress.

Answer 5

Our host Joel Spolsky has written an interesting article on this subject.

Answer 6

Yes, there are a lot of reasons. Being open-source doesn't mean it'll automatically be well written.

However, sometimes it really fits your business model because you need to ship something fast, usable, not too specific in requirements and already tested by millions of people. In this case, doesn't make sense to produce something in house.

If you want to convince her of using Wordpress instead of building one, show the arguments on time and money that would be spent in trying to write from scratch instead of using an open source solution. Don't forget to show some live examples from big companies that are using Wordpress (check the official website).

Answer 7

For most companies, developing your own blogging solution is the equivalent of developing your own version of the machine that mixes the tarmac to make the road that leads to your office.

The only exception is if you want to get into the road-building business. But that's a hard and competitive business, an established stable market with a lot of capital requirements, not something to wander into.