Open source as a speed breaker to my project

Question

We develop scientific software and I manage a small group of applied scientists who write great code. A lot of our products depend on stable development tools which we've been using for developing a stable code base. Now the issue is, someone from the management visited an open source conference and was too pleased to see a lot of great tools which can be used internally for free in place of the commercial ones we've been using so far. So he suggested to the management to remove costs of buying the tools we've using and shift to the open source ones. Now I do not have anything against the open source movement but through a small experiment I found that my team is spending a lot more time debugging and maintaining stable code bases for those open source tools .

I'm sure a lot of other program manager's have had this problem so far. Would people relate their experiences and let me know of any studies made on this subject ? i want to present a cost benefit analysis to the management by giving some statistical facts not just empirical evidence. I'll be glad to know some case studies thereof.

Answer 1

I think open source is terrific, but I use a commercial IDE (IntelliJ) for Java development, even though there are popular open source alternates Eclipse and NetBeans. In my experience, IntelliJ is the best IDE, hands down, with a measurable impact on my productivity.

I can't say that it's true of all tools, but in this case it is.

I don't believe that either open source or commercial tools can claim the high ground here, because I can cite good and bad examples on both sides. Blanket statements and "me, too" thinking are usually a bad idea.

Statistics will be hard to come by. 86% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

I would expect managers in a company whose products are based on science to be more rational. You're a small firm - talk it through. If it's not possible in your situation, then no one has a chance.