Section 10.1. Two Poles of IT: Buy Versus Build

10.1. Two Poles of IT: Buy Versus Build

The argument against one throat to choke is not an argument against using commercial software. Rather, it is an argument against using commercial software as an improper crutch to avoid obtaining an adequate level of competence and a robust design for IT infrastructure.

The choice that the manager of every IT department must make, and the choice that presents itself repeatedly in different contexts, is how much to buy and how much to build. There is no right answer in general; everything depends on understanding the requirements, the technology being considered, the department's skills, and the availability of time and money.

In practice, what happens is that the executive in charge of making these choices has to consider for each system whether he prefers to be a manager of resources (a bias toward buying a commercial solution), or whether he prefers to construct a solution on his own (a bias toward building with open source).

In fact, this is usually a false tradeoff. Commercial software is not all buy, and open source is not all build. In any project, commercial software must be extended and customized, which amounts to building. And open source software has lots of functionality that provides a running start.

One frequent mistake when choosing to buy is thinking that the simple act of buying solves a problem. Almost every purchased solution comes with a requirements gap between what the software does out of the box and what it should do at a particular company. In most cases, for a system of any size or importance, a significant amount of work will be involved to configure or customize that solution to solve that company's problem.

Open source projects don't have to be bought, but they don't have to be built from scratch either. This book has stated clearly that certain skills are involved in using open source. However, depending on the problem being solved, if an open source project is sufficiently productized, it might not require any more work than a commercial product.

There is no easy way out, and the art of IT is making this decision properly in each new context. All the companies that are famous for innovative use of open source are heavy users of commercial products. (Linus Torvalds himself caused a stir when he chose a commercial source-code management system for the Linux project. Why? Because it solved a well-understood problem better than open source alternatives did.) It rarely makes sense to be all buy or all build, yet when some IT executives argue against open source, they are essentially arguing that buy is always the right choice.

Making this tradeoff is an art and is one of the most important services that IT managers provide to their companies. There are two parts to it: deciding when to consider building and understanding how much work is involved.