Open sourcing of IT management products is an interesting topic. Many questions bounce around in my mind. Here is the my train of thought as I read this post:

Why do customers want open source? To be able to change/improve the code themselves? This seems unlikely to me. On the contrary, the attitude I see is somewhat opposite. Customer do not want to take responsibility of the code hence ideally they don't want to touch it. I think there is a significant difference between the software products that are mainly used by developers and non developers. Non developers by their nature do not contribute code. Sure they can file bugs, may be write documentation (not very likely)etc. but they do not typically get into coding themselves. So I think open source software does not necessarily have an appeal to customers due to availability of the source code. I'd be curious to find out, how much of the code is contributed by the customers to open source IT management companies such as the ones you're advising.

But open source software does have an appeal. As in the case of Spiceworks low barriers to entry is very important. Customers do want to "try and buy". Open source software provide this by its nature so customers happily download the software, try it, see what the benefit is etc. and buy if they decide to use it. Along with the low barriers to entry, customers expect to get transparency, opportunity to participate in shaping the product.

Before the Big 4 open source their products, they have many, many! steps they can take. There are no trial versions for most of their products. They still often demand NDAs to evaluate products, customers often feel ignored and have little to no information or influence on where the product is heading. and pricing is not transparent. Surely, open sourcing would by its nature do all this, and may be it is the magic bullet because of that. Not because we can see and change the code but all that comes with open sourcing a product.

Back to reading the post one more time…