Open Source entrepreneur

Yesterday one of our customer, Del-Jen was participating on a Panel about Demystifying Open Source.

Paul, Del-jen's CTO, demonstrated very well how his use of Open Source technology saved them a lot of money in licensing cost and consulting cost.

What was surprising to me is the long term cost.
Over a period of 4 years the cost of open source software did go down. The more they use it the less it costs.
On the other end the cost of commercial software increased constantly during the same period.
The cost includes licensing and consulting.

We started working with Del-Jen 4 years ago with a MySQL training and experimentation. After a year they started implementating Open Source Fusion Enterprise in a mission critical middleware.
This custom middleware interconnect and process time-sheets, forms, documents and payroll information to its 4000 employes all over the world.

The fact that total cost of ownership (TCO) of open source software is lower then commercial software is good.
But that this cost goes down over time is very good news.

Del-Jen is a Fluor company.