Perhaps the ultimate savings you can achieve is to get your software developed for free!

On the surface, that is the promise of open source techniques. However, it takes a great deal of coordination and skill to form and motivate an open source community to build useful software. Such an effort is underway at DTE Energy in Detroit and described in a recent CIO Insight article.

Open source is most effective for creating software “platform” technology that many others can use. Need a content management system for your web site? So do many other people. Use one of the open source CMS’s available like Drupal or Mambo or any of a dozen other free open source systems.

Not exactly what you need? Then do a little programming and modify the open source software to meet your needs. Contribute your changes back so others in the community can use your changes too.

This works well if you need the software for internal use like DTE. Another key for them is using the open source contributions as software components. They place a high value on the reusability of the components and only accept those that meet their high standards.

The article doesn’t say if these are .NET components or whether they are used in some specific application context like a CRM system. Whatever these components are, they are apparently also needed by many others because DTE is receiving contributions from over 300 programmers.

If you are a software product company, then using open source to develop your software may seem counter-intuitive. Yet, there are companies that do it like Sugar CRM. The business model is to make money by productizing the software and providing paid-for installation and professional services.

Does using an open source community to development your software make more sense than offshore outsourcing?

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