If OSS is my hammer, am I only seeing nails?

OSS is a powerful multi-purpose tool, much like a hammer.

If OSS is my only tool, do I see all problems as nails that I have to drive home with my OSS?

The downside of this is that it then needs to be designed, built, integrated, tested, released, supported, upgraded, data curated and maintained. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a given problem extends far beyond the time-frame envisaged during most solutioning exercises.

To be honest, I’ve probably been guilty of using OSS to solve problems before seeking alternatives in the past.

What if our going-in position was that answers should be found elsewhere – outside OSS – and OSS simply becomes the all-powerful last resort? The sledgehammer rather than the ball-pein hammer.

With all this big data I keep hearing about, has anyone ever seen any stats relating to the real life-time costs of OSS customisations made by a service provider to its off-the-shelf OSS? If such data exists, I’d love to see what the cost-benefit break-even point might look like and what we could learn from it. I assume we’re contributing to our very own Whale Curve but have nothing to back that assumption up yet.

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