Open Source Cost Surveys, RevisitedOpen Source Cost Surveys, Revisited

I got a lot of great feedback regarding yesterday's post about needing some kind of standard way to gather data about cost savings / ROI / TCO / [your buzzword here] when switching to open source. Based on a little more discussion and thought, I have some more ideas about what form something like this could take.

The idea's still the same: create a standardized survey instrument for people who switched from a proprietary product of some kind to open source, as a way to determine their cost savings, productivity enhancement, and so on. This way, instead of having to reply on metastudies or a whole congeries of different surveys, people can turn to a single consistently-formatted repository of data.

So how do you put something like that together? First, and most important in my mind, is the interval of time required for the data gathered. I'd think that at least four to six quarters worth of day from before and after the changeover would be a good idea. More beforehand if at all possible, since this gives you as clear a picture as can be of where the company in question is coming from -- and where they ended up. There's little point in recapitulating all those press releases that proudly trumpet how company X or city government Y moved to open source without any follow-up.

Second is to have the raw data made available to anyone who wants to use it. Prospective researchers could grab it, slice-dice-and-Julienne it any way they liked, and draw their own conclusions about which companies benefit from what kinds of scenarios.

A third key element would be to break out the costs as thoroughly as possible: training, education, but also to allow the submitter to define a metric for productivity, if possible. Every company defines this sort of thing differently, but at least relative percentile measures from before, during and after the deployment can be gathered.

This is all still pretty primitive, but that's why I'm discussing it here. It's high time open source made its case without falling back on "anecdote" as being the singular for "data".

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