In a recent NextGov post, Joseph Marks interviews Commerce Department New Media Director Mike Kruger, whose claims contain two falsehoods and one instance of trying to turn a feature into a flaw:
“Drupal is free but it’s free like a puppy is free,” he said, noting ongoing maintenance and upkeep costs.
The downside to an open source CMS is that it requires significantly more work on the agency end, either by in-house coders or by vendors that manage the transition and maintenance.
“If you don’t want to do any coding, this isn’t the solution for you,” he said.
The ability to include nearly anything in an open source system — as opposed to relying on pared down, standardized offerings from a vendor — also can lead to paralysis, he said, especially in a large organization where a lot of different divisions have an interest in what goes online.
Let’s deconstruct that statement:
Open-Source Maintenance Costs
Ongoing maintenance for open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal couldn’t be a smoother or more pleasant process, especially in recent years with the advent of auto-update features. Sites with custom designs might need extra care to ensure that updates don’t break existing code, but this is a rarity that hasn’t happend for years on the dozens of sites I manage running open-source systems.
Perhaps in some instances maintenance costs are higher, but only because CMS systems produced by vendors are seldom updated if they’re updated at all. Of course, this isn’t a good thing. Software invariably moves forward and your website better be moving along with it, if only to keep up with other evolving standard.
On top of that, software that isn’t updated isn’t be debugged and if you’re running software from even a large web agency, chances are bugs in your software are being found at a rate that’s orders of magnitude slower than bugs are found in open-source projects. That’s not because open-source projects have more bugs to be found. Instead it’s because there are more users and therefore more potential bug checkers to find vulnerabilities and flaws before something bad can happen to your site.
The False Flaw
Marks also decries “the ability to include nearly anything in an open source system.” I suppose this temptation can be too much for an organization with no self-control, but that’s hardly any reason to subject yourself to the buggy, home-made offerings of a web agency. I’d much rather deal with the “burden” of thousands of ready-made software modules and plugins that I could add to my site with little or technical expertise than suffer through the process of asking a web agency to modify its proprietary code.
Say you want to try out a new feature on your site to generate sales. With an agency’s home-rolled CMS, it might take you thousands of dollars and weeks of testing to discover the feature you wanted to test isn’t unneeded or doesn’t create the kind of conversion rates you need. With open-source software, your experiment could have been free of charge and executed with code that’s already been tested on thousands of sites. So where’s the downside here?
Define “Standardized”
Let’s say that every Sunday morning I mixed myself a screwdriver, but instead of using orange juice I used grapefruit juice. If I did it that way for years I may even refer to it as my “standard” way of mixing that drink, but if someone came over to my house for brunch and a drink and asked me to make a screwdriver, chances are grapefruit concoction would not meet their definition of a standard screwdriver. My standard for that drink isn’t the universal standard, no matter how much I love grapefruit juice.
The same logic applies to software. When Marks mentions “standardized offerings from a vendor” he isn’t necessarily referring to software that strictly follow W3C standards for good design. Instead, he’s probably talking about a widgetized website, a “standard way of doing things,” rather than a universal standard.
The great thing about open-source software is that you can have both of these types of standards. You can have time-tested, standards-compliant software and then determine a standardized way to implement it. That is to say, you can get all the benefits of a CMS used by millions and then agree that your organization will only run that software with a limited set of the countless add-ons available to you.
Deconstruction complete.
So, Kruger is right, open-source software may prompt you to upgrade more often than you would with other options, it will present you with a huge number of choices, and it will not be as widgetized as some proprietary offerings, but none of these things are downsides.
Note: When I first posted this piece I misattributed Kruger’s opinions to Marks. My apologies to Mr. Marks for confusing his reportage for his opinion.
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