NDSA:Open Source Member Questions

List out your ideas for questions for us each to respond to here. Ideally, we would like to have a relatively short set of questions that get at the heart of the key decision factors.

1. Can you describe your decision process for software? What are the key questions you ask about any given software?
2. If you have been using a open source system (for digital preservation) (KC: thought we might want to focus it) for several years what parts of managing that application take up most of your time?
3. Do you see any inherent value in using open source platforms involved in the stewardship and preservation of digital materials? If yes, could you articulate what you see as the inherent value in this context?
4. How do you decide if the community around the software is strong and sustainable? or if it matters?
5. How do you decide how much of your own time to put into documentation to make it easier for others to use? Does this effect the decision of whether to release as open source?
6. What role does different software licenses play in decisions to adopt Open Source software?
7. How do you weigh the advantages of flexibility with open source against potential dependable sustainability with a vendor?
8. Can you describe a time when you adopted an open source software tool for a particular project? Describe the situation and the key factors in the decision and then evaluate how successful or unsuccessful the tool served your goals. Going forward what do you see as the key implications of this case?
9. Can you describe a time when you decided not to adopt an open source software tool for a particular project? What were the key reasons for your decision?
10. What are the 5 key financial metrics that need to be accounted for in comparing costs across buy, build, borrow rubric?

--- From John Spencer (and I may be doing this wrong...).

Couple of more data points I'd like to see from the commercial side, but I think they may be able to be "blended" into your questions above. I'm thinking about things such as:

1. How much does "vendor lock-in' contribute to your ability (or lack of) to deploy open-source software? 2. Have you found any examples of open-source software that have improved your business practices (and did they lower your TCO?)? 3. Is open-source software a goal to deploy within your organization, or do you anticipate you will remain a user of vendor-based software?

These questions are really only valid if you are seeking input from the commercial community, and I think you should. Comments?

--- From Micah Altman. One key distinction between OSS and commercial software is the types of risks to which one is exposed:

1. If successfully deployed, what risks to long-term access of your content will the enterprise infrastructure help to mitigate?
   1. management of legal risks/licenses on content
   2. funding risks/costs of long-term storage and access
   3. physical risks (e.g. through content replication and auditing)
   4. access risks (e.g. format obsolescence; provenance failures; loss of documentation/context/institutional memory needed to understand content)

1. What risks does infrastructure create in long term?
   1. Software implementation single point of failure (e.g. single implementations w/defects affecting entire enterprices)
   2. Hardware implementation single point of failure
   3. Closed/proprietary format -- loss of understandability
   4. Closed/proprietary protocol -- financial risk from vendor lock-in
   5. Closed/proprietary storage platform
   6. Risks around software IP -- loss of access to software platform
   7. Institutional knowledge/maintenance of infrastructure -- EOL of product, etc.