The True Cost of "Free" Tools

We often find potential clients looking at Open Source version control tools, in conjunction with SnapshotCM, who ask, "Why would I pay for SnapshotCM when I can use the Open Source tool X?" This question implies that the Open Source alternative is free. But is that assumption actually true?

Perhaps you have potential clients who ask you the same question about your products and services. Or perhaps you have made use of Open Source tools in the past. P. J. Plauger, owner of a couple of software companies that have competed with "free" tools and current Senior Editor of the C/C++ Users Journal, has written that he used to sell his products to clients who could not afford "free" tools.

Below, we explore what he meant by that comment by comparing both the costs and the benefits of commercial and Open Source tools.

The True Benefits

The benefits of the right version control solution are many.

• A good version control solution improves user understanding of your software assets. The difference between the symbolic names of RCS and its like and the graphical branches of SnapshotCM are clear examples of the types of understanding and productivity improvements possible with the right product.
• A good version control solution facilitates doing the right thing and avoiding mistakes. Interacting with graphical branches is simple and straightforward—you can be confident in what you are doing. Doing equivalent operations using symbolic names is slow, cumbersome, and filled with uncertainty.
• A good version control solution complements your processes. Team coordination and task isolation can be well managed. Branching becomes a tool to use rather than a feature to be feared. All this while supporting the best of your processes.
• A good version control solution facilitates communication with other team members or groups, such as QA and Production. Easy-to-use snapshots provide baselines for hand-off and accountability while allowing developers to simultaneously continue checking in changes for the next release iteration. Reasons behind changes are automatically recorded for examination by others. And changes can be easily examined.

We could continue. The benefits of the right version control tool are often under-estimated. Likewise, the costs of a less than optimal solution exceed what most would imagine.

The Costs

The cost of a tool set involves much more than its purchase price. In fact, many factors affect the actual cost of a tool set:

• Initial purchase cost. This cost aspect gets a lot of attention because it is easily quantifiable. However, it is typically only a small part of the tool's true cost.
• Training costs. How quickly and easily can users and administrators grasp a new tool's concepts and get up to speed? Is training help available to speed up this process? In terms of user time, a hard-to-learn or hard-to-install/configure tool is more costly than an easy one. Rather than in actual dollars, this type of cost is paid in reduced productivity.
• Tool Fit. How well do the tool's concepts fit your development challenges? A better fit or a higher-level abstraction provides efficiencies over an incomplete or lower-level solution-providing tool. The worst such scenario involves a tool that serves merely as a mechanism, leaving you to implement the high-level solution on your own. Then, even if you manage to do so, such home-built layered solutions are never as robust or as "free" as a supported, turnkey solution. In the end, the "free" tool can easily wind up costing you several times more money and time than an outright purchase of a solid commercial solution.
• Ongoing usage costs. How efficiently can the administrators and users perform the tasks they need to accomplish their work? A tool with slow performance, poor user interface, or poor task fit will slow down productivity. On the other hand, a tool with good performance and an intuitive user interface will facilitate quick understanding and productive use.
• Tool reliability. When trusting your software files—which for many companies are one of their most valuable assets—to a version control solution, you want to know that you will not have problems. In the event that you do, you want additional assurance that someone can quickly address the problem. With Open Source tools, unless you spend significant dollars to develop that expertise in-house, there is no such assurance. Even then, there is no long-term benefit to developing expertise in an Open Source tool's internals. The bottom line; it's better to create expertise in your product line than in a tool that contributes nothing unique to your product.
• Support costs. Who stands behind the tools being compared? With many Open Source tools only the original author is providing support, with no obligation to address problems or implement new features. In contrast, commercial tools are actively being improved with significant new functionality being added every few months.

Relative Cost Analysis

Each cost category should be evaluated to understand the true relative costs of one solution compared with another. Nevertheless, for brevity's sake, let's look at just one such cost: the ongoing usage cost.

Let us assume that each user averages 10 minutes per day using one tool and a less sophisticated solution requires an average of 15 minutes per day. That extra 5 minutes per day—waiting for a slow tool, figuring out how to do something that the other tool fully supports, or worse, misunderstanding what one tool is telling you—add up to significant frustration and distraction costs that are likely to exceed even those 5 minutes per day. Nevertheless, let's assume it is just 5 minutes per day that's lost. Over the course of a year, that time loss results in a productivity cost of 2.6 days per user, which, depending on developer costs, can in and of itself exceed the initial purchase price of a commercial tool such as SnapshotCM.

If you add in the cost of even one day of down-time - the cost of manually doing something that is otherwise automated, the cost of administration, or the cost of having to fix, enhance or support the Open Source tool yourself, or just the cost of developing the expertise to be able to do so - you will find the extra price tag associated with "free" tools can greatly exceed the initial purchase costs.

Your Solution

If you are coming from using no version control, you don't know what you are missing. As a result, anything can look good. However, picking an Open Source tool can be much more costly than the right commercial tool. We at True Blue Software Company encourage you to carefully consider the true costs and benefits associated with any version control solution. In so doing, we are confident that you will find SnapshotCM a better value. Check us out by taking advantage of our free evaluation. Go to http://www.truebluesoftware.com/ for details.