BANGALORE, INDIA: Many organizations appear to be looking at Open Source software as the answer during tough times. However, is it really the answer, or will it end up costing more than its commercial counterpart? The answer to this question isn't a simple yes or not, and needs to be analyzed carefully.

First of all, if you're planning to shift, don't do it blindly for the entire user base. For instance, if you've decided to use OpenOffice instead of MS Office to save license cost, then shifting all users to it may not be a good idea, even if they were using 10 percenrt of the features of MS Office.

One of the hurdles you'll face would be sharing documents with your partners, who are using MS Office. For instance, suppose your sales team sends a proposal to a client in a simple Doc file created in OpenOffice. The client reverts with changes using the track changes option of MS Office.

Since OpenOffice doesn't support Track Changes, your sales team won't be able to read those changes. Likewise, if your organization has been using complex Excel sheets for accounting, then a migration to OpenOffice may not be feasible, unless you can make all the formulae work. In both cases, having some licensed copies of MS Office at least would really help.

Next thing to remember is that Open Source software that's been downloaded freely from the Internet and deployed may save you the initial acquisition cost, but that's about all. Sooner or later, you'll run into problems with it, for which you'll need support.

The cost of this support will vary depending upon the software and the number of users using it. So using such Open Source software is feasible only for a short period of time. Over the long run, you would end up paying either for its support or for a commercial package. A CIO I know shifted all his Mac machines to Neo-Office, a free Office Suite for Macs. While this saved him initial license costs, he's now having problems supporting it.

Lastly, remember that using Open Source software alone is not the answer. Today, you can make Open Source software interoperable with closed closed source software. This can allow you to use your existing IT infrastructure resources better.