The same can be said for commercial software. That’s why vendors (like the one you work for) sell annual support packages.

The primary source of support for an OSS product is, of course, the developer and user community itself.

However, in the initial stages, the support (documentation, user forums, bug fixes and revisions) should be provided by the organisation that decides to put out the software as an open source resource. The ICA, for example, is very much interested in nurturing the ICA-AtoM product through its initial stages.

As a community around an OSS product matures, value-added services such as maintenance support and custom development are then typically provided by third-party providers.

At the same time, for those institutions that do have the technical resources to customize and extend the application to suit their needs, the source code is freely available to do so. Any additional development that these institutions do can then be contributed back to the core application source code for the greater benefit of the community as a whole, rather than having it packaged as a new feature or module that customers must pay for as a product upgrade.

This is, of course, the traditional argument for the benefit of open source software.

I agree that OSS software is not always the right tool for the job, just because it is OSS. The ‘total cost of ownership’ (TCO) has to be evaluated in each case.

However, given the limited resources that are available to archival institutions worldwide, the overall benefit to the community is so significant that an earnest effort to launch open-source software simply has to be made.

The Dutch soccer legend Johan Cruyff says, “If you don’t shoot, you don’t score”

Therefore, if you have been thinking about getting into the development of an OSS archival application I would encourage you to get involved and contribute to the ICA-AtoM project. We could use someone with your talents

I am very excited about the flexibility and features of the PHP5 MVC platform on which I am developing it. The initial beta release and documentation will be made public in a couple of months.

In this day and age with free software running rampant, it’s not necessarily about the quality of the software you provide; it’s about the level of support you can provide with it. Most archivists simply have neither the time nor patience to worry about the technical details of their application. And unfortunately, OSS generally requires you to do so.