Open Source Weblog

"I thought it would also be useful to summarize the business value to customers of using open source," he writes. "In the interest of keeping it simple, I created a new acronym, CRAFT."

CRAFT stands for:

Community Contributions
Reduced Costs
Accelerated Adoption
Flexibility of Usage
Technical Support Network

"The open source community is very diverse, and the amount of code being developed and released at all layers of the software infrastructure stack is nothing short of amazing. There are tens of thousands of open source development projects going on around the globe and new ones starting everyday," Berquist explains.

"Open source products are generally cheaper than commercial products, quicker to adopt for new projects and easier to embed, deploy, and virtualize. Finally, next generation technical support networks that are being developed by Ingres and other open source providers will continue to reduce the costs of managing, patching, and securing open source deployment platforms."

I've tried - and failed - myself to come up with a new phrase that properly explains the value of open source beyond simple cost savings and code access and I believe Tom has potentially cracked it. The great thing about open source is that is can provide all of these potential benefits and values, but the importance of each one depends on the individual user requirements.

Reduced cost is probably important for all, and some will find community contributions important, while for others flexibility of usage but outweigh all other benefits.

Apply some sort of scoring system to CRAFT and you've potentially got the makings a way to compare similar open source projects for their suitability.

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