What about web based software for storing genealogic data (insteed of PAF)?

From reading the rest of your post, you seem to be using “free” in the sense
of no financial commitment necessary to obtain the software. A more
significant sense of “free” as it applies to this software is the freedom that
one gets to modify the software as desired. This advantage is quite independent
from any advantage of extra stability due to more people helping with the
code.

I would hope that the church would think more about Free Software in terms
of the freedom it provides to users of the software, and the important
Christian/humanitarian aspects of sharing software. The difference between
Free Software and proprietary software isn’t a question of price, but one of
the freedoms granted to the users of the software. I think that providing Free
Software, (rather than proprietary software), to the members of the church
could form an important part of the church’s mission to perfect the saints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

> 1) Java Stack. We use several open source components for our java stack
> (including Hibernate, Spring and others). It has been painful for us to integrate
> these all into a common stack, and we’ve done most of that work ourselves.
> Now that it’s done, our developers are extremely productive in it.

The fact that you’ve been able to do that integration work is in large part enabled
by access to the source code and the freedom to modify it, correct?

> You have to
> ask if the money we’ve spent developing and the money we will spend keeping
> it up-to-date is worth the “vendor independence” we gain from not buying some > commercial offering. To date we think we’re still on the right path, but we’ll be
> watching carefully as tools mature.

Does a single provider proprietary software offering even exist that does
everything your customized stack does? If not, would the separate pieces
available from separate vendors be customizable enough to allow them to
be integrated just as well? Would the church be willing to spend the amounts
required to get the same level of customization (access to all source code)
as currently available through the open source stack?

I don’t know all the answers to those questions. But I will say that I’m happy
to see the church taking advantage of open source offerings where it makes
sense. And here are a couple of further questions:

1. As for the money already spent doing integration work: Wouldn’t many other
individuals/organizations be able to benefit from what the church has done
here? Wouldn’t it fit squarely into the church’s charitable mission to share
that work with everyone?

2. As for money to be spent keeping all of this up-to-date: With open source
projects being the pieces integrated, there’s no doubt that the best way to
keep those costs down is to push the changes upstream to the open source
projects themselves. As you discussed below, contributing does have costs,
but when you’ve done this work already, you can save a lot by letting the
upstream maintainers take over your improvements where applicable, so that
they’re already there in the next upstream release, and you’re not stuck having
to re-implement changes or port them forward from the old release.

> 2) Linux. Linux is free! Or we wish it were. We pay for libraries we need, we
> pay for integration services and we pay for support. We hope we won’t end up
> paying for using the IP in Linux, but one never knows. ”Free” just doesn’t mean
> what it used to mean.

The important way in which Linux is “free” is the freedom it provides you to use
and modify it in any way you want. This is the same freedom you’ve been
taking advantage of in so many open source components of your Java
software stack. As for fear of having to pay for “using the IP in Linux” that’s a
groundless fear. What evidence do you have that using Linux carries any more
risk here than any other software (whether Free Software or proprietary)? And if
you are concerned about risks, your provider of support for Linux is likely already
providing assurance in the form of indemnification anyway.

> There is an interesting place we’d like to use the open source concepts,
> however. If you’re like me, you’ve developed a number of spreadsheets,
> databases and simple apps to help with various callings you’ve had. We’d like
> to make that easier for developers to do and to share what they’ve done. Stay
> tuned. I’ll be talking more on the blog about how we’re going about making that
> happen…

It would be interesting to see more cooperative development happening among
technical church members along those lines.

Even more significantly, I would love to see the technical departments of the
church adopt a stance that no software should ever be distributed by the
church under a proprietary software license. In your original blog posting you
referred to the church having “an extended work force of millions of members
who are willing to contribute their time, talents and money to the Church.”
What better way to start taking advantage of that enormous pool of talent and
motivation than distributing software that would allow church members
themselves to offer improvements.

For example, you’ve indicated that you’re making an effort to improve
internationalization and localization in church software projects. At the same
time, I’ve seen many responses to your blog indicating that there are technically capable church members in many parts of the world that want to help, but currently cannot be considered for employment by the church. Wouldn’t it be
great if members such as these could voluntary make contributions to things
such as localization? Who better to improve things like language support
in church software than the native-speaking church members themselves
who use the software all over the world?

-Carl

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
This is a Microsoft supported project.

The promise of open source is found in his paragraph on Java: “It has been painful for us to integrate these all into a common stack, and we’ve done most of that work ourselves.” The fact that you *can* integrate it into a common stack at all is the promise of open source. You *can* do it yourself. “Free as in freedom” as they say.

Open source is not about giving warm fuzzies with expensive support contracts. You *can* pay for Linux support, or you *can* hire the technical expertise to do it yourself. The cost is probably similar in the end. The difference is, “who do you want to blame?” With proprietary software, you are forced to buy the service contract, and you cannot fix it yourself.

Comment on OpenOffice – my husband downloaded it and uses it in place of Micorsoft (whatever). I agree with it missing some things. I do a lot with my computer and when my husband asks me to help him out with something he is trying to do, I become very frustrated because of those missing things. I know some people like the idea of Open Source, BUT it has it’s drawbacks. What does the Church use for producing it’s literature (pamphlets, magazines, etc.)?

One other comment about all of this that you are doing, Joel — WOW!!

As far as an Open Source ERP that is enterprise worthy and very stable try out Compiere (http://www.compiere.org/).

Embracing Open Source has more to do with desire than with whether the solution is “getting close” or “almost there”. Embracing Open Source requires a change of heart.