I read an article on Backcountry.com in Inc. magazine's latest issue. I also found an interesting article along similar lines about them here.

The Inc. article mentions a number of very important things. However, I think many of the "problems" of going for OSS can be addressed and fixed. Backcountry's CEO talks about having a fulltime team of OSS gurus to run and tweak the applications. Clearly, support for many OSS products is a big issue. Particularly when a organizations such as Backcountry.com need to run their entire set of applications on the platform. Therefore, their decision to have a staff of OSS techies is probably justified.

This again brings a major problem related to OSS to the fore. That of a standard infrastructure for user-level documentation, support and user guides. Backcountry has the requisite technical strengths to do some of their wizardry with the source code of products they are using. Smaller outfits or those that primarily need to focus on the business side of things need other alternatives. When none is forthcoming from the open source world they logically gravitate towards closed source products. For far too long and in too many places, OSS has been touted as free software. Unfortunately, although one can get OSS for "free", organizations do need support to make things work. OSS groups have a tendency to release versions (pre-alpha, alpha, beta....what have you!) and just hope users will have the patience and the necessary geek-quotient numbers to make it work. What if they were to think of a few other issues surrounding their product such as documentation, user guides and a more robust user forum for support? Of course, the last part is being addressed by most OSS vendors through their paid support services. Which is not a bad idea at all. But we live in an OSS ecosystem that is made up of, for instance, the LAMP stack, various other applications and utilities for reading emails, browsing the web, group calendaring systems and many others. How can we have a system where a larger set of support services is created for the entire OSS stack or even one particular set of the stack?

There is clearly a need for some organizations to step up with an OSS version of SaaS (Software As A Service) that IBM has been talking about for quite a while now. Perhaps they will extend it to the OSS stack too, who knows? How about HP? They have made tons of money by selling and providing services around OSS.

Coming back to Backcountry.com. There is a more than clear hint from their CTO in the Inc magazine article that they have turned to non-OSS applications when required. After all, one has a business to run, not evangelize OSS. Is it possible that there are enough OSS applications of good quality to justify not looking at proprietory sources.