Total cost modelling
No licence fee does not mean no cost: there is hosting, maintenance time, training and possibly paid add-ons. A three-to-five-year table sets open source and commercial options side by side.
Consider an automotive supplier in Bursa. Technical drawings and PPAP files are scattered across a network share, tooling maintenance lives in the memory of a few senior staff, and spare parts are tracked in Excel. A commercial document management product charges a monthly fee per user and stores files in its own cloud, which the OEM customer's confidentiality terms do not really allow. Open source looks attractive here, yet “free” is a misleading word. You pay no licence fee, but installation, updates, backups and security become your responsibility. We treat open source as an ownership decision rather than a cost saving. You decide where data is kept, when the system is upgraded and who develops it; our role is to make sure that ownership does not become a burden over the years. That means choosing projects with a living community, adapting them without touching the core, and running them with regular maintenance on your servers or in an EU data centre.
What we handle, from picking the right project to running it safely for years.
No licence fee does not mean no cost: there is hosting, maintenance time, training and possibly paid add-ons. A three-to-five-year table sets open source and commercial options side by side.
Commit activity over the past year, the number of active maintainers, a published security policy, and the foundation or company behind it. These signals, rather than star counts, show whether a project will still be alive in five years.
We record which components carry MIT, Apache 2.0, EUPL, GPL or AGPL licences and when an obligation to share source code would arise. Interpreting that legally is your adviser's job.
Changes are made as plug-ins, modules, themes or configuration. Because the core stays untouched, new releases install without breaking your customisations.
Single sign-on through Keycloak or Entra ID, permissions driven by Active Directory groups, and API links to your ERP and other systems.
Dependency updates with Renovate, image scanning with Trivy, an SBOM for every release and an alert to you whenever USOM or the project itself discloses a flaw.
Fixes for bugs we find are submitted to the original project. Every fix accepted there stops being a patch you would otherwise have to carry.
Four steps from requirements to production, with a real-world pilot in one department before the whole company moves.
Must-have features, user numbers, integrations and where the data needs to live.
Two or three candidate projects, a demo installed on a test server and a total cost comparison.
Several weeks of use with one department's real data, then a candid review of gaps and costs.
An upgrade calendar, monitoring, backups and installation notes another team could take over.
Decide early which release track you will follow. Most mature open source projects offer a long-term support track alongside a fast-moving main line. For internal systems, sticking to LTS and planning one or two upgrades a year is both safer and cheaper than chasing every new version the day it appears.
In licensing terms usually yes; in operating terms no. Servers, maintenance, backups and security updates all need a budget. The real long-term advantage is that licence costs do not rise as your headcount does.
That is why project health is part of the selection. If it happens anyway, your code and data remain in your hands. Moving to a fork or migrating the data to another system is possible, which is rarely an option with a closed product.
For most internal use, no. Under the GPL the obligation typically applies when you distribute the software, and under the AGPL when you offer it as an online service to third parties. Our licence inventory flags these points.
Community forums are useful but promise no response time. For systems we set up, we therefore suggest a maintenance agreement with written response times. Some projects also offer paid support from their maintainers.
Usually, yes. We extract it through export files, an API or the database, convert it and load it into the new system. A trial import comes first so we can check for gaps together.
Which need do you want to cover, or which commercial product would you like to leave? We will show you suitable projects and what they cost to run.
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