michelle murrain
"Live Together, Die Alone"*
For years and years -- basically, as long as software has been purchased by nonprofit organizations -- the basic model has been: a nonprofit organization pays a fee (sometimes rather large) to a software maker for a copy of software to install on your desktop or server to do a particular task, whether it be tracking donations and constituents, tracking clients, running campaigns, or the like.
What this meant was that each individual organization spent thousands -- or tens, or hundreds of thousands -- of dollars a year to implement software for their organization. The economics of that form of IT investment are hard to manage in a climate where the survival of nonprofits is increasingly endangered, and many are closing or merging.
But other models exist -- namely implementing, investing, and collaborating in open source software.
Evaluating Free and Open Source Software
Michelle Murrain, NOSI You've gotten used to evaluating software for use in your organization. You have a specific need to fill, you look around for the list of software that can fill that need, make sure that the feature set matches, that you have the budget, and that the company or vendor is reputable, and can provide the support you need. But how do you evaluate free and open source software?
