(photo by acidcookie)

What to do when faced with a 40+ page RFP that has been clearly written with proprietary vendors in mind?  Have other open source vendors faced this? Usually, we are just too busy to play a very time consuming lottery ticket.  Is there education we can do for procurement people that will make it easier for them to find an open source solution that might be a significantly better deal?

I have found one excellent blog post on the web: http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-open-source-meets-procurement.html

I recently had to decline to bid on a project that was trying to confederate a large number of state schools that could quite likely save a significant amount of money by using open source.  Here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote declining to bid:

Thank you for taking time to seek out the open source community of .LRN to bid on your 46-page RFP.  Your organization has obviously thought through your needs and seen that there are considerable financial and functional advantages in bringing all of your community and technical colleges together in one system.  You have also sought out the open source communities so I assume you also realize that there may be both financial and functional advantages to using open source.

Based on my experience, I believe the use of open source technologies would, in fact, be cheaper, more scalable, more flexible and more agile in terms of adapting to both changing technology and changes in your organizations.  Solution Grove specializes in helping educational organizations customize and use .LRN and other open source products such as LAMS, Moodle and ELGG.  It is with great sadness that I inform you that Solution Grove is not able to donate the many hours it would require to respond to your RFP.

Responding to an extensive RFP has very different economics for a proprietary company versus an open source consultancy such as Solution Grove:

Even if you agree that the technology we propose is the best available, there is no vendor lock-in.  You could give the job to another vendor, who, because they don't spend uncompensated time doing long sales processes, can charge a lower rate.

It would be reasonable, even likely, that you would decide that an economical choice would be to deploy using internal resources.

Unlike proprietary systems, there is no up front license fee that will offset the cost of sales.  There is no data lock-in that assures you will continue using the system and paying the vendor for years to come.

It is actually harder for me to fill out these questionnaires for .LRN because it is specifically designed to be customizable.  So what you would need to be comparing are not its current capabilities and costs, but what it would cost to customize it the way you need it to versus the equivalent proprietary product.

Similarly, we can combine a number of open source learning technologies and these grids do not make it easy to say, “No .LRN doesn't do it but .LRN plus LAMS plus OpenID does”.

If you would like to work with us as consultants to help you evaluate or prototype open source solutions please do not hesitate to contact us.  We provide hosting and ASP type services as well as support organizations that host internally.

Thank you,

Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove