Open source in churches
October 31st, 2006
I stumbled upon a blog today from chuchblogger that referenced an effort called The Freely Project. The Freely Project has an article questioning the viability of open source in the church infrastructure. As a volunteer in the I/T department for my church, I find this an interesting proposition. Few points come to mind:
- Cost – there is considerable upside in using Open Source software from a cost perspective. Microsoft tends to be expensive. Fortunately, churches can apply for a 501c3 account and purchase Microsoft software at a greatly reduced price. I can’t speak to Apple as I have no experience purchasing or maintaining Mac environments. Open Source certainly wins when everything is free, however.
- Support – this is a tricky item. OS is great from a community support perspective. Microsoft has a considerable amount of knowledge out on the Internet regarding support of the various products. There is also a fairly substantial knowledge base already established based on the sheer volume of people that work with and understand Microsoft. Where Open Source struggles on this is the volunteer aspect. Churches typically will have volunteer I/T departments (until they reach a fairly substantial size). My experience has been that most people who are volunteers in the church are not technical people and if they are, they are not *nix gurus. They are typically software development or engineering folks that have considerable experience using the Microsoft suite of products. I have to give Microsoft the edge on this one.
- Reliability - I am sure this point will be oft debated but I am going to speak from my own personal experience only. Microsoft’s products are fairly reliable for the first few months on a new system. It’s not until you have installed several pieces of software, tweaked this and that and un-installed some other systems that the operating system starts crawling or breaking. Compatibility can be an issue, but not a wide spread issue. Linux, on the other hand, seems to stay reliable for quite some time. It is rock solid and simply doesn’t break. Now, if you have a person who doesn’t really know what they are doing, it is easy to mess up a Linux install. If I look at a typical church deployment (this is not to say that some uber-geeks wouldn’t do a rock solid deployment that couldn’t break), I would argue that the reliability of Microsoft is acceptable.
- Customer Experience - end user experience is key. If the church staff, volunteers, etc. can’t use the system, it is all for naught. My experience is that pastor’s know enough about computers to be dangerous. Their office staff are somewhere close but with less reservations about messing around on the computer. End result? Lots of problems on the computer because they “tried” something. Unpredictable results in Microsoft will quickly become reload issues within Linux. Until the majority of the market adopts Linux as their desktop of choice at home, I think Microsoft would have to have the edge here.
This list is not exhaustive, by any means. I would recommend Linux, hands down, if the office staff was familiar and there were willing volunteers to help manage/support the environment. Short of that (which would be my expectations), a Microsoft deployment leveraging a 501c3 account will best serve many churches — from a new plant to mid-size.
