Start up cost for IT projects is usually very high.. you spend $$$$ on database server, $$$ on an application server, $$ on operating system… couple thousands here, couple thousands there and you spend all your budget on infrastructure.

Open source software has changed the game forever. If you own a small business or a start up company then you need to use open source products to lower your cost and save your money for the actual implementation of the application.

I build both complex n-tire enterprise applications using J2EE and SOA technologies for big companies and simple websites using Ruby On Rails and Ajax for small businesses. Sometimes I feel that I work in two conflicting worlds… the enterprise domain which only believes in big names and sophisticated solutions and the small business domain which believes in keeping things simple and at low cost.

Software Engineers at smaller companies come up with very interesting solutions for complex problems by using a lot of open source products. They are not afraid of trying open source software with the mentality of “how could you loose money when you don’t spend any money”.

The story is totally different in the enterprise world (except my friends at Google and Yahoo!) where complex solutions are provided for simple problems and open source software is considered more expensive to implement because it comes with no support or guarantee.

The true story is… open source is a serious contender to proprietary software and big companies need to get real and adapt to the new generation.

I personally would rather to spend my money on customizing open source applications to fit my needs instead of buying out of the box proprietary applications which were designed to fit everybody.

Here is a list of some of my favorite open source software (they are organized in a random way)

• Eclipse
• Ruby On Rails
• MySQL
• Apache : Apache webserver, Geronimo, Tomcat ..
• PHP
• Mozilla
• Ubuntu Linux
• OpenOffice.org
• osCommerce
• Gimp
• Incscape
• Xara Xtreme
• MediaWiki
• WordPress

The list could grow too big so I am going to stop :)

I’ve always admired small companies and their abilities to come up with innovative ideas and elegant solutions in very reasonable time.

Its all about communication.

Small companies enjoy friendly and productive communication where the point of having meetings is to agree on things rather than disagreeing on them. On the other hand, big companies suffer from formalities and bureaucracy. Their meetings are about achieving personal agendas rather than providing practical solutions.

What surprises me the most, is the desperate attitude of some small companies to act big and to adapt to the corporate culture . As if you act bigger your revenue is going to increase. They don’t understand that having long meetings is a problem. They like to add more and more managers and directors to the point that they can’t get anything done because of the bureaucracy overhead.

What these companies don’t realize is that their size is their biggest advantage. They are more likely to satisfy the ever changing market demands than bigger companies.
If you are in the entrepreneurship business, you already know that plenty of the new ideas presented under big companies were actually made by smaller companies, or individuals. del.icio.us and upcoming.org are only few examples. These cool websites were 1-man projects…. Yes only one man, he is the designer, the developer, the project manager and the owner.

Big companies rather to buy smaller companies applications than trying to implement their own. The corporate philosophy is it cost more to build than to buy.
If you are small company owner, your company size is your biggest advantage. So don’t try to lose your friendly culture while big corporates are spending big money to restore theirs.

If you are not familiar with Tag My City project, please read this first.
I am doing some progress on Tag My City website. The following functionalities are almost fully implemented:

• Add a new place
• Get the longitude and latitude of a place
• Review a place
• Upload pictures of a place

I am still not sure if v1.0 should cover all US. cities or just Dallas. I will be making a decision about that in the next two weeks.