Two recent pieces: Open Source Software and the Curse of Plenty by Pete Loshin and The curse of plenty: what El Mariachi tells us about writing software by Neil Davidson use an apparently unrelated example to discuss software development. They explain how the movie “El Mariachi” en 1992 did cost only $7,000, whereas the average budget of movies at that time was roughly $50 million! The producer explained his success in terse words: “Refuse to spend. Think of a creative way to get around your problem.” If you are interested in his recipes, you can check out The Internet Movie Database.

According to Pete and Neil, This success teaches us several lessons that can be applied to software development. If there is one that I think should be remembered however, it’s this one: the more budget, the less creativity. Even if the open source software industry is not only linked to monetary issues, funding is essential. This explains for example why non-profit or government agencies, which have tight budget restrictions, have long been interested in our technologies.

We all know this motto “do more with less” with haunts the minds of CIO the world over! Open source solutions address especially well this demand: not only do they reduce costs by “freeing” the source code of the software and providing it without license charges, but they also offer higher quality levels. Indeed, their purpose is to satisfy customers, whereas others seek to shackle them!

History of art offers many examples that prove that with a little imagination and lots of creativity, one does not need to invest massively in technology to reach an innovative and satisfactory result. Let’s apply this principle to IT also. Aren’t we talking about the “art of programming”?

Bertrand