OK. Now that I’ve got your attention, let me elaborate. It matters, just like all foundational decisions matter when deciding what and how you’re going to design and develop a software solution. It just doesn’t matter the way some people think it matters.

I’m writing this because it seems that I’ve had this discussion at least a dozen times in the past few years, and every time I give a call to my team and ask: “what is better, Drupal or .Net?” or something similar. The answer I get is always something on the order of “it depends, but most likely based on the fact that the company wants to do something long-term and add lots of customized features, it doesn’t matter.”

That doesn’t mean that the process will be the same, but rather that the time, effort, work and outcomes are likely going to end up in a similar place. With Open Source, you sprint ahead early, setting up a working framework in almost no time at all, and things are looking great. Then, a curveball feature requirement comes into play and things grind to a halt as the team searches for a plugin that meets the need or, more likely, works to develop custom code that does the job.

In a parallel universe, the .Net team has started out slowly, using their experience and the vanilla framework to get started. It’s all “custom”, but then there’s plenty of help out there in the community and the system is ready for anything. Six months into the project, when those pesky custom features are tackled, they don’t pose nearly the challenge as they do for the Open Source team. Nine months in, and both teams are basically doing the same work, and any cost savings at the beginning has turned into a wash.

So, the lesson here is, when choosing a development environment, make sure to think strategically about the long term, and don’t worry too much about how much “savings” you’ll get from the cost difference of Open Source versus Licensed. In the end, this is only part of the problem, and not the most important part.