Open Outsourcing is a development model that focuses your programmers' proprietary domain expertise on the core concerns of your application, lowers development costs, and increases the sustainability of your codebase.

Your competitive edge is defined by your people, their insight into the work you do, and the domain-specific technologies you have built together. The Open Outsourcing model does not change that: key technical expertise, domain knowledge, and code stay in-house and remain proprietary. Infrastructure code that is more broadly applicable, however, is developed by expert library designers and made available to everyone in the form of open-source libraries.

The arguments for having infrastructure built by library specialists are straightforward. While your developers focus on producing visible results in the application, a library designer is free to devote his or her full attention to the interfaces that form such a crucial part of the application programmer's vocabulary. It takes a special kind of talent to produce library designs that are not only stable, but that allow your developers to directly express their ideas, build and maintain momentum, and still produce code that stands the test of time.

The argument for building open source libraries is a bit more subtle. After all, well-designed general-purpose infrastructure can be thought of as a competitive advantage. Why give that away? Very simply, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

By analogy, consider how the standard PC hardware platform was essential to the revolutionary technological explosion that spawned everything from the iPod to the world wide web.

"Commodity infrastructure dramatically lowers development cost, allowing us to build more complex and interesting applications than are possible when there is no standard technology."

For the same reason proprietary computer languages and hardware platforms are becoming extinct, open library interfaces enjoy a strong evolutionary advantage. Opening library interfaces to the world encourages broad interest and investment, which boosts the viability and sustainability of code that depends on those libraries.

Boost libraries are an especially good investment because they are designed for standardization and are a de-facto standard in many organizations. Most quickly gain wide acceptance, and are reviewed and used by a broad user base, ensuring correctness, stability, and usability. An emphasis on peer review and collaboration amplify the value of your investment with contributions from Boost's community of top-notch library experts.

Boostpro has the expertise to deliver elegant, expressive interfaces that make your code easy to write and maintain, and the know-how to shepherd a library through Boost's peer review process. For domain-specific technologies critical to your core business, we will develop custom closed-source software, to be kept in-house. Where appropriate, we can divide development efforts between open Boost and closed-source proprietary work. We will help you make the most of your software engineering investment.

By: David Abrahams for boostpro computing.