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What is an open source CMMS?

What is an open source CMMS?

Thursday 16 april 2020

Open source CMMS software? Many people are asking the question. To get to the bottom of it, we have looked to see if it is possible to find free CMMS software on the web. CMMS for Computerized Maintenance Management Systems if it was still necessary to call it up. Here is the result of our research...

> What are the different types of CMMS?

The open source designation applies to software whose license meets the criteria defined by the Open Source Initiative, with in particular the possibility of accessing the source code, reading it, modifying it and adding to it. However, the term open source is commonly used to qualify software that is also distributed free of charge, even if its source code is not available to the public.

Brief explanation about Open Source

We all know about open source software and we even use several of them: this is the case with LibreOffice and Openoffice which are two office suites that are alternatives to Microsoft Office. In the field of free retouching we meet GIMP and for the development teams the Linux systems are in Open Source. In the latter case it is even this operating system, a version of UNIX, which dominates the DataCenter market with its head and shoulders. Even Microsoft's Azure platform uses mostly Linux to run its servers for its own applications! It's a long time ago when Steve Balmer called Linux a cancer...

For the little story Linux was written in 1991, by a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who was tired of having to wait to use the UNIX server at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote his own OS and opened it up to the community. Great no! 

Is there any open source CMMS software?

So we took our favorite search engine and searched in French, "GMAO open source", in English: "CMMS open source" (CMMS = Computerized Maintenance Management System).  As a result of the searches, we only found blog articles saying that open source CMMSs don't exist. And they are right.

To put on a good face, some articles even try to provide links to CMMS sites from paying publishers. Not very serious!

By the way, what is the Business Model of Open Source? Well on this question will save time, a simple summary will suffice :)-> nobody knows...

But then, is there any free CMMS software?

Here again, mobilize the search engine and queries. The best answers are found in articles which, when talking about free CMMS, mention the free 15-day or one-month trial versions offered by CMMS publishers. What's more, most often they only offer a limited set of functionalities. It is not the 15-day trial that transforms the solution into a free CMMS. When we are given a piece of cheese at the supermarket, it is not the cheese that is free. It's the piece!

Some CMMS offer a 2-month trial period with no limitation on functionalities, without limitation of the number of users and without limitation of the number of registrations. You can use the entire application in real conditions and even benefit from personalised support. And indeed, the CMMS trial is free.

The good joke of some blogs, I wouldn't quote any name that doesn't want to start a career as an information-provider, is to advise, and I quote: "if you want a free CMMS you take a paper and a pen". They even talk about the "paper interview" and describe the associated method of recording the interviews carried out in a notebook. Others mention Excel. Well, all this is really not serious.

Because of course, if you stick to paper or use Excel to manage lists of interventions (there's not much else you can do with it) you won't spend anything. But that doesn't mean that the cost will be zero for your company. In fact, the exact opposite is true because of the loss of efficiency that these solutions imply. These solutions can cost you a lot of money when your competitors equip themselves with CMMS.

And the Return on Investment? What about this famous ROI? For there to be one, it would still have to be an investment. And if you choose to equip yourself with a SaaS CMMS there is no investment necessary. You only pay for what you consume and the solution has been designed to make it extremely quick and easy to get started, avoiding a long and costly implementation project phase.

Conclusion

No open source CMMS solutions. No free CMMS solutions. And if CMMS SaaS isn't free, it's much better than that, because through the productivity gains you'll make money. 

By the way, at Yuman our ambition is to offer an unparalleled user experience. Check it out right away: try CMMS for free. Within 2 minutes, the time it takes to create your account, you'll discover what's newest in this category of software.

You can also benefit from a demonstration led by one of our consultants: book a videoconference

Good discovery and see you soon on Yuman.

 
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