Mike Pedersen has been developing Uhasibu, a revolutionary cloud based application that promises to change the way we do our accounting. Currently in its test phase, Uhasibu targets small and medium enterprises by automating accounting tasks, including petty cash and auto-mated KRA reports.

The innovative application will cost Ksh 1 000 per month, and there lay Pedersen’s problem. Following up on thousands of users to pay up such an amount ends up been a costly, labour intensive affair. Furthermore, complications such as post dated cheques and bouncing cheques are to be expected. A safer bet would be the use of electronic bank transfers, though at a  trans-action cost of Ksh 200 to Ksh 300 would eat in to his revenue base or get passed on to consumers as a higher fee. This left mobile payments as his only bet.

Pedersen says that choice of mobile payments meant that he needed a mobile payment processing solution. Various existing solutions in the market which start at a cost of about 3% of the revenue collected was not Pedersen preferred choice. Instead, the developer decided to create his own mobile payment solution that would enable him save on money that he could have paid as fee. This led to the birth of PesaPi, an M-PESA application programming interface (API) that provides a set of standard instructions that allow other programmes to communicate with Vodafone’s M-Pesa interface.

Rather than provide PesaPi as a commercial service to other clients, or just use it for his applications, Pedersen has gone ahead and released PesaPi’s source code as open source.  This means that the source code is available to anyone for use including compiling, modification and alteration at no costs.

According to Pedersen, PesaPi is nothing new with several organizations having systems that are already integrated with M-PESA. Reasons that drove Pedersen to release PesaPi as an open source product was that it provided a cheaper option compared to hiring full time develop-ers. Other developers contribute to the platform since they also stand to gain from it.

“The more people involved, the more eyes that read the code,” he says. This results in better quality, robustness and stability of the solution. The more the people reading the code, the more the questions arising hence the outcome is quite solid.

Pedersen also adds that a payment platform is not his core business hence he did not want to focus on it.

The main challenge for PesaPi at the moment is enabling developers to test and integrate their applications with PesaPi without a commercial M-PESA number, known as a Paybill number. This is known as sandboxing and is implemented in other applications such as Paypal.

Firms looking to go open source though have to have something to offer. “An open source M-PesaPi is something that developers would be interested in because it is needed by many people,” he says. Pedersen cautions that open sourcing an application that is not important to many people, few developers would have interest in it.

Open source comes in many licenses which limit the amount of freedom that the users have. Open source solutions will even enable users to fix problems they discover with the application.

Most people assume all open source applications are free, which is not the case, according to Pedersen. However almost all open source applications are available free of charge.

Pedersen advises that firms can leverage open source for solutions that abstract processes or automate processes that work on other commercial solutions (not necessarily their own).

Firms can also outsource core products such as has been done by MySQL, the popular data-base application solution provider. The firms then make money by selling support services for this application. Sugar CRM (client relationship manager) is another popular application that has been released by a commercial entity as open source, the entity makes money by selling easy-to-use cheap Sugar CRM cloud hosting. One can host their own Sugar CRM instance, though the cost and effort might be steep.

Pamoja Media, a Kenyan based development housed has outsourced ukulima.net, an application that they built in-house. Comark Onani, Pamoja’s Chief Technical Officer  says that they are looking at attracting developers to build applications for the farmer’s social network and addition of better ideas to it.

Dorcas Muthoni, CEO at Open World, a solutions integration and training firm says that all of their solutions are built on open source technology. She says that the benefits go further than price as the firm does not have to re-invent the wheel on building existing solutions. Muthoni says that the open source solutions also offer a great learning tool as one can use solutions that have been released as open source to learn technologies such as operating system kernels, API building amongst others.

Open source tools are also a great choice as they tend to adapt open standards making it easy to integrate with other solutions.

Eventually, Muthoni sees the fusion of open source and closed source solutions especially with the emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS) where users pay for licenses rather than solutions. Muthoni mentions Uhasibu such an ideal approach as open does not need to invest in a server to use it.

While poor user interfaces and usability ease have been cited as challenges of most open source solutions, Muthoni says that most users chose open source solutions because they can do what they want, even with a poor user interface.

IBM has built an open source office application known as Lotus Symphony. The solution itself is based on open office, another open source office suite. IBM took Open Office and improved its user interface and added extra features to come up with the application.

Google has open sourced some versions of its Android operating systems for mobile phones, which itself is based on the open source Linux operating system kernel. This has seen the quick growth of the Android OS with addition of features and bug fixing from external developers, all without costing Google a cent.