Slashdot Mirror

printer-friendly link

Acquisition by Symantec killed Central Point Software. The DMCA buried it.

They made Copy ][ Plus for the Apple II series and other similarly named software for other platforms. C2+ was the essential piece of software at my high school, for students and teachers alike, back when copy protection itself was an art form (double spiral tracks on 5.25" floppies), not like the typical, "If this block on the disk is readable, refuse to run," protections of later years. (However, 8.2 was much better than 9.0. For some reason the UI became sluggish.)

Nowadays, such software is completely illegal under the DMCA.

Or try reading the printable version.

The whole article on one page, you dumbasses.

or one.

Avoids the 19-page ad-laden version:

http://www.cio.com/article/print/125263

Not only did the Slashdot editor not catch a spelling mistake, he apparently didn't catch the fact that the linked article is an advertisement from CXO Media, which, according to its web site, mixes articles and advertisements: "Through our integrated media and marketing programs we provide..."

From the linked article: "... the team is using Quantum's StorNext software as its file system..."

Question: Did a Slashdot editor get paid directly for running an advertisement disguised as an article? Or was someone in Slashdot's parent company paid "under the table"? Or did the parent company get paid?

Anyone wanting to read a real article from 2005 about CERN's data handling, data storage, and data processing can download this PDF file: Grid Computing: The European Data Grid Project.

Real articles begin this way: "The computing challenges for LHC are: * the massive computational capacity required for analysis of the data and * the volume of data to be processed."

Advertisements begin by talking about God and murder, this way (from the article linked by Slashdot): "CERN's Search for God (Particles)..."

and "Maybe you last read about CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and its massive particle accelerators in Angels & Demons by Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame. In that book, the lead character travels to the cavernous research institute on the border of France and Switzerland to help investigate a murder."

I keep hearing that Linux isn't user friendly. But people are so used to Windows that they find anything else pretty much alien to them.

But then you read stuff like this and realise it's not as hard as people think.

http://www.cio.com/article/120452

Sure, if stuff breaks it can be hard to put right, but the same is true if your Windows PC won't boot and you don't know much about computers.

The conclusion of the article is that:

Though he personally is pleased with the OS, Halamka is not so sure he'd deploy it widely in his organization.

Although he apparently thought much more of SuSE then he did of RedHat, which is covered in this article:

http://www.cio.com/article/41140

Incidentally, in that article (which is the actual comparison) he says the best OS is Mac OS X, although his favorite piece of hardware is a Dell?!?

]{

MS has already cross licensed with IBM and Sun (and LG, Samsung, Novell, Fuji, etc).

See what happened to patent litigant Timeline after they cross-licensed with a company that MS devoured: http://www.cio.com/article/119203/Microsoft_Wins_P atent_Case_With_Timeline

money making tip: get slashdot to link to your pop-up ridden pages

ad free print links:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117150
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117050
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117201

money making tip: get slashdot to link to your pop-up ridden pages

ad free print links:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117150
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117050
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117201

money making tip: get slashdot to link to your pop-up ridden pages

ad free print links:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117150
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117050
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117201

Article on one page (as opposed to *10* seperate pages...)

http://www.cio.com/article/print/114550

http://www.cio.com/article/print/114550
Take that advertisers!

http://www.cio.com/article/print/114550 - Print version so you don't have to go through ten pages to read it all.

Anonymous coward so no Karma whoring today. :)

Sorry, I don't know where to contact you but you appear to read replies to your posts and this is the most recent one, so I'll put this here:

CIO Article on anti-forensic tools

I figure it may be of use if you need to further challenge the "expert" testimony of that one fellow. I'd have posted it on Blogspot, but you have anonymous comments disabled and I don't have a Blogspot account. Hope this helps!

1. MySQL Uses the GPL
2. MySQL Doesn't Use the GPL
3. Integration With an Existing Environment
4. Product Maturity
5. Feature Set Maturity
6. Availability of Certification
7. Corporate Considerations
8. Perception of Scalability

They all have *some* merit, but all are very dependent on your situation. 1 and 2 seem to cancel each other out, as in if #1 is an issue for you, #2 probably wouldn't be. #3 is sort of weak, arguing that if you already have many other databases, adding yet another different system is detrimental. That's not an argument against MySQL, but against disparate systems altogether. The rest of the issues are matters of degree. "While MySQL does have a certification training program, its training availability is not nearly as widespread as for, say, Oracle or MS-SQL Server." True, but if you're comfortable with the level of quality of certified MySQL people, then go forward. It'll contribute to the general upward spiral of adoption, hiring, certification and so on. MySQL is going to keep growing, it's just a matter of how quickly and in what directions.

P.S. Printable version here -> http://www.cio.com/article/print/113111

http://www.cio.com/article/print/108501

http://www.cio.com/article/20133/Maine_s_Medicaid_ Mistakes

Most of this article is pretty good, but I disagree with one of the early bits about supporting Macs in a PC-oriented office:

For Publicis Group, the Macs have higher total cost of ownership. This is because of the particular hardware configurations and the company's corporate culture, which calls for more intense support on the Mac side.

You might want to read this piece.

http://www.cio.com/archive/021507/fea_user_mgmt.ht ml?page=1

As IT you should not be giving users whatever they want, but you need to remember that each request means that IT is probably missing something. The article is a good read and contrasts the "control everything" motto that you have to a balanced approach that makes IT part of a total discussion on topics like "I need to do this work at home" or "I need to share these documents with joan in accounting".

Don't fear your expert users, embrace them and learn.

And yes, I do work in IT. While we don't deal in corporate secrets, we do have a secure environment for out users that is not restrictive.

http://www.cio.com/archive/021507/fea_user_mgmt.ht ml?action=print

For what it's worth, I wrote an in-depth look at the neuroscience of the brain and its impact on peoples' ability to change for CIO magazine here: http://www.cio.com/archive/091506/change.html.

I've been following the net neutrality debate for a while now. Real briefly, the telecommunications industry is lobbying for the right to manage the traffic that flows over their networks as they see fit. For more read the post linked above. Everyone is focusing on the last mile, which makes sense because that is the part of the network where there is the most congestion. But getting rid of net neutrality would also give the companies that own the fiber and routers at the core of the Internet the ability to manage data there.

When I heard that AT&T was going to buy Bell South, I wondered how much of the backbone this new company would own. With all the attention on the last mile were we overlooking a burgeoning monopoly at the core?

• The first 90,000 miles are toll-free, Cisco Systems company profile (detailed), 8 September 2002.
• The first 90,000 miles are toll-free, Cisco Systems Newsroom news story (brief), as seen on Newsroom, 21 February 2001.

Articles discussing this include:

• Now that's a long distance call!, Humans in Space, NASA, 3 June 2003.
• Johnson Space Center, NASA Spinoff magazine, 2001.http://www.techbriefs.com/spinoff/spinoff2001 /johnson.html -->
• This isn't Houston, Lafe Low, CIO Magazine, 1 October 2001.
• Voice over IP takes a giant step forward, Jon William Toigo, Washington Technology vol. 16 no. 1, 2 April 2001.
• Astronauts call home via shuttle VoIP link, William Jackson, Government Computing News, vol. 20 no. 5, 5 March 2001.

Also, the company is having some trouble filing reports with the SEC, presumably because of options grants. http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=24382

Just days before this deal was announced they had an interesting 8K report filed: http://money.cnn.com/quote/sec/sec.html?symb=NOVL& sequenceid=1&guid=4732459

They owed a ton of cash that was due in 2024, but callable in the event they failed timely filing of reports with the SEC. Apparently that Microsoft money saved their bacon on that one, since immediately after the deal was done it was reported the money had already been paid out to debtors. Their SEC reports should make interesting reading for some time to come.

Being paranoid, though, I wonder if their accountants or the debtor or both aren't beholden to Microsoft's business interests in some way. That would be really scary.

I could post more of them... or you could look some of them up yourself. Google is a great place to start - even though it is a pain to find the newer articles mixed in with the old ones.

On top of that - keep in mind that the Business Release wasnt ready for pressing Nov 27th... it was ready earlier than that to allow for manufacturing (Nov 9th-ish)... so, tell me, are there no changes in the Business version that was RTM on Nov 9 compared to the Consumer version not yet released?

If by some chance, factors changed that (according to MS) were delaying the Consumer release, then why is it the release date hasnt been moved up? Just curious... seems weird that they wouldnt be striving for the Holiday Season release (especially with hardware vendors bitching, and MS having to offer coupons for free or discounted upgrades to live up to the promises and appease their channel partners) they originally wanted if the product is ready - as you claim - as MS earlier claimed it was not - a claim they havent retracted in anything but very vague statements that entirely miss the heart of the matter (completing revisions/fixes MS thought necessary for the Consumer release).

They (MS) dont specify what is RTM (Business or Consumer)... and I've already seen numerous releases of Windows that are identified the same but arent actually the same (yeah, if you look at the full version string there is a difference - but nothing on the box, packaging, manual, disk, etc). And there are enough articles just-pre RTM of the business release, as well as post RTM of the business release still claiming the same reason for the consumer release delay. And of course, they have told some of their channel partners, like CompUSA, the same thing. Maybe they are lying. Weird...

ok, a few googled results for you...

Dec 2, 2006 http://1digit.blogspot.com/2006/12/windows-vista-r elease-delayed.html

Jul 11, 2006 http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=22868

Nov 29,2006 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/11/28/AR2006112801697.html

Note the section about them stating that hardware support and software compatibility support is a factor for the consumer release delay. odd...

the guy is an EX-employee, who is *supposed* to have spoken on Microsoft's behalf

No, according to The Friendly Article,

Brian Burke, the Microsoft Regional Director for Public Affairs,

t is my understanding that it was Burke who led the lobbying effort on Beacon Hill against ODF, and also urged legislators to introduce the amendment intended to take away much of the ITD's planning power generally, and as regards standards specifically, and hand it to a task force made up of political appointees.

Furthermore

Galvin also received a show of support from Microsoft in the form of a $200 December 2005 donation from Brian Burke, Microsoft's Northeast regional government affairs director

Last fall, both Pacheco and Galvin voiced concerns about the ODF initiative, criticizing the process that led to the ODF mandate.

Additionally,

an indication from Microsoft's Brian Burke during the last semi-public meeting on the matter (Sept 16) that he had been discussing the matter with the state's senators on Beacon Hill (Boston's equivalent of Capitol Hill).

And also,

a Massachusetts organized meeting on June 9, 2005 that was attended by Sun, IBM, Adobe, and many others. Representing Microsoft at the meeting were McKee, state government affairs manager Brian Burke and account technology specialist Leslie Tan

So I think it's pretty well established that:

1. He isn't merely a lobbyist, he's a chief lobbyist
2. In all likelihood, he's represented Microsoft's interests (i.e. pushed anti-ODF) for the duration of this discussion

Can you provide evidence that the advisory post is a full-time job and/or that Burke has left Microsoft, let alone being seen as "disloyal"? Maybe my google-fu isn't up to your ability, but I just can't find evidence to support your allegations.

Did any of you bother to check and see whether any of the other members were pro-ODF at all?

In what way was my statement limited to Microsoft?! It is my opinion that the rulemakers and regulartors shouldn't be directly involved with the groups they're regulating, be they from Microsoft, IBM, or Linus.

Since you brought it up, the relevant ones (i.e. the "Technology" Committee) are all listed prominently in The Friendly Article, along with their affiliations. Given, I've not done extensive background on them, but neither do they seem to be primary movers in pushing ODF. Can you provide evidence to the contrary? If so, I'll be against them too!

The mere mention of Microsoft instantly instills FUD.

And the Microsoft fanboys immediately post counter FUD to any aspersions cast upon the Great Microsoft! Sheesh. Give me a break and go get informed.

The battery recall costs them about 440 milion dollar. They expect a loss of about 260 milion dollar due to the startup costs for the ps3. Also they sold less PSPs, 9 milion instead of the 12 milion they expected.

They still expect a 440 milion dollar operating profit over the year, though, even though last year it was almost 2 billion dollar. I guess if they take this hit now, they'll still have a chance to recover pretty well in the following years, if the ps3 is a good seller of course.

US DoJ SRAM probe takes in Mitsubishi
U.S. Extends SRAM Antitrust Probe to Samsung
SRAM Industry Probe Hits Toshiba
iSuppli questions value of SRAM probe

All are 2 weeks old.

There's a difference between legal downloads and total downloads. Right now, legal services are only capturing a tiny share of the market. That indicates that the market price for the product has not been set correctly.

Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.

So the content providers (production companies) are selling the content to the networks at a loss, and the networks are then selling the content to my cable company at a loss? That's really nice of them, but I doubt that's a sustainable business model. Which makes more sense: everyone is losing money when my cable company offers me the content for $15/month, or everyone is making money on the transaction? Remember, much of this content can be had for $0 - the major networks broadcast their content - paid for by advertising.

And you lose high-cost production shows, big name actors, etc. You need capital to do something like this, and usually that capital os fronted by the networks. Yes, you can do low-budget things with no-name actors, but that's not what the public wants.

If the production companies make more, I think they will be happy. Re-read my comment: "By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit." In addition, the public has shown that they are fine with little known actors, as long as there is good content: Lost, Scrubs, House, Standoff, etc.

To make that statement, you have to know what percentage of downloads is being handled by iTunes. I would be very surprised to hear that even 2-3% of downloads are via services that charge $.99/track.

Last year, Apple had about 80% market share in legal, downloadable music distribution. Even now they're still considered the market leader http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25572 and it seems unlikely that their market share has dropped down to your 2-3% in a single year.

Radio provides music much more cheaply, as you indicate yourself, below.

Yup. At the cost of known scheduling.

If I can get that show for $.20 today (I can on my cable, even though it's going through a third party), then cutting out the middleman should increase profits for the content providers.

Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.

By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit.

And you lose high-cost production shows, big name actors, etc. You need capital to do something like this, and usually that capital os fronted by the networks. Yes, you can do low-budget things with no-name actors, but that's not what the public wants.

So you think you will pay twice for the same content? That's very generous of you! I'd rather subscribe to my shows in a "Netcast aggregator", and watch then whenever I'd like, while only paying for the shows I watch. To each his own.

As I said, I'm paying my cable company for convenience and quality. 90% of the shows I watch are available off-the-air with bad static (horrible compression rates with a DVR) and I only buy DVDs for a handful of shows. I'm paying twice for those, sure, but not for the majority of things, and it keeps me perfectly clear in legal territory rather than in the pseudo-legal territory you're in. Yes, to each his own.

Second: Notes for Mac.

Third: Notes for *Linux*. And it's Eclipse-based.

And they're all 7.0-level clients. The Linux client is actually a preview of the 8.0 Notes client (called Hanover)! So, no need for sympathy! :)

He's electronically tagged, although the curfew times are a joke- 12.30-7.30am weekdays and 13.30-10.00 on weekends. When the little blighter will be alseep...he's a teenager for crying out loud!

Oh and he is not 16, he was 18 (here, and here) but is now 19 (here).

He has been named and located though ....so any really irate ex-work buddies dont have far to look...

Not familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley I see. If you're a "finance executive" there probably IS, yes. The SEC mandates how certain types of communications are to be retained, and a "finance executive" almost certainly deals with covered communications routinely. It would, in fact, be criminal for him to simply delete email if it were not archived elsewhere under a corporate retention policy. http://www.cio.com/archive/031503/tl_washington.ht ml

An excerpt from a bit longer essay I wrote:

In August 1980, Byte magazine published its issue on the Forth programming language

At that time, I was working with Control Data Corporation's PLATO project, pursuing a mass market version of that system using the Intelligent Student Terminal (IST). The IST's were Z80 processor terminals sporting 512*512 bit mapped displays with touch sensitive screens and 1200bps modems that went for about $1500. We were shooting for, and actually successfully tested, a system that could support almost 8,000 simultaneous users on 7600-derived Cybers (the last machine designed by Seymour Cray to be marketed by CDC --with 60 bits per word, 6 bits per character, no virtual memory, but very big and very fast) with under 1/4 second response time (all keys and touch inputs went straight to the central processor) for $40/month flat rate including terminal rental. Ray Ozzie had been working at the University of Illinois on offloading the PLATO central system to the Z80 terminal through downloaded assembly language programming, doing exotic things like "local key echo" and such functions.

I was interested in extending Ray's work to offload the mass-market version of the PLATO central system. In particular I was looking at a UCSD Pascal-based approach to download p-code versions of terminal functions -- and even more in particular the advanced scalable vector graphics commands of TUTOR (the "relative/rotatable" commands like rdraw, rat, rcircle, rcircleb, etc.) if not entire programs, to be executed offline. Pascal was an attractive choice for us at the time because CDC's new series of computers, the Cyber 180 (aka Cyber 800) was to have virtual memory, 64 bit words, 8 bit characters and be programmed in a version of the University of Minnesota Pascal called CYBIL (which stood for Cyber Implementation Language). Although this was a radically different architecture than that upon which PLATO was then running, I thought it worthwhile to investigate an architecture in which a reasonable language (you should have seen what we were used to!) could be made to operate on both the server and the terminal so that load could be dynamically redistributed. This idea of dynamic load balancing would, later, contribute to the genesis of Postscript.

Over one weekend a group of us junior programmers managed to implement a good portion of TUTOR's (PLATO's authoring language) advanced graphics commands in CYBIL. Our little hunting pack at CDC 's Arden Hills Operations was in a race against the impending visit of Dave Anderson of the University of Illinois' PLATO project who was promoting what he called "MicroTUTOR". Anderson was going to take the TUTOR programming language and implement a modified version of it for execution in the terminal -- possibly in a stand-alone mode. Many of us didn't like TUTOR, itself, much. Indeed, I had to pull teeth to get the authorization to put local variables into TUTOR -- and we were determined to select a better board from our quiver with which to surf Moore's Shockwave into the Network Revolution. CDC management wasn't convinced that such a radical departure from TUTOR would be wise, and we hoped to demonstrate that a p-code Pascal approach could accomplish what microTUTOR purported to -- and more. We quickly ported a TUTOR central sy

This guy got contributions from Microsoft. Now, it was only $600 over 3 years, so not sure if it's even worth repeating, but there it is. http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/opensource.html? action=print

and for how much...

http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/opensource.html? action=print

Apparently, $600 buys you a grandstanding State House Senator. I wonder how much an actual law costs.

Here's an interesting link. http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/opensource.html? action=print

"Money in Politics

The battle over proprietary versus open documents software began heating up well before the ITD's September announcement. Observers say that lobbyists on both sides of the issue turned up on Beacon Hill earlier in 2005 and met with Galvin, Sen. Pacheco, chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight, and others.

In July 2005, a registered Microsoft lobbyist, Maureen Glynn, donated $200 to Pacheco, according to campaign finance records. Glynn, who lobbies for other companies as well, also gave Pacheco $200 in 2003. In January 2004, Mario Rebello, then a Microsoft employee and lobbyist, donated $200 to Pacheco's campaign."

and

"The Initiative for Software Choice, a trade organization with close ties to Microsoft, also wrote a letter to Pacheco a few days before the October 2005 hearing, warning officials against the move toward open standards. "The ODF policy creates a biased procurement mandate for open-source vendors to the detriment of all other competitors," the letter stated.

At the same time, Sun and IBM were also lobbying in favor of ODF, including a major letter-writing campaign on the part of Sun employees in Massachusetts. Public records show that Microsoft paid Massachusetts lobbyists salaries totaling $69,200 in 2005, while Sun, which has a major facility in Burlington, paid $60,000 to its lobbyist. IBM paid its lobbyist $15,000. Employees from all three companies have also given contributions to various political campaigns in Massachusetts. (Since Jan. 1, 2003, Sun employees have given a total of $4,675 to Massachusetts candidates, while IBM employees have donated $12,375. Employees of Microsoft, which has significantly fewer workers in the state, contributed a total of $450.)

"A decision by any Microsoft employee to contribute is a personal decision," says Ginny Terzano, spokeswoman for Microsoft. "The industry, including Microsoft, has a very politically active employee base.""

Campaign finance records show that those state officials who most vocally opposed the plan received campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists. For instance, state Sen. Marc Pacheco, who held hearings on the move to OpenDocument Format at which he voiced opposition to the plan, received $600 in campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists over the past three years.

    -- http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/opensource.html? action=print

Sure, $600 is only a token, but its the thought that counts.

From the CIO article below, median wage across China is around $120 USD/m.

http://www.cio.com/archive/101505/china.html?page= 2

Financial Times reported Shenzen minimum wages around $100 USD/m according to this link:

http://www.danielgross.net/

So your # seems a little high. But the $50 USD/m quoted in the parent article seems too low. It would be illegal.

Even though Gates is quoted in the NYTimes as saying Vista will ship "on-time" (relative to the last delay), on the same day CEO Ballmer is expecting more delays even to the current January 2007 date.

When the two cheifs can't even agree, at least in PUBLIC, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the project.

Now where did I put that OS X brochure?...

Check this out:

http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=20986

Microsoft could do plenty of right with the Slashdot crowd if they wanted to, but they don't want to. This is not some defenseless little start-up you are defending either. Microsoft does nothing out of the goodness of its heart--it's all for their shareholders. There's nothing wrong with that either, but let's not pretend they are anything that they aren't. We will get to see more and more of how they really are as time goes on: Why Your Future Depends on Open Source -- Part 2.

Also, telling your audience that you think they are a bunch of hypocrites and daring to be modded down does nothing for your argument.

FTFLA:
A growing number of cities and towns want to develop their own public Wi-Fi networks. But they face stiff opposition from telecom and cable providers.

You will find that there are several state laws on the books as well as US House and Senate bills pending that would prohibit or limit a city's ability to provide WiFi services. To make things fun, there is a competing bill in the Senate that would make it illegal to make it illegal to make a law that would prohibit cities from offering services (!!=1).

Our political system amazes me...if we could only harness all that wasted energy.

FTFLA:
A growing number of cities and towns want to develop their own public Wi-Fi networks. But they face stiff opposition from telecom and cable providers.

You will find that there are several state laws on the books as well as US House and Senate bills pending that would prohibit or limit a city's ability to provide WiFi services. To make things fun, there is a competing bill in the Senate that would make it illegal to make it illegal to make a law that would prohibit cities from offering services (!!=1).

Our political system amazes me...if we could only harness all that wasted energy.

More IE sh*t here

"The misconception that open source solutions are free often ends up costing an organization a lot more in the long run because they never took the time to do an initial assessment of what they actually expect from the product."

Isn't this Microsoft's favorite anti-open-source argument? Do you have any (non-Microsoft-generated) data to support that? When you talk to people using, or considering using Eclipse (with or without crystal), do you warn them to carefully consider these "hidden costs", and take a closer look at Visual Studio, or some other proprietary offering? As the PM for crystal for Eclipse, aren't you trying to "have your cake and eat it too" with this argument? Business Objects supports MySQL, eclipse, tomcat, and red hat linux. For some reason, Business Objects seems to anticipate demand in their base for open source solutions at all levels of the stack. Well, every level except BI. What dynamics are driving Business Objects to use open source in so many places, and which of those dynamics DON'T apply to reporting or BI, and why?

As far as "carefully considering requirements before a project", anyone interested can go to sourceforge and download reporting, analysis, dashboards, and the whole BI platform from Pentaho, try it out, and see for sure whether it meets their needs. It's not "forget your requirements - use this because it's free", it's "carefully consider your requriements, download the entire open source BI suite and try it out for free. And by the way, ask your proprietary vendor to allow you to do the same with their whole suite."

I googled "open source costs more". The first hit was this study from the UK:

http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/doc uments/BEC5606_Full_report18.pdf

This study seems to show that, in their experience, they saved money by using open source, and not just on licenses.

The second hit was from CIO Magazine, in an article called "The Myths of Open Source."

http://www.cio.com/archive/030104/open.html

It's all anecdotal, but the real users they talk to cite savings, and even larger-than-expected savings from using open source.

"A lot of companies are making a lot of money off of providing support and solutions for open source software. "

Who? JBoss, who is huge compared to your average open source company, has revenues estimated at $40M from support and services. While that's "a lot of money" by my personal standards, and is a little less than 10% of what Business Objects makes from support, if the UK study is to believed, it would mean that their customers still spent significantly less money than they would have using a proprietary offering. Put another way, JBoss is providing huge value to a very large worldwide community for $40M total, less than 10% of what Business Objects makes supporting BOBJ customers.

"Business Objects includes indemnification and support in all of their products"

Are you sure that's accurate? If I buy crystal reports developer, I get a real support contract from Business Objects? I can call in and get tech. help and report bugs? In looking at the online documentation in the online store, numerous features and benefits are mentioned, but nothing that I saw implies that you get support on the less-than-$7,500 editions of crystal. Your post implies that I would, but I think that's wrong.

I agree with you that people should consider many factors, and that an open source solution won't always be better.

-Lance
Pentaho