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Okay first off, a better article than link in summary: Marketwire article

Now as for seeing the actual study: The Standish Group's "The Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.

Open source shows that philanthropy and business can cohabit and mutually thrive ...

I'm not certain that everyone shares this view. The article seems to posit that open source is a 'perfect' donation vehicle with no down sides but I know several people who directly disagree. Why just this week, The Standish Group released a report (that you can have for a mere 1000 USD) and this is the summary:

Boston, April 16, 2008 -- "Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com).

"It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA.

Five years of research has gone into this new report titled "Trends in Open Source". The Open Source report discusses The Standish group's research study of the top 10 drivers that are influencing decisions on how IT is adopting open source technology.

"The Standish Group's new study clearly shows how pervasive Open Source Software is used in industry today. It is a shocking examination of Open Source usage by commercial and government organizations," said Timothy Chou, Ph.D. former President of Oracle OnDemand and author of "The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future," "The Standish Group has successfully quantified both user and market behavior so that we may more fully understand what is driving this IT trend."

"The Standish Open Source Report is a thoughtful, objective and extremely useful tool for understanding the impact free software is having on the entire IT industry. Every CIO, CFO, and CEO of any corporation with large IT expenditures should read this report," said Wayne Sadin, CIO, Loomis USA, Houston, TX "The impact of Open Source on IT will be profound and The Standish Group research helps business as well as IT management make vitally important investment decisions."

The Standish Group's "Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.

Emphasis mine. So you can see that there is definitely a mentality of open source "costing" industries. I'm sure the people at Brittanica and other encyclopedia publishers claim millions in losses to Wikipedia.

Allow me to point out something I think the article missed which is that when you donate to open source, you're avoiding a huge loss of donations through third parties and local governments. Example, say I donate a 100 dollars every month to an African village through Africa Needs Help International (made up, it applies to almost every organization though). Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story. It could very well be intercepted by local guerillas, Janjaweed or the Mujahideen (often the very reasons the local villages are in need) which would actually be directly contradicting what you are trying to do.

When you donate to Open Source proj

Open source shows that philanthropy and business can cohabit and mutually thrive ...

I'm not certain that everyone shares this view. The article seems to posit that open source is a 'perfect' donation vehicle with no down sides but I know several people who directly disagree. Why just this week, The Standish Group released a report (that you can have for a mere 1000 USD) and this is the summary:

Boston, April 16, 2008 -- "Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com).

"It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA.

Five years of research has gone into this new report titled "Trends in Open Source". The Open Source report discusses The Standish group's research study of the top 10 drivers that are influencing decisions on how IT is adopting open source technology.

"The Standish Group's new study clearly shows how pervasive Open Source Software is used in industry today. It is a shocking examination of Open Source usage by commercial and government organizations," said Timothy Chou, Ph.D. former President of Oracle OnDemand and author of "The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future," "The Standish Group has successfully quantified both user and market behavior so that we may more fully understand what is driving this IT trend."

"The Standish Open Source Report is a thoughtful, objective and extremely useful tool for understanding the impact free software is having on the entire IT industry. Every CIO, CFO, and CEO of any corporation with large IT expenditures should read this report," said Wayne Sadin, CIO, Loomis USA, Houston, TX "The impact of Open Source on IT will be profound and The Standish Group research helps business as well as IT management make vitally important investment decisions."

The Standish Group's "Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.

Emphasis mine. So you can see that there is definitely a mentality of open source "costing" industries. I'm sure the people at Brittanica and other encyclopedia publishers claim millions in losses to Wikipedia.

Allow me to point out something I think the article missed which is that when you donate to open source, you're avoiding a huge loss of donations through third parties and local governments. Example, say I donate a 100 dollars every month to an African village through Africa Needs Help International (made up, it applies to almost every organization though). Well, I'll bet that ANHI takes a cut of that to run staff and transportation and such so let's say we're down to 75 USD. That 75 USD is probably used to buy from a predetermined company (usually not in Africa) and not at the best possible rate so we could probably estimate that 5 USD is trimmed off in pre-arranged agreements so we're down to 70 USD. Then whether or not that 70 USD of goods actually makes it to the village is another story. It could very well be intercepted by local guerillas, Janjaweed or the Mujahideen (often the very reasons the local villages are in need) which would actually be directly contradicting what you are trying to do.

When you donate to Open Source proj

"Oracle is to expensive for their needs"...

Oh really? If you want/can run the DN on raw iron, maybe. But if you want to run an OS as well (as most do) then you need to factor in the cost of the OS as well...
http://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research/beaco n_347.php/

Businesses fail. Business plans fail. According to the Standish Group, 80% of software projects fail. Granting credit isn't about "getting all the money back." It's an investment by the banks. It's risk management. Using your logic, I should be able to sue a company in which I own stock if its value drops.

have a business loan I personally signed for in order to upfit my first office. You'd better believe I'm working my ass off to make sure I can pay for it

Good! I'm happy for you! I'm just hoping that nothing goes wrong for you (like getting sick, or injured or something). Slightly more than 50% of the bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. (Closer to 46% when you cut out the addiction related problems).

What they should have really "reformed" were the homestead acts in states like Texas and Florida that let millionaires keep their mansions in bankruptcy. This bill also does nothing to punish business that abuse bankruptcy that destroy workers jobs, pensions, and health benefits.

... since 1994, the Standish Group has been publishing the results and reasons of IT projects. Go here for the original report.

We've gone from about 25% of projects being "successful" (on time, on budget, meeting stated needs) to about 31%. So translated, that means 2/3ds of the time you get into your car or get on an elevator, it'll work as you want.

Consistently, the top reasons for projects failing, for the past 10 years?
1. Unclear, poor requirements
2. Lack of user involvement
3. Lack of buy-in and support by upper management

I have to agree with other comments made, this isn't rocket science. We just need some time and maturity as an industry. Civil and mechanical engineering have had thousands of years to work out their kinks. The software engineering science has had to deal with technology and implementation far outpacing our understanding of the basics and principles involved.

But we're getting better.

Honestly, if the world at large knew how brittle, fragile and reliant on heroism most of the critical financial and industrial software was, there would be a huge outcry. It's one of the shameful aspects of our industry.

"Which is why expensive managemnet will be kept onsite and the grunt work offshored"

Coding is grunt work? Are you joking? That kind of contempt for the code (ie, that which serves the customer) is what leads to 75% of IT projects failing.

The code is way more important than the management. You only have to look at the open source community (entire number of managers: 0) to see how great coders don't need managers to make great software.

I agree with what you say about other professions being the next outsourcing targets, though.

If all you are doing is writing code to spec, it's immaterial if your doing it onsite or in Bangalore or Kiev.

Totally. But so few projects these days require the coder to just code.

There were some other things I thought were kinda strange...I'll concentrate on Solaris here.

For Solaris they actually used Solaris on Intel, which is fair enough considering they were looking at doing stuff on the same hardware, but isn't that good for 'real world' situations (A comparison with a Sun E450 would have been interesting) because most people who use Solaris use it on Sun hardware. Some things are a bit unclear - they seem to say they got the Solaris box from Sun, even though Sun don't sell Intel based boxes themselves - they get OEMs to do that. (actually, they correct that later, saying that Sun brought in a Dell PowerEdge box) They don't say when they got the box, but they did mention Sun's Project Cascade (think Samba for Solaris) but didn't mention that products for this are now available (well, availability was annouced a few weeks back, though I don't know about x86 versions).

They gave Solaris (on Intel) a D on RAID due to lack of support for PCI cards (not sure how fair that is) which is kinda funny when Solaris on SPARC has about the best and most reliable RAID setup out there, according to people I've talked to.(NetApps were also highly praised btw) They then criticize Sun for being 'expensive' (the hardware is, sure), when they were not even testing Sun hardware, while Solaris itself is actually very cheap for a commercial OS. (NT is only cheaper than Solaris when your NT box has no clients) They then have contradictory stuff about Solaris - stuck in the datacenter on some pages (the main ones), while on other pages (the Solaris specific ones) they give a different picture...

Btw, in the final page about Solaris they mention a report from the Standish group, but they don't give a URL to it. It's available here - Solaris Vs NT.

It's also here Now when will i get my password so i can log in?