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Driving Out Costs with Open Source Tools?
zO1inks asks: "I work for a custom web solutions company and I'm working on a white paper and presentation that outlines the merits of open source software, particularly the cost savings that can be achieved by using free (or low cost) open source software (OS's, Server, Utilities, etc.) vs typical (and more costly) Microsoft solutions. The material is targeted towards Fortune 500 companies that would have an interest in driving down the costs of custom web development, design, construction, migration, and support. I'm wondering where the largest gains are to be had and what supporting statistics show the validity of such strategies? (e.g. Bank xyz uses Linux to conduct X number of transactions per day with a downtime of only Y hours per month) Bottom Line: Is Fortune 500 ready to embrace Open Source?"
I've recently come to a rather harsh conclusion after a good friend of mine lost his IT position in a company that uses microsoft products. The reason for letting him go was the expense. They simply couldn't afford to keep him. Yet, they shell out well over $200,000 a year to MS for licensing fees. Hmm, that's anywhere from 2 to 5 IT professionals' salaries... Hmm... So, if didn't use MS products, we could have qualified workers who can support all this open source mumbo jumbo
Your argument is true but not just for OSS solutions. In fact this logic can be applied for a corporation going from a Mainframe business model to a distributed computing type model. So OSS is not essentially the culprit here, it is more platform migration and adding in new technologies. When you consider any true enterprise class application, by the time it goes production it is NOT at all what came off the CDs. Instead a series of customizations and configurations have occured which drastically change the face of the application overall. In essence development has occured. I feel that you are dead wrong about source availability. When considering the deployment of an enterprise application source or at least the ability to extend a program through vartious customization exercises is critical. Functions like scripting, API extensions, etc. all become critical for fitting an application truly into any large scale enterprise. Now on to your issue of support. Nine times out of ten, I start looking on the Internet for a potential solution to the problem. This is often quicker than having to push through the support channel of any fortune 500 company. For the paper in question, if the end user of the OSS solution is willing to pay I would guess that RedHat, IBM, or HP are all willing to sit on the phone and listen. At minimum I would guess that other organizations who maintain a professional services branch would even be willing to maintain a long term support contract. As far as total cost of ownership goes, I agree the jury is out on many solutions from Windows to Linux if they really save a buck or two in the long term. I would guess that overall it is a wash. If an organization really wants to have guaranteed up time with full disaster recovery, etc. Let me tell you they are going to pay, and the cost of an operating system is fairly trivial when considering such an application. It is really the small to medium business who benefits most from the cost of these things. However this is not the biggest plus for OSS solutions. The largest benefit is the return of customer control which OSS solutions provide! If you don't like dell, then you can go and get your server from IBM and protect your solution regardless of vendor. Here is a compelling argument: buy an Itanium server from HP and the operating system from IBM (AIX 5L for Itanium). This is really the case of true market freedom which totally benefits the customers. Now, this is a little difficult on the support side to manage, but it lets both HP and IBM know that hey they need to treat you well. I feel that getting a total solution from one vendor maybe counter productive. CUSTOMERS NEED TO MAKE VENDORS WORK HARDER TO SUPPORT THEM. These are just some random thoughts of mine... Michael Hay
MS support is FREE. How you say? For example I had to pay $255 bucks for the call on problem with MS SQL SERVER. after a few weeks of sending em crap they find out it is a bug and then they reimbursed the $255. see...FREE!
The direct aquisition price of software development tools is irrelevant, especially for large organisations besause if they get a tool that costs more but saves them time.. they win...
Remember, the biggest cost in software development is TIME!
Engineers cost a lot... so does not meeting deadlines...
At least you are acknowledging that to be a good NT admin you still need good skills, and not just any joe schmoe can do well , like I have seen some posters claim.
Ultimately TCO is relative to the company my TCO for Linux is very low because I use it a lot. If I had never used it before the TCO would start off quite high. However, I wasn't born a Linux user, I never used it before 1999. Now I run it on a web server, a firewall, a mail server, and even an Oracle server. At some point I made the effort to learn. I did the same thing with NT 4 when it came out, so I can do both. If I am paying the bills, I always use Linux. Changing technologies is difficult, it is an investment of time. The best we can do is pick technologies that we think are useful, invest our limited time in them, and hope they live up to our expectations.
The company I work for has been deploying Free Software (GPL/BSD/Artistic/Etc) for roughly 10 years now. The problems tend to be the following... 1) Image/Marketing - With companies paying to send CIO's to the caribean(sp) to demo their software at "Conferences" it can be hard to shake off the illinformed CIO/CTO/CBS. Who care about true technical merrit when your out tanning on a beach bloating on free drinks. (This is a common practice with healthcare software.) 2) Capable Software - Simply stated there isnt a free database that can handle the load and size of enterprise databases such as Oracle/DB2. As soon as Postgres or MySQL supports Distributed networked databases of Terrabit+ size running on 32 nodes then things might get more interesting to Fortune 500's. Where I have seen success is in smaller system specific services for Fortune 500s. Linux plugs in as an excellent Intranet software. Throw together Linux+Apache 2.0+Tomcat+FOP_Etc and you start having a killer app. If support is a concern throw IBM, DELL, or SGI at them. If OpneMail is ever up to speed then the whole Outlook/Collaboration issue would head out the window.
I'm sure your intention with this statement was to prove how cool you are (since it has absolutely zero relevance to your topic), but in actuality, it exposes you for what you are... either unqualified to work at a hardcore Unix shop, or so much of a sellout that you'd choose to work on a dev platform that you "hate", probably for the $$.
* To the average Corp, the ability to modify software means precisly dick
I guess that means I have one. To me, the ability to modify the Amavis email scanner meant that I could effectively rid my company of the scourge of corporate email: Visual Basic Script. Finding a commercial, closed-source package from a vendor willing to modify it was not a possibility, especially in the price range that my company could afford.
* It's often hard to get good support of OSS. Good in this case means timely. If one of our HP servers goes down, we can be on the phone with a HP tech in less than 5 minutes. Trying getting a tech that quick with OSS, without paying through the nose in advance. Lost time == Lost Revenue
This is an illogical arguement. You are comparing hardware support from a vendor against software support.
Let's set aside the illogical arguement for a second, and guess that what you really meant was "You can't get quick support for cheap for OSS software." The problem with that supposition is that you are assuming that support from other closed-source vendors is cheap and quickly available. Let's choose a prominent software vendor as an example, say, Microsoft. The last time I had to call Microsoft technical support (about 2 years ago) it cost around $120/hour to just talk to an engineer, whos final response was "buy new software". In the case of our use of OSS, support comes from a reliable, well-known source 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: me. Not only does the company I work for retain me as an employee, they receive the benefit of instant support when they need it. Compared with the cost of support contracts vs. my salary, the company is saving several multiples my hourly rate by using me alone.
* Retraining isn't free. If you're using Software XYZ, it's going to cost quite a bit to train your staff to use Software ABC
Ah, this is an old FUD tactic from the bad old days, when Microsoft wasn't as big and Windows 3.1 was still a 16-bit joke. The arguement, which of course is pure FUD, takes the form of "If you use our software, it will be consistent, ergo, once trained, you'll never have to train again!"
By comparison, I'm sure that retraining all of those NT 4 Admins to learn Active Directory cost absolutely nothing, eh? Hopefully that little barb will make it's point. To put it politely: as long as you continue to upgrade software and hardware, training will continue to be a part of the process. To say that retraining is a "cost issue" is to bury your head in the sand when you are already retraining for the next platform/application in a series of upgrades.
I'm not trying to advocate the constant, exclusive use of OSS; I'm trying to point out that I shouldn't have even spent the time writing a rebuttal to this pile of manure that you have submitted.
Now for some objective facts:
Open Source Software can provide benefits provided that you have a definite need for customized software AND staff that understand the underpinnings of that software.
Support is available from several commercial vendors, notably IBM and Red Hat. For critical support needs, it might be in the interest of a company to hire a staffer that is versed in that specific package. In the case of a large corporation with multiple deployments, this may be more cost effective depending on the size and type of deployment for a given OSS package.
Retraining costs are actually equal to retraining costs seen elsewhere with commercial packages.
Frankly, the use of OSS typically depends on the following factors:
Size of budget for deployment of a service or application
Size of staff and experience that they may have in a given environment
Commitment to the use of internal development when needed, to support customization
Use good common sense, and careful analysis, to determine if the company will see a cost savings by the use of OSS.
If I get an 800 number, and support your open source questions in better average time than MS et al, can you get your company to pay me big bucks?
(I know, this model hasn't really worked that well in the real world, but my overhead is lower since I have no buzzwords and am not planning an IPO.)
Then I went to work for a big-5 consulting firm, and on one of the jobs I was forced to drive an hour and a half each way to a client who was paying $175/hour for me to take that cable out of the plastic bag, attach one end to a UPS, and the other end to a server.
They refused to do that job themselves, because they had contracted with us to do it. No matter that the job was charged to them "Time and Expenses" at rates the top whores in the country would be embarrassed to charge.
That said, most Fortune 500 companies won't use open source (note how Apple, IBM etc. already do, however!). This makes them easy pickings for the likes of a Microsoft to seize control of all proprietary software and start draining money out of these Fortune 500 companies- which can happen for a _long_ time before the Fortune 500 companies are severely weakened.
In the bottom line it becomes a question of efficiency above all. Yes, huge corporations like to outsource this sort of thing, but if other huge corporations can get an advantage in margin or efficiency by taking on IT responsibility themselves, over the long run they will beat up on the corporations that are overspending on Microsoft licenses and continually wasting human resources keeping up with Microsoft's ever-increasing accounting demands. Complying with a Microsoft audit costs MONEY. For a huge corporation the human costs of labor and wasted time could be nearly as much money as the actual license fees in question- and the audits won't stop coming.
Basically, any Fortune 500 company sticking determinedly to proprietary software is supporting not only itself but is also supporting its vendor in a sort of charity. If that vendor is Microsoft, the cost is very impressive- even staggering. You have to include the accounting costs of audits, the 'runtime' of the relationship as well as the actual products themselves.
This could prove fatal for such companies in the long run if their direct competition includes more self-contained companies.
Take a look at MySQL Myths Debunked
MySQL is free, and contrary to popular belief, is just as powerful as the for a huge price + 1000 times the size alternatives. It's also supported by a modest number of companies if you'd like to pay big bucks.
I was the only guy I knew driving a truck full of drywall who even knew how to SPELL Unix. (or spell in general for that matter... (g) ) Fortunately, I was able to get a job working for NASA as a Unix admin... Quite a difference. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I've known LOTS of Unix geeks who were working in Microsoft shops because that was all they could find. I knew a Linux guy who worked in steelwork because he could find nothing else. And it's not like the Baltimore/Washington area is lacking in technology firms.
Tell your friend to keep trying. Learn as much as possible, become the best developer or admin he can, keep pursuing his desires, and eventually things will work out. Imagine carrying a sheet of 14' drywall across a muddy construction site in the rain, having it snap over your head, your feet wet... your body aching. Every time a user comes in the door and asks me a stupid question; every time I can't get something to compile; every time I start to get frustrated, I sit back for a minute and reflect on that past. And I'm glad I had the experience. Now I can truly appreciate my job, and recognize that I am fortunate to only have the problems I do.
> using free (or low cost) open source software
:)
open source software does not require you to pay an amount to get the source. In the old days, some (even Richard Stallman) earned some money selling a packaged medium whith the source, since that would be easier than from the dangling primordial web.
Today, you usually pay for opensource software when you want to receive a CD with all the stuff a box usually gives you (books, assistance, etc).
Bottom line: if you want, you can contribute some money by getting software that way: more expensive than for free, but certainly cheaper than closed source.
As to examples of usages, a bank association in Portugal (composed of almost if not all portuguese banks) has a large number of services based on linux, as well as solaris, irix, hp-ux, aix and yes, windows. Not everybody is that enlightened, or it is something that's needed and just isn't there for linux.
I don't know the exact percentage, but linux is not the smallest one
And, specially because of getting something for a far smaller price (zero) we are using tomcat each time more than jrun, which has an exorbitantly expensive licensing fees.
Hugs
I'd like to know what legal problem the LGPL poses. I'm not aware of any, and as my project Mojo Nation is released under the LGPL, I would be concerned if there were any.
Oh -- well I suppose the LGPL does prohibit you from altering the code and releasing your variation without contributing the changes back to the open source project. I could see a lawyer considering that to be a big problem.
Regards,
Zooko
I guess I would have to disagree, even on the average level. I'm actually amazed at the general ignorance of most Unix admins I encounter. Especially the group on /. who considers themselves experts because they can make it through a Redhat install.
As far as the number of admins. That has little to do with the OS, but much more to do with the solution being supported.
It's the number of day to day requests for work that say how many admins you need. Supporting a File/Print server requires signifigantly more work than supporting a database server, at least as far as the server admin is concerned because file/print shares are not static, new users come in the door daily, printers are added, replaced, etc.
But that's only because on a database server, most of the work is done by the DBA. Then again this depends on your environment. 2-tier apps require more DBA work than n-tier. Ongoing development requires more work than static third party applications, etc.
if a manager spends less than his/her budget for a given year, that manager gets less money the next year, even though the manager has done what seems to be the right thing for the company.
That depends on the company and the situation. If the order comes down from on high to reduce overhead because sales are flat, they will certainly try to find ways to cut costs. I don't understand why they don't just concentrate on getting the job done and doing it as efficiently as possible instead of trying to increase the amount of money their little fiefdom receives. I mean if running a tight ship means that you will have a better P/E ratio and make the investors happy, why not do it?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Unfortunatly, Fortune 500 is not driven by cost alone. Senior managers are driven by other motives, including reputation of the closed-source vendor company, white papers by big consulting companies (who have the same feeling about said vendors), owning shares in said vendors (illegal but it happens), and of course, the old "no one ever got fired for buying [fill in the blank]".
I hope your white paper is successful, but after 2 years in a Fortune 10 company, I'm not too optimistic.
Right.
And, add vendor independence. If F500 companies are concerned with the best, then having the flexibility to choose the best support, and switch support service without switching software. That should hold some value to a F500 company.
Exactly! My company is making a painful transition from an publishing package that has proprietary file formats to XML because the company that makes oru original publishing software is dropping support. If we had been using a package without a proprietary file format, transition to different software would be a lot less painful, and we would not have had to worry about how to support old doucmentation. Since the new tool could read it.
You said - to the average Corp, the ability to modify software means precisly dick!
That's like saying, to the average corp., the ability to renovate your own building means nothing. Corporations which are not builders still need builders to renovate their buildings. Similarly, corporations which are not software developers need software developers to make customizations to their software. That is, if the software is actually useful to the organization.
In fact, most large commercial software packages come with source by default - like Oracle Applications, SAP, etc.
If your business relies on software, you _need_ the ability to modify your software. If your business doesn't rely on software at all, you're right, you probably don't need to modify it. And trust me, if your organization is of any considerable size, you do rely on software.
You said - It's often hard to get good support of OSS. Good in this case means timely.
Have you read the support contracts for VA Linux servers? You can cheaply get 2 hours service time almost anywhere.
You said - If it ain't broke don't fix it. When our commericial software does what we need it to do, why SHOULD we switch, and risk failure?
You are risking with going with proprietary software. If your company relies on its data, you have to ask yourself the question - who owns my data? If you are like most companies, the answer isn't you. Your data is worthless without the programs to operate it on. And you certainly have no control over those, if you use proprietary software.
The main question you asked was, "is it cheaper?" I don't know about anyone else, but the reason I use free software is the freedom, not the price. Do corporations care about freedom? Of course they do! Ask any CEO if they would want their future to be tied to the future of their suppliers. My guess is that all of them would say no, and that it would be worth more money to untie them from suppliers.
Engineering and the Ultimate
You said - Unfortunately OSS engineers typically cost much more than MCSEs.
I have never seen that. Of course, I haven't look around a whole lot. Most of the high-priced people are for proprietary UNIXs, not Linux.
Anyway, one reason UNIX admins are pricey is because a) they know what they are doing, and b) it takes fewer of them.
If you run your company using thin client X terminals, you could probably get away with only one SysAdmin. If a terminal breaks, you throw it away, and the SysAdmin only needs to admin a) The application server (probably need 1 for every 50-100 people), b) The database server c) The mail server, and d) the web server.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I've got to believe that the first order obvious effect is the license fees are reduced to zero. As MS adopts this new pay-as-you-go model, that makes the arguement even stronger!
I've believe that MS going to pay-as-you-go will only make our argument stronger, and may very well be the unexpected nail in the MS coffin put their by themselves. I think that corporate america is going to scream loud and long when this idea finally does go mainstream.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Well, if it's the Linux kernel, my company, Mission Critical Linux will gladly write you a contract to provide support. Our interfaces include phone, email, fax, and web, and we'll gladly fix your problems (whoever's at fault). A wide variety of support contracts, including 24x7. Just point your boss at us, and give us a call.
> Do the average Corp, the ability to modify software means precisly dick!
It means that you can take that source code and go to the vendor of your choice to get support. Don't like your current support vendor? Go elsewhere, with NO changes in your systems / software. Otherwise known as giving the user POWER (choice).
> If one of our HP servers goes down, we can be on the phone with a HP tech in less than 5 minutes. Trying getting a tech that quick with OSS, without paying through the nose in advance. Lost time == Lost Revenue
And how much do you pay for that HP support contract (I used to work with HP systems, trust me, you pay for that support)? So, you can pay for HP support or you can pay for OSS support. Of course, if you don't like the OSS support, you go to another vendor. You don't like the HP support, you go to...
Oh yea, it's proprietary, you have no option.
> Retraining isn't free. If you're using Software XYZ, it's going to cost quite a bit to train your staff to use Software ABC
True, but when the next, incompatible version of Software XYZ comes out, and you have to retrain on it, because they're phasing out support for your verson, what options do you have? When OSS Software ABC comes out with a new version, and you like the old version, you find someone to support it, and you don't retrain.
> If it ain't broke don't fix it. When our commericial software does what we need it to do, why SHOULD we switch, and risk failure? This ain't somebodys home Linux firewall box we're talking about here.
If you're happy with what you've got, and it works for you, keep it. If you're not happy with what you've got (for whatever reason), you ought to look at all the alternatives.
Corrected URL: http://www.missioncriticallinux.com
(or as a link)
sorry.
Note to self: check links before posting!
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
- Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
- OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
- Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
- OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
the sack of shit it is
This is inflammitory speech. This kind of language is designed to invoke an emotional response. People who know they do not have a logical argument use this kind of language. People with logical arguments do not need to result to this kind of name calling.
For the mission critical stuff [open source is] far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features.
Buzzword mania. Note how this poster tells us that all open-source software is insecure without backing up this claim with facts.
The facts are this:
- Sun, as an example of one of the expensive closed-sourced vendors this poster considers better than Linux, has 23 vulnerabilities reported in the year 2001.
- OpenBSD, in the same time period, has only had eight vulnerabilities reported.
Yet, we are supposed to believe that closed-source is always better than open-sourced systems.This person talks about vague "enterprise features" that open-source is supposibly missing without telling us exactly which enterprise features open-source is supposed to be missing.
In other words, this person is making a number of inflammitory emotional statements, and stating a number of opinions without backuping up those opinions with facts.
Moderators should not be moderating a post like this up.
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
In many cases, this isn't an issue, but where you're doing batch jobs on data, you want the fastest code you can get.
--
The problem is, the guy stocking the store has no "real world" experience in Unix admin or production programming. Any idiot who can read can setup and install Apache/PostgreSQL/etc on a Linux box. While setting up Oracle and installing the ACS is more complex, it's still not that hard. Hell, I did it, and I'm a complete idiot.
Setting up a single machine, while somewhat impressive is not the same as building a functioning network out of a building full of oddball platforms and legacy applications -- which is very important in Fortune 500-type companies.
I'm not trying to put a damper on the guy's enthusiasm -- rather, I want to encourage him to expand his knowledge beyond simple administration of a single box. Make a trip to your local thrift store an pick up a few 486s on the cheap and integrate them into a home network. Mix and match -- don't focus on Linux only, stir in some Net/Free/OpenBSD, Windows and Mac (Mac SE/30s with a network card can be had for $30 or less, and can speak TCP/IP).
Then set up a remote access service to your home network via modem, then a VPN with a friend. Congratulations, you've just worked through the major things that Big Companies are looking for in IT workers.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Large organizations have large numbers of people who ostensibly do tool evaluation and selection. The process itself is slow and expensive, parochial and error prone.
Vendor tools have a fixed cost of ownership based on what the vendor charges you. Add to that the cost of deployment. There are several components to that. One the physical cost of rolling it out. Two the cost of missing functions and having to replace them with more tools, a different process or paying the vendor to change the product. The time spent rolling it out. This is not trivial. Say for ssh tools you pay a vendor x thousands of dollars and most not all your macines are covered because they don't have an ssh for 'xyz123' OS. Now that's probably because there aren't that many of those around so the vendor will say no. Or lets say you need a different object model because your management console wasn't built to display 25000 objects that you have to track. So there's another fix and/or a completely different and more expensive way to deploy the tool to circumvent that problem. Then there are the plain broken things that don't work right or are completely dependant on something that doesn't work like no ssh support at all which ends up being a real PITA since now you have to do local management through the local console port.
Now in the open source world you have the costs incurred by being able to fix all of that. You can make whatever change you want and implement whatever functions you want. This assumes that the underlying functions actually can be built and aren't otherwise retricted by other licence problems like trying to write opensource ssh version 2 and not running afoul of the encryption libraries you would need to no that. OTOH you make all sorts of unusual changes like writing a high performance db for ddns/dhcp high speed zone transfers instead of the old crappy bind based flat sile gorp. Having said that don't underestimate the costs of having to build and maintain your own tools. Now that you have the ability to make all sorts of changes you will be expected to do so. You have to have some development discipline and good solid change management. And then you have to make sure that you can meet the performance requirements. A vendor tool might have been written for performance and for you reverse engineer the functions and run them in perl might not run fast enough. Or postgresql might not scale up large enough or what have you. And you're still not out of the licencing woods if the open source code has a licence that says basicall "I don't know it's not my problem - somebody might come after you" lawyers hate that shit.
Of course you don't have to worry about the vendor killing your tool. You do have to worry about being able to finish the job and hoping the developers don't quit.
When the point-N-click works, it's great. It all begins to turn to pooh when one of these things happens:
Never confuse a plethora of choices with real freedom. Never confuse pretty with useful. Never confuse slick packaging with thorough testing.
Where OSS such as Linux wins is:
Let's not even bother exploring the ugliness represented by layer upon layer of legacies and idealogically incompatible subsystems in the various Microsoft products.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
as the industry morphs from a widget/perpetual license to a service/subscription business model the above scenario will occur - just as if the lights go out if you don't pay the electric bill, or your cable is disconnected if you don't pay the cable co., your software will cease to work if you don't pay the subscription fees.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If you can show that the software in question
breaks less frequently and/or is quicker to
configure, in other words that it consumes fewer
human-hours, in my opinion you have a very strong
argument.
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
How would open source solve this?
You look at some options. Some are open source and free, some are not free. You choose the free one. The non-chosen vendors sue for "misprocurement".
Uhh... Windows 3.1? I have yet to see a properly-configured Win32 (sic) machine hold it's own against a properly-configured Linux machine. Especially considering that any Win32 machine put under any sort of actual use tends to get unstable after, oh, I'll give it 48 hours max.
It all depends on where you go looking for information. There are plenty of security related sites out there that cover Linux.
And what's this bullshit about RPM patches? Have you ever heard of just compiling your own and being done with it? That is why such things are provided for download -- if something goes wrong, you can fix it.
I can hire MS engineers all day long too. Can I hire competent engineers of any sort all day long? I highly doubt it. MCSE's are a dime a dozen, but if something just happens to go wrong on that W2k server over there, what are they going to do to fix it? "Oh, reboot the machine, it'll all be fine." Er.. stability?
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
One thing that primarily open source shops (and I'm talking about someone doing more than using BIND and sendmail out of the box and serving static pages with apache) would seem to need is someone with a lot of programming ability. And I don't mean light scripting in perl or shell, someone well-versed enough in C to be able to make reasonably complex new apps or modifications to existing apps.
I work with both OSS and Windows applications, and it seems that the Windows applications are unreliable but have better feature sets. The OSS applications are more reliable, but often seem missing the features I need or require some kind of a middleware application I don't have the skills or time to tie together into a coherent whole.
Unfortunately OSS engineers typically cost much more than MCSEs.
Not if you are comparing people of similar skill levels, and you should. If you hire a "dummy" to run your systems... then the problem is you have a "dummy" running your system, and you get what you pay for. If you hire a highly skilled UNIX or OSS engineer and a highly skilled MCSE, chances are the cost is not going to be that much different. If the rewards for building skills aren't there, why would anyone want to pay all that money to become an MCSE? Microsoft must be lying to someone -- they tell workers "become and MCSE and make buttloads of money" and they tell bosses "hire MCSE's, they don't make jack squat compared to real engineers".
While there may be a lot more MSCE's than UNIX or OSS engineers out there that are "dummies" because of the effort that has been made by Microsoft and their partners to push a lot of people through training classes and whatnot, I have to say "Who cares?". I don't know why you'd want that sort of person in your employ. And if you have to pay about the same amount per person, then UNIX or OSS typically wins because most people find that they need fewer people to support UNIX and OSS systems than they do Microsoft based systems because they break less often.
One of the big myths about Microsoft's stuff is that it is "easier" to administer or somehow less complex than *nix. I don't think that is true at all. It merely hides its complexity under a GUI that lulls people into a false sense of understanding. But when things break, the complexity underneath can rear its ugly head, and since so many things inside the black box are secrets people often find themselves unable to solve problems without help. *nix on the other hand puts everything right out there in the open, which can be daunting for a newbie, but by forcing people to do their homework up front, they build real understanding more quickly, and get to use and build on that knowledge faster.
What about libraries with a BSD license? I'm trying to decide between LGPL and BSD for my new library (a big one) and have been leaning towards BSD, but haven't ruled out LGPL. If my library were of use to you, would LGPL vs BSD make a difference to you>
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Will somebody please explain to me what-in-the-hell-exactly are "enterprise-level features?"
I mean apart from costing an arm, two legs, and the soul of your first born.
As far as your later point about the company needing to write half of the software they need, wouldn't you agree that the majority of large businesses *do this anyhow*? On one level or another.
Blech. Signatures.
If I want to get Sun's C++ compiler for SPARC Solaris, I need to get a purchase order, I need to wait for the software to arrive, I may need to wait for a CD-ROM to arrive, I certainly need to wait 24 hours for my host-specific licensing information to be processed by Sun. As the project grows, I need to ensure we have enough licenses; if we don't, I need to go through the whole deal all over again. That's a lot of my time. (I've done this on several projects.)
If I want to get g++, I download it.
I can assure you that at least two Fortune 500 companies use gcc/g++ as their production compiler for commercial software. (Only LGPL libraries are used; great care is taken to avoid GPL libraries.) Sorry, no names.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
The greatest cost to any large IT department, by far, is personnel. Every $80,000 employee costs the corporation over $120,000 in salary, taxes, benefits, etc, PER YEAR. The cost of Web development tools, web servers, etc, is maybe a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. If a company is paying over $100k a year for a developer, they don't mind paying a few thousand for a development tool.
Open source tools cost an IT deparment more _in salary_ because they are more difficult to learn. MCSEs cannot charge as much as unix admins.
There are some pieces of software that are prohibitively expensive, like Oracle. However there are no open source equivalents.
Not to mention, corporations have not shown themselves to be very eager to reduce software costs. Otherwise they would buy IBM's DB2 at $20,000 rather than Oracle8i at several million dollars. Both have roughly the same features.
If you're dealing with a Fortune 500 company, you are dealing with a company that already invests serious resources in supporting software and software users -- OR -- a company that may well use IBM Global (Solutions|Services? I forget which). In either case you've got some arguments.
First the IBM case:
IBM GS has Linux knowledge and the ability to provide reasonable support for a number of Open Source tools (hey! They do WebSphere, you know).
Depending on how far up the Fortune 500 you are, you may or may not have savvy folks on site, however.
The other case:
The company is already spending a fortune and probably has a great deal of expertise it doesn't even know about. An audit of possible uses is likely to turn up savings sufficient to fund some level of internal support. The more machines to leverage, the cheaper that internal support becomes in relation to the Windows/etc licenses saved.
I'm amazed more people aren't more familiar with SAMBA - If you're not: /home/httpd/htdocs/ as their I:\ drive in windows and/or update the MySQL database via ODBC.
Take an old box at home and set it up as a SAMBA server. Get to know it well.
Figure out how to make it the PDC for your home network and do logins and share printers.
(You'll probably need to download the latest version if you want to authentication on Win2K clients, since it's a fairly recent capability.)
Webmin makes it easy to administer, too.
Then do a gap analysis to see what features W2K server has that you need. You'll be surprised at how robust and transparent it can be to the users.
Plus, if you have Linux developers in your shop, they'll appreciate being able to map to their ~/ directory, or to be able to ssh in from the road to acess their files securely. (I can even do this from my handspring visor.)
If you don't skimp on hardware and you don't load up the box with every known program and service, you should have a nice stable setup to present to management.
Then, document the hell out of everything, especially how to add/delete users and reset passwords, in a way that any MCSE in training could understand.
Maybe do this on a secondary network, until you are comfortable with your skill/ the hardware/ the software. Tell management that you need SMB on Linux for some of the network tools such as SSH.
Perhaps your intranet is the place - Apache on Linux is a lot easier to use if the content producers can map
I've done a few pages on my experience setting this up on my website: Wirefarm take a look at "Section 2" halfway down.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
-- My Weblog.
gcc and Sun's compiler will have different bugs. You wouldn't release a product without testing it, so you should always use the "final" tools. Look at how many gcc bugs Linux hits each week. Compiler bugs are usually subtle, so you'll need lots of test-hours to adequately QA your product.
I know some developers who always compile with full optimizations and don't even use their compiler's debug symbols and features when compiling. They test what they ship. There are some compiler bugs that only show up in optimized builds.
cpeterso
>The cost of software is one of the lowest cost points for corporations.
For most applications that's undeniably true. This guys best bet is to focus on the flexibility and customizability of most Open Source programs.
On the other hand, I do know a lot of Unix shops who use quite a bit of Linux and BSD precisely because of it's low (free) cost. They still use commercial Unix's like Solaris, but they use Linux and BSD for think like print servers, internal DNS servers, etc. Linux and BSD are also handy for inexpensively giving each of thier developers thier own individual Unix box!
Bullshit. I work for a division of a fortune 100 company. We use lots of Open Source software including Linux.
We *also* use a lot of proprietary software, including Windows NT, AIX, Solaris, and Novell.
We use whatever we think works best for each particular situation. Some Open Source programs have compelling advantages, including price, customizability, and (for some programs, like OpenBSD) security.
Will this guys paper convince CEOs and CIOs to drop all of thier proprietary software? Hell no. But it might make help them to understand what their tech staff already knows. Open Source programs *can* sometimes be a valuable addition to any IT departments "bag of tricks".
That's actually really true. That's also why there are thousands of people who "consult" for fixes to Windows problems and charge beacoup bucks for it. What's needed is a nationwide group of linux admin/hackers (probably certified from RedHat or something) that know their shit to fill this "void" in the Linux world.
:)
Here is how I envision such a process working:
Company has problems with it's Linux boxen, calls for help.
OnSite consultants come out, assess the situation, and fix the problem if it's readily apparant. If not, they call back to the core, which happens to consist of a few programmer/hacker types who delve into the code and debug/add new feature, what not. Submit patches to appropriate groups, fix customer's problem, get paid, move to next problem.
I have a feeling, though, with Linux's stability reputation, such a group would be like fixing Maytag's.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I share the same philosophy. People and corporations use UNIX *and* Windows. Might as know both and expand your options. I want to be familiar with both platforms so when i make the jump to Oracle DBA work, I'm not limited to "Oh, I only know how to use NT" and other such nonsense. (Basically, not only will I be a DBA, but also a qualified SysAdmin if need be. I'll charge accordingly, as well. :) ). But that's a few years on down the line.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Actually, it may have nothing to do with OS workings, but applications for the OS. There's tons of Point of Sale stuff out there, available only to Windows platforms. A switch to OSS would require paying the application to port the software (if they're willing) or hiring some programmers to create a custom solution (which will probably not be OSS). Just a thought...
I've also found that the typical office user doesn't give a rat's ass about Microsoft, Linux, whatever. They just want the computer to do what they need to do and get out of their way. They go home to watch TV or to bars, at which point computers are meaningless to them. The problem is, you can't reasonably expect a user to switch from a full-featured Office Suite to a lesser one on the promise that "things are getting better all the time". It's like having Air Conditioning all your life and then someone telling you you can't have AC anymore. "Fuck You Jack!"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
linux / opensource are only free (as in money) if your time is worthless
Expensive, but consider the cost of a wrong cable, or plugged in backwards, or some such.
Serial cables can be strange beasts, and UPS cables seem to be stranger than most. $600 is a lot for pluggin in a cable, but pretty cheap for keeping a "maintained by HP" status.
... until you try to 'do' something with it.
Yep. NT is stable as long as you do not use the GUI.
About a major bank using Linux:/ pressreleases/2001/banco_linux_mainframe_050301.ht ml.
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/news
Here's a sample:
In the first phase of the project, Banco Mercantil has consolidated the workload running on 30 existing NT servers into one Linux for S/390 image on a single IBM mainframe. Later, applications currently running on Sun and HP servers will be moved to the new Linux for S/390 image.
Not too shabby for a first step. And, IIRC, they ran it on an existing box. Consolidating boxes makes IT guys drool.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Cygnus is responsible for the software. The contract that you sign with them says so. You pay money, you report bugs, they're required to fix them, and give you binary and source code updates.
They are very much responsible for the software. Their software developers are some of the most knowledgable on the gnu compiler collection.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Huge fallacy.
Next time they say that they need someone to blame, make them read the EULAs they agreed to. There is not a chance in hell they are going to be able to blame Microsoft. It's the same thing with free/open source software, but at least they can take any problems into their own hands as the source is available.
Besides, you have much more choice in the support you get for Linux. If MS doesn't want to help you (likely), tough shit. If your Linux support provider doesn't want to help you, go to another one.
adminning 1 NT box is easier than admin'ing 1 UNIX box.
increase each to 100, and all of a sudden, you need a whole bunch of NT admins to go around and point and click all the boxes, but the unix guy would write a script, and then do it.
i do hear that this disparity is a whole lot less prevalent with 2k, and that the enterprise management is fairly nifty, so this comparison may not hold true anymore.
tagline
... hi bingo
what i am talking about here is the average level.
on average, on a scale of 1-10, it is my opinion that your "average" NT admin is about 2-3, and your average *NIX person is 4-5.
i have also found that the number of admins is usually with *NIX much less than you need with NT.
tagline
... hi bingo
most companies DON'T make money off of software.
you, like "real" companies that make "real" products. These kind of companies have accountants that get all hot and bothered because they can reduce the number of screws in a widget by 2, so they can save 3 cents per widget.
"closed source" is an expense. pure and simple.
one day, the bean counters are going to wake up, and say "geezus, we are now paying MS about $500/employee/year just so we our employees can send email, use MS Office and play MineSweeper(tm). On top of that, we have constant hardware upgrades, and our IT staff takes up 20% of our budget, and they are a bunch of high school educated people with a "certification" from microsoft, and no formal college training... and we're paying them on average $60,000 a year on average so they can point and click to keep our network running correctly"
For the VAST majority of businesses, IT is a cost center. It produces no revenue. In times of economic hardship, cost centers get reduced or eliminated.
The economic argument is a good one, dont underestimate it. Companies are not going to roll over and play nice forever. they bought MS's line of shit that using MS products will "make" them money. Watch. Its coming. I know of one Utility that is looking at their IT budget, thats at 20% of total expenditures and saying "wtf, we arent in the computer business, why are we spending so much money on it".
tagline
... hi bingo
however, you need 3-4 times the number of MSCE's, coupled with the fact that teh skill level and knowlege of MSCEs is so much lower than a *NIX guy.
but hey - thats what you get when you dumb down server admin to be point and clickable.
tagline
... hi bingo
On the subject of someone to blame, more recently it's becoming someone to sue.
If you've got a license arrangement with a third-party solution provider then you've got a body to claim against if it all goes horribly wrong.
If your customers are going to take you to court, you want to pass that buck along, and that's what companies are really prepared to pay for.
Instead of going for a predetermined conclusion (ie Open Source must be better because that's my own personal religion), try going for something a little less ambitios - say the conversion of Utah to Catholicism (jk!!)
Seriously, don't aim for the conclusion that open source is better. Try instead for something a little less sweeping and make a case that at least one open source product should be included as an option when each purchase decision is made. It wouldn't be hard to make an excellent case to purchasing departments for OSS projects to be the standard that must be exceeded before a new software purchase order is filled.
You don't have to make the manager's decisions for them - that's what their job is, not yours. What you need is to make sure OSS is ALWAYS one of the options that is put before them.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Wow!!
.sigs somewhere, realised I knew what it meant and suddenly got a chill through me as I understood how much of my brain was filled with utterly useless things and how much time I wasted at a debug prompt in DOS.
:-)
I got as far as the Meaning when I originally saw it in a list of cool
I love your translation though. Makes my geek sig a lot more philisophical.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Thats a gross generalization.
I know extremely brilliant MCSE's. Yes, the NT4 certification has been dumbed down. Yes, they're fixing that in the 2000/XP exams. No, that doesnt mean all MCSE's are idiots.
I know extremely ignorant UNIX admins. Most are blinded by their hatred of anything not open source to be an excellent sysadmin. Others just follow the crowd. Some use linux and then come to a true unix platform... then claim to know everything there is.
I know extremely talented UNIX guys, too. I also know a fair share of dumb-as-a-brick NT guys. In the world there is all types.
My personal philosophy is utilize the best of both worlds. Unix is arguably best suited for some applications (Web service, Database Services). Windows is arguably best suited for others (Domain Management, E-Mail and Collabaration Tools).
This is why I have a SCSA and MCP, and i'm working on getting my MCSE. I believe knowing the subtleties of both a popular and strong unix and a widely-accepted NT make me just that much better as a sysadmin.
This philosophy has earned me my last two positions - both with fairly large companies. IME, the big companies are sick of the egotistical banter of the stereotypical overzealous Unix Admin and the General ignorance of Stereotypical Paper MCSE's - and they have implemented filters to prevent such attitudes bringing their attached wetware into the company. IT Workforce managers, like the stock market, have come to realize the gross orgasm of the previous few years is over. Now things normalize.
Just my $0.02 1/2
Um, no.
If I want to get Sun's C++ compiler, I go to their try and buy page, and download it.
It stops working after about a month. That's more than enough time to decide whether you like it, and if you do, to go through the purchase order and whatnot.
24 hours for licensing information? It took me twelve minutes. Most of that was waiting for Timothy to get off the damn phone and let me call up.
(Note, I happen to be a regular contributor to GCC. So please don't think I'm slamming GCC. I just don't like the smell of fresh bullshit wafting from my monitor.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Cygnus doesn't even exist anymore. It was acquired by RedHat a long time ago.
/. since before the acquisition and haven't seen anybody complain. So I'm assuming that they're still in business, doing what Gilmore and crew created them to do.
While Cygnus has been absorbed by Red Had, my understanding is that they still provide open-source support contracts for a fee. It's just that they're now part of Red Hat (and doubling as Red Hat's support department), rather than an independent entity.
If that has changed I (and a lot of other people) would like to know about it. B-)
But as far as actually HIRING them I have indeed been out of the loop for a while - since I don't have to buy open-source support in my current situation. So if Red Hat DID break them I would only know about it if somebody complained - like here on Slashdot.
I've been reading
And that includes spiking the perenial "Who will support me?" objection to open source applications and system components.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Whenever I try to get my employer to try some open source app, the main thing they scream about is upport. If it breaks, they want someone to blame/fix it, and they are willing to pay big bucks for that.
Then contract with Cygnus Support!
That's what they DO!
(Besides upgrade many of the Gnu tools, cut distributions, and maintain archives for them - with money from the support contracts.)
Think of Cygnus as a software company that happens to put its products under the GPL. Or think of it as a service organization specializing in GPLed software tools.
And they're no pikers, either.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I had to do a paper in school (a Unix Admin class at U. of Maryland) on this exact topic. I found out that a very good argument can be given for open source products such as Apache, Sendmail, Linux, Free BSD, etc. so long as you can get the proper TRAINED professionals to manage the software and as long as you can keep the TCO down by utilizing stable equiptment and software that is well tested. Fortune 500 companies dont really care about buzz words, they want products with support channels and proven performance. I think with companies like Red Hat and IBM supporting Open Source prioducts we will see more adoption in fortune 500 companies.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
I've worked at places where purchase orders could be done quickly. I know companies like that exist. However, in most of the places I've worked, a P.O. takes longer than a month. Sometimes several months.
Likewise, I've always gotten initial keys promptly. Replacement keys after a hardware failure sometimes take much, much longer.
I think you accidentally replied to my post, but meant to reply to post #70 below. .V / _` (_-<_-<
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/
__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V
make world, not war
Yup, and for me personally, the chance I'll modify the linux kernel, or mozilla, or gimp, is (almost) nearly zip because I don't have the time or expertise to screw with the code. But I know I can recompile it if necessary, and because it's in the open, I also know it's (hopefully) relatively free of potential back doors. The merits of having something in the open can be worth more than the chance of modifying it directly.
In other words, don't lose sight of the other benefits of free software by concluding that it's a rare chance you'll actually modify the source directly.
It's often hard to get good support of OSS. Good in this case means timely. If one of our HP servers goes down, we can be on the phone with a HP tech in less than 5 minutes. Trying getting a tech that quick with OSS, without paying through the nose in advance. Lost time == Lost Revenue
Why should this be any different with an OSS support service provider? Someone above mentioned Cygnus. Can someone that uses them as support provide how long it takes to get ahold of them?
And in my own experience with HP (for their lab equipment, not computers) it usually takes damn long to get a competent engineer on the phone. Sometimes they call back an hour or more later. Of course, this is an entirely different line of product, where 24-hour uptime isn't mandatory.
Retraining isn't free. If you're using Software XYZ, it's going to cost quite a bit to train your staff to use Software ABC
Once again, how is this different from commercial software? No firm will stick with the same software for the next 20 years. And new employees will need to be trained as well.
Maybe the original author writing the whitepaper is talking about a new firm opening shop, or a new department forming. With two paths before them, with training costs at either end, OSS could prove quite cost beneficial.
And on my own little rant, many people love pointing out that OSS has a higher TCO due to retraining. For instance, it might be cheaper to upgrade an office to winxp instead of migrating to linux. But these people forget that it's a One-Time jump. Once the office is running linux, there's no more jumps to linux to be made, and upgrading to newer kernels is now essentially free (sysadmin paid time only).
If it ain't broke don't fix it. When our commericial software does what we need it to do, why SHOULD we switch, and risk failure? This ain't somebodys home Linux firewall box we're talking about here.
If that's true, we'd all be still running DOS, or earlier. There's always software that does what you need to do, but to keep up with current technological capabilities is usually important too. (Ie, would you want to keep using a non-WYSIWYG word processor if you didn't have to?) (And no dis to the LaTeX crowd, I love LaTeX, but whipping up a quick report for me is usually quicker with staroffice or equivalent).
You're right in that just jumping the linux bandwagon without looking isn't necessarily a wise move. But to carefully plan out a strategy to get the most out of available software with the potential to also minimize the cost, can prove to be an attractive option to some companies. Especially the ones either early in development or without much funding. .V / _` (_-<_-<
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/
__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V
make world, not war
The MS Licensing schemes (or scams?) are their bread and butter. I can't put into words my disgust when I spec a server from Dell or Compaq and it looks really cheap until I factor in say 25 CALs and W2K Server. Pay-as-you-go? I'll be one of the first engineers to take a number for the angry complaint line if a server goes down because it's time to renew my subscription and I have many angry people wanting to know why...
...
I can see it now, the upper management will hold an emergency meeting to run the IT dept (or outsourced guys) through the wringer...
Stuffy Corp Exec: "How could this have happened? How long will it take to have the systems back on-line and functioning properly?"
Witty Network Admin: "That's just it, the systems are functioning properly. They're simply denying logons and not allowing anybody to access shares or printers. The Event Logs indicate that our licenses have expired!"
Stuffy Corp Exec #2: "Isn't it the responsibility of your department to maintain our equipment and keep us current on our licensing?"
Witty Network Admin: "It is indeed. We have kept this network running flawlessly. We made our request for licensing funds more than 2 months ago. I do have a question to pose: where in the grand scheme did my PO request for updated licensing fall?"
Idiot Numbers Guy: "It never made it past my desk. I didn't see any ROI (Return on Investment), when it came down to brass tacks. I don't see why it should have failed, we bought the software and licenses, we should be able to use it."
yea, I think we already know the way things go with open source and free software...the only money involved is for the hardware, and time to configure properly. Maintenance in a well-designed environment should be drastically less money bound. All it takes is the systems being given to the people with the right skills.
I have worked a number of such companies (some European but of Fortune 500 scale) which do use open-source tools - such as gcc, gdb, DDD, emacs, Samba, Apache, myriad other open-source development tools and even Linux.
The reasons were that such tools were in some cases: better, more standard, cross-platform, robust. In the case of Linux it was a platform which was x86 based (removing some endian issues) and would recompile our Solaris code without much change (we had problems with Solaris for x86) and lived happily on our network.
I think most larger corporations require some advanced groupware software to disperse bulletins, communicate with normal corporate BS, scheduling, etc. and if you know of one right now in Linux, let me know, because that's one of the few things that's kept Win2K on my computer.
---
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
When you are talking databases, you can frankly ignore Microsoft. MS SQLServer has its features, but ultimately, you are stuck with an MS only product. Simply put, you don't want your database to be MS only. If your needs are simple, many opensrc databases can do the trick. If your needs are complex, you probably need some more support and should go with a proprietary job (Oracle, DB/2, etc). If your queries are simple, MySQL is pretty tough to beat. However, if you are doing more sofisticated transactions, working with over 1TB of data, and thinking about failover and cluster, then you are pretty much talking Oracle-time.
As for the middle-tier, services, etc, you definitly want to go open source. There just is no need to use any web server other than Apache. MS IIS makes me want to puke. Everything from Perl, to Java Servlets, to JSP will fill your middle-tier needs. Services are abundant, from SendMail to OpenLDAP. NovellDirectorService (free but not opensrc) is also not a bad F500 app. For NAS needs, definitly go with Samba. It performs just as well as win2k as a CIFS server. Where you will find trouble is with things like Exchange. If they want Exchange, you will have to go with a mixed system.
However, the real question shouldn't be opensrc code or proprietary code. Because, frankly F500 company's dont give a shit about paying for something. The real question is MS or *nix. MS has some great products, but they don't play nice with others. So for me, the answer is simple. Once you reach a certain size, you are going to have a few Linux boxes, some BSD boxes and maybe even a Solaris box. And you will run a healthy mix of opensrc and proprietary code on those systems.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The example you mentioned in parathesis sounds more like a backend thing. Backends, especially in the banking industry, tend to be so old that they predate both open source and Microsoft in the server domain. Those systems tend to be running AIX or SCO.
You're welcome to use my company, TrustCommerce, as an example. We use open source software for pretty much everything, both web stuff and backend. Our processor runs millions of transactions a month and hasn't had a single moment of downtime in over a year. All of our web and frontend stuff is using open source software as well, but there are plenty of good examples of that from companies that will be far better known than us.
There's a big difference between 1% planned downtime which can be scheduled for the wee hours of a Sunday morning or a holiday and 1% failure-related downtime. A bare "uptime" number, while not devoid of significance, is not a terribly useful metric out of context -- 24/7 availability is a lot more important in a web server or firewall than in (for instance) a POP server.
Our IT staff (excluding the database people) is 3 in number, and yet we average 99% uptime.
99% is actually a poor number for uptime for many organizations. That translates to 3.5 DAYs down per year. Even for MickySoft that's kinda high.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
is by leaving the way for updates, upgrades, gutting, and redisigning of information systems wide open. having a free and clear migration path to other, better or more appropriate solutions is a great benefit of free/open source software that is not a common option in today's proprietary economy.
this, in my opinion, is a great selling point.
check out my comic: Essential Tremors
You must be the one joking. I work as a programmer for one of the largest brokerage houses in the world. I just finished coding an app that is going to be used by a lot of important clients.
It is written in Perl, running on Apache, using
OpenSSL, etc, etc... Why were OpenSource products chosen? Because they allowed us to actually make the app. Nothing in the commercial world was good enough.
I was talking the other day to a chap I used to work with - he now does pre-sales for $verylargeISPindeed. He mentioned in conversation that their mid-range Sun hosting solution now costs less than the bargain-basement NT/2k alternative. The reason? Their major cost is administration and the Windows machines like to know that you're there. The Sun machines can safely be left alone except when Apache or SSH needs updating.
This would apply equally (given decent hardware) to BSD or carefully chosen Linux installations and would avoid the situation, prevalent at my last employer, of having to employ hordes of expensive but clueless NT admins whose main job was to reboot/rebuild servers that had fallen over.
The advantage of open source to a company is to a great degree the same advantage as UNIX in general - reduced admin costs through stability and ease of administration.
Steff
Our problem was that we had a few laptop users coming into the building every once in a while from someplace else in the company and they were tired of all the changes they would have to make to their systems to work on our network (we were static IP). So, we pulled an old 486 from a storage room just before it was donated to a school and installed Linux and set it up as a DHCP server. We didn't want it on our production systems because they were old and we didn't want to put on the extra overhead. After the solution had proven itself for a few months, everyone moved to DHCP and we upgraded the hardware to a P120 and everyone was happy. No new hardware to support the new OS purchase. No need to go and do maintenance on the server since it would stay up. The only costs were my salary while I built the system (3-6 hours since I was still learning my way around) and the electricity to run the box (no monitor because everything was done via telnet).
Another group in the company was using a RedHat system as the corporate bulk mailer. I didn't like the idea our company was into that kind of thing, but it made sense to use Linux for it.
The point is that corps. will always want someone major to back their critical systems. They are also more conservative that individuals or small companies. They don't like risk and don't want to be the first to put their business into the hands of something they don't know about. Concentrate your paper on how non-critical systems/products can be shifted over to OSS at a lower price. The fact that major corps are embracing OSS is something you might want to mention, but until more depend upon it, most corps won't go that direction.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Is open source actually improving their business somehow? I am not so sure about it. Take for example Oracle 9i AS. This web solution is based on Apache Web server and adds a value to this, great Java support and enterprise level of caching technology with a patented solution for cashing dynamic content. With what open source solution you want to replace it? Its already using all from open source that is avaiable and just adding more value to the whole package. You don't have anything in open source that could really replace this. (And no, don't even think about OSS application servers like Zope. They are just a joke. Sorry.)
Its all working cool for small business and it would work maybe even for larger companies, but you are not looking in Fortune 500, maybe in Fortune 50000 :))
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
for buying IBM...or Microsoft. Fortune 500 companies don't care about open source. They care about the service provided by the supplier, how long the supplier has been around. They'ed rather pay top dollar for hardware AND software than to hire people to keep Open Source running.
Exactly. And IBM was in the Fortune 10 last time I checked, so...
[|]
Yes. They already are. The suits just don't know about it yet.
Example: I work for an IT consultancy shop in $SOUTHERN_US_STATE. A large part of our business comes from @BIG_OIL_COMPANYS. Something like 90% of the code we write for them is in perl (even if half the time it's ActivePerl on NeanderthalTechnology(<-- 'Oog write operating system. Oog like color blue')).
Most of the time, clients couldn't POSSIBLY care less about whether tech FOO or tech BAR is used, open or closed, as long as it lets them do what they need to do. Becuase, let's face it, if they cared about this crap they'd do it for a living instead of whatever it is they do now.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
in most cases you're not paying for any actual support, you're simply buying a scape-goat.
... most problem-solving occurs when the user goes out and finds the answer in a 3rd party faq or website (im sure there's a rule for it, but it seems that the less affiliation a website has with a company, the more useful it's information tends to be).
i can't remember the last time i had a useful conversation or email with a support tech
of corse, you could just be spending that money on the Psychic Friends Network:
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
_f
I agree with the person that said your efforts will go down as a sack of shit.
> particularly the cost savings that can be
> achieved by using free (or low cost) open
> source software (OS's, Server, Utilities, etc.)
> vs typical (and more costly) Microsoft solutions
You should title your WP something more like 'Driving Out Costs with Free Tools'. Of course, then who would read that - a bit obvious. Just because a tool or app is open source doesn't mean that it is free.
Change your focus so you don't sound like such an industry lemming and you may have more success. For example, what can large companies gain from using _open_ product? First, they don't get reprimanded for customizing their products (note InformationWeek article about Oracle reprimanding customers for customizing tools that cost millions of dollars). Second, a real community of users that are familiar with the internals of the products seem to me to be more helpful than the support lines for most consumer products.
Oops - post getting to long. Good luck.
I've always thought that the "price" to pay for open-source software was time and patience.
If you are willing to wait, many open-source projects catch up and sometimes pass their closed-source counterparts.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
On IBM's web site they offer several different pieces documentation, some in powerpoint, on the merits of switching to Linux.
you may contact Cygnus, ask if they have any numbers, same with red hat.
And Yes, Fortune 500 is ready for Linux, they just don't know it yet.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Have the companies lawyer read the MS liscense.
Then have them read the GNU or GPL liscense.
Be sure thewy know you only have to release the code if you release a product. This should not be a problem for in house tools.
If you can get them a copy of the liscense for XP and passport, that should motivate in decent lawyer to advise the company to find another solution.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Good online support is not limited to OSS.
there are many good online help forums for VB. VB's real problem is anybody who can draw a form thinks there a programmer. I can not count the number of times I've been teamed up with other VB programmers who can't grasp Multi-dimensional arrays, much less OO techniques.but I digress
My point is there are many areas to get support for many different Technologies.
Personaly I use OSS where ever I can get people to listen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If used intelligently, yes. First of all, we've never sued Microsoft, Novell, etc. and we never will. That is a bogus argument, and you know it. Secondly, changing the software is useful. I've changed the source for our intranet search engine a couple of times, for good reasons, that couldn't be achieved without it. Similar functionality (according to the management/committee that looked at it) would be about $300,000 in licensing commercially. And we'd be tweaking, testing, configuring, supporting anyway. That is what IT departments DO.
This sounds alarming. Shouldn't you be asking whether there really are gains to be had before you start looking for statistics to show their validity? And if you really do know that there are gains, how do you know this without already having the supporting statistics?
It's this kind of attitude you need to overcome as much as the actual cost/benefit stuff.
circa75.com
Given that Fortune 500 companies are successful because they make the best use of their resources, it's not unreasonable that they might be big into Open Source behind the scenes. I've worked at one very big company for a bit and everything was Unix, open source, and a lot of home grown stuff. Also, last I checked, Apache accounted for something like 60% of all web servers out there. I'm willing to bet a lot of Fortune 500 sites out there use it. And, the last stat there is something that ought to comfort the suits. The point is that it's hard to say just what these companies use because they have no requirement to disclose that, and a good incentive not to disclose.
Did you forget that Star Office can import that MS Presentation (So you can keep that Corporate 'Theme') and go from there ... oh wait my Winblows just crashed.
Thank god, someone who gets it. The idea of most software providers is to give their customers access to a helpdesk (which usually isn't half as helpful as a tour through Usenet and/or IRC). Tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks! No way to drag a company like M$ to court and have a judge say they need to compensate you for your losses.
What about taking an insurance? It's always a nice idea to do that when you could get claims from customers, so that wouldn't change a lot. Maybe an insurance company could ask a higher fee if you work with Open Source (which they will think is of bad quality and prone to errors), but my bet is that you're still spending a whole lot less in this scenario. And let's face it, when was the first time proprietary software had a bug fixed sooner than any piece of Open Source software? So which software will be more suitable to run critical stuff in the end?
Suppose the same nasty bug is found in both IIS and Apache. It allows a hacker to break into the server and change the site. We all agree that this is very bad for businesses and if we're dealing with a co-hosting company, their customers will surely blame them if it happens. Now suppose a friend of mine and I both are co-hosters, he's running IIS, I'm running Apache. Guess who's going to be the first one to release a message stating that the bug has been fixed and the problem solved?
But suppose there's some quick hacker who hacks both our networks before any bugfix was released (no, I don't want the discussion again about what a hacker is, you all know exactly what I mean here, right? *grin*). The guys messes up a few sites and we both get huge claims from our customers. Now what will happen? Sure, I can't contact Apache and pass the claim to those people. But can my friend do that to M$? Don't think so. So, we're up to our necks in the same sh*t. Now suppose that one of us got himself a good insurance. The one who didn't, will be out of business before he can say bugfix while the other one simply forwards the claim(s) to his insurance company.
Now for the customers... The customers of our not-insured company suddenly lose their co-hoster and thus their websites! And the ironic part is, it's because of their own claims! Tough luck for both. The other one however, remains in business and can welcome some of the customers of the other one. I know I'd go for Open Source and an insurance!
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
I've worked as a sysadmin in several UNIX/Windoze mixed environments for quite some time. It always struck me to see that the Windoze guys outnumbered their UNIX colleagues by far. And more interesting: those Windoze people had work all day long, while the UNIX people had time to do things for themselves (did I hear someone mention the word training here?). Why else would you think I can post this many articles on /. every day *grin*?
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
It's often hard to get good support of OSS. Good in this case means timely. If one of our HP servers goes down, we can be on the phone with a HP tech in less than 5 minutes. Trying getting a tech that quick with OSS, without paying through the nose in advance. Lost time == Lost Revenue
This is why I'd go with Compaq or VA. I get hardware support for my Compaq Linux servers faster than I do for my NT 4.0 servers. Probably due to call volume for NT...but still.
Good luck getting MS on the phone in less than 5 minutes. If you can't find what you're looking for at the KB then you get to pay $250 to talk to someone. Then first level there will just read you the same Q articles you just read. In reality MS has a 24 hour problem fix time. I've never called them with a problem and had a resolution the same day. It's usually by lunch the next day. You can get that kind of support for Linux with newsgroups...and you don't have to pay. Granted most corps are dumb and like the ability to get a live person even if they have to pay. It's a security blanket I keep hoping they are going to grow out of. It's all in how you look at it. Just because you CAN pay for support doesn't mean you should.
After reading at least a half-dozen posts about how companies want support that OSS doesn't offer, I thought I'd ask whether the support offered by the likes of MS is really worth the money. On my current job, for example, where I'm using MS Access (yeah, yeah..), every time I've called MS' support, I've ended up solving my own problem. EVERY time. Maybe I've solved it a little faster than I would have, but in almost every instance the people who are helping me have as little clue as I do what could be causing the problem. For my money, the people who offer the best support are going to be those who know not only the application, but also the use to which the app is put. The help desk at the other end of the phone have no way of knowing that. (I guess this might apply mainly to databases, which is what I do, but still.)
To effectively compete with the Microsoft marketing office, one should create a set of presentation materials for just this purpose. If this presentation is "open sourced", perhaps in successive uses it can be optimized to address the concerns of larger companies with internal technical support departments.
Whenever I try to get my employer to try some open source app, the main thing they scream about is support. If it breaks, they want someone to blame/fix it, and they are willing to pay big bucks for that.
For them, it's a cost of doing business - and having someone ready on the other end of the phone at a moment's notice is well worth it. I'd imagine that a General Electric would have a much better service experience on the phone with Microsoft than would Turkey Joe's Software.
That being said, small to medium-sized enterprises can really benefit from OSS. Here's how:
1. The obvious. None of all those expensive licenses. Server licenses, client access licenses, end-user licenses . . . they really add up when you're in the 10-250 user space.
2. The not-so-obvious. These days, businesses are under the scrutiny of the software license police. Every unlicensed piece of software can cost the company $150,000 - that adds up in a hurry. Naturally, the auditors and SPA are more than happy to negotiate a multimillion dollar fine down to whatever they think the small business can pay - $80-100,000.
This results in a high business risk for using unlicensed software (one ad actually stated "You're one disgruntled employee away from an audit"); and a large cost for maintaining records in order to ensure compliance and defend against such an audit.
At my company, we have an employee that spends more than half his time just on software licensing compliance. Costly indeed.
Fact is, smaller enterprises don't often have the extremely complex data processing and networking needs that Fortune 500 companies have. And many (if not all) their needs can be met by using open source software.
If you're looking for corporate adoption of OSS, don't look in the Fortune 500 space. Look at the thousands of smaller enterprises out there.
That's where the revolution will be happening.
I don't know -- sometimes, there's less training and development time involved in using open source tools than using their closed source counterparts. CVS comes immediately to mind here. Most commericial source control tools require a lot of training for an organization to use effectively (training that the companies that develop these tools make a pretty penny off of giving), In addition, some of these tools need at least one or two full-time trained administrators to keep it running, answer questions, etc.
The licensing cost for closed source tools is sometimes only the beginning of the expenses. And the sad thing is, many of the extra features on these tools which requires the training in order to use either aren't used by the developers or used only because of a mandate from the PHB, whether or not they contribute to productivity.
Believe it or not, not including the support issues mentioned earlier, the "open source/free is better" stance also will likely run into serious opposition from the IT/IS/product development managers within those Fortune 500 companies, because any savings generated by using open source tools would translate into their budgets being cut by the resulting savings (unless they spent it on something else). That's how the really strange world of the big company budgeting process works: if a manager spends less than his/her budget for a given year, that manager gets less money the next year, even though the manager has done what seems to be the right thing for the company. Then, by extension, that manager would lose that much political prestige/status/karma/whatever you want to call it within the company, since they then have a budget potentially smaller than their peers.
Even stranger, I've seen cases where managers new to a company demanded what was the most expensive tool for a given task, even though the free tool fit the developers' needs better. It's all about "how important is this project?"
I know it sounds bass-ackwards (at least it did to me when one of my old bosses explained it to me), but that's the way it works in a lot of places.
Well, guess what, they all used GNU tools. OK, their workstations are HP and SUN. But their development tools are gcc/g++, make, CVS, gdb, awk, perl, ... (complete your list here).
Plus some proprietary components that they could not find in the OSS world, like Rational Rose, ORBIX ORB, and some commercial OODBMS.
That was in the 96/97 time frame.
So where did that leave us? Up the creek I can tell you. One call and a credit card later we were talking with Microsoft directly and playing the good old game of "Blame someone else." It is hard to get 1 company to support everything you run, especialy when you don't want to be a 100% Microsoft (or IBM) shop... IBM are close, but without MS support, even they are next to useless... I wish they just went for Sun kit for the web servers and workflow environment... Still I like MQSeries and we'd have to have that included in the picture... but at least that would only be 3 companies to play pass the buck with and not 4.
In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
I followed the link you provided over to IBM's 'Supported Services' page.
m l
http://www-1.ibm.com/services/sl/products/java.ht
Select:
Country=United States
Operating System=Win
Product Group=All
It appears that IBM is discontinuing all support of NT 4.0 and Win2k. Surely this is a misprint or something. Can anybody speak to this?
I hate Microsoft as much as the average Slashdotter, but dropping support for MS operating systems would be an incredibly bold move at this point in the 'game', especially by the likes of IBM.
Given the budget tightening at my company, I'm pushing for Linux as hard as I can. NT is such a PITA platform target (when developing Java-based server apps). Our entire group of developers is pro-*nix, it's the management who wants NT. I'd like to be able to point out that big companies are discontinuing support for MS because they think there are better (supported!) alternatives out there.
Stephen
In my experience NT is very stable until you try to 'do' something with it.
I set up a fileserver for my dad's office with NT4 Wkstn + sp6a. The thing has been up for over 4 months.
However, when I was running NT 4.0 wkstn as my personal workstation, the maximum uptime I ever got was ~21 days before the performance became unbearable. I used that workstation for running Netscape 4.x and Office 95/97 almost exclusively.
I just upgraded to Mandrake 8.0 from 7.0 (which rocks!, btw). I ran 'uptime' before I did so. 110 days uptime as a personal workstation. I primarily ran Netscape (which is notoriously crash-happy on Linux), development environments/code, installed tons of software, and Mozilla. The system was rock solid, all without a reboot and no degradation in performance for over 3 months.
My kick-ass Dell laptop (256MB + 550Mhz + 20GB) with W2k (work) has to be rebooted *daily*. Main applications: Netscape, Office97, Visual Studio (VB), Jbuilder3. That's bullshit. Stephen
I work for an unnamed company that is making the transition from a bricks/mortar biz to a clicks/mortar biz. I hate those buzzwordy terms, but that's the reality of it.
My job is to basically write the stuff that will power the web site, like a custom search engine and that sort of thing. I also build and maintain the databases behind the scenes. Nearly every aspect of the project I'm working on is rooted in open source/free software.
The three components of the package we're building are comprised of the following:
- Web server -- apache with PHP.
- Database servers -- PostgreSQL.
- Media server -- the only closed, proprietary product we use -- Microsoft Windows Media Services.
- Other behind the scenes stuff -- perl for some information indexing before it's stuck into the Postgres databases, gcc/g++ for adding some extensions to PHP, etc. My desktop, the one I'm posting from now, is a GNU/Linux box.
We've been developing using this stuff for months now and we haven't had any problems. We haven't needed tech support yet, but if we do, we've partnered with the right people who we can share info with -- they give us some help, we do the same for them.We are a business and intend to make a profit, and open/free software has given us such an edge over our few competitors (we're in a niche right now).
We're very proud to say that we use and support open and free software, and display all of the logos of the software we use quite prominently on our site. (Which I'm afraid I can't show right now because I'd like to remain semi-anonymous, or at least keep the company somewhat anonymous.) Every time we give presentations on our project, we make sure to tell the suits and anyone in attendance that we use apache and not IIS, GNU/Linux and not Windows 2000, PHP and not ASP and PostgreSQL instead of Oracle or SQL Server.
We're planning on giving back to the community, too. For instance, the extensions I've written for PHP are going to be released in full source, either through the PHP group or something to that effect. (They're mostly general use things useful for building search engines and such, like a Porter stemmer I just wrote and those kinds of things.)
Free and open source software has given us an edge. We may be a small company, but we're going well with it.
At least, that's been my experience.
J
Looks like you are working for MS as a bug finder(for free of course). In fact, you were even willing to pay them $255 to find their bugs for them, but even MS isn't so cruel as to take your money when they are getting your services for free.
Enigma
Enigma
The question is not: is he a troll?
The question is: is he right?
For Open-Source solutions (which is what the article was about) I disagree completely. There are plenty of Open-Source tools that meet enterprise demands... but then again, enterprises are already using those tools.
If the post refered only to Linux (misunderstanding the article), I suspect he has a point. Corporations have different "itches" than Torvalds et al, and I think most programmers prefer to get paid for solving "corporate itches". A commercial UNIX (or any BSD, for that matter) is probably a better deal for them.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
As a professional IT consultant who has actually worked with Fortune 500 companies in the past, I can say from experiance that your presentation will invariably go down like the sack of shit it is.
Why so harsh? Because your average Fortune 500 company (if there is such a thing) is not anywhere near the same level as a small business for whom open source can be a God-send, allowing them to decrease their costs and boost profitability.
No, your average Fortune 500 company has a large, dedicated technical team and most likely, an insanely complex IT system which has evolved over the last couple of decades. Changes to this are made rarely, and with great caution, because if things go wrong, then they're talking about millions of dollars of loss every hour.
Open source is simply wrong for these companies. For the mission critical stuff it's far too insecure and lacking in enterprise-level features. And since Linus's stated aims with the whole Free Software movement are to provide software for people like him, the necessary features aren't there, and aren't going to be there any time soon. Who wants Linux, when Solaris, AIX or HP-UX will do the job better, faster and with decent backup from a company that isn't going to fold within the year.
And then there's the desktop workstations. Never mind the TCO of implementing open source solutions here (a far greater factor than any one off costs like license fees), then there's the costs of re-educating staff and rolling out the solution. For a company with thousands of workstations, that is prohibitive!
And that doesn't even take into account the fact that said company is going to end up having to write half of the software they need, because open source coders are far more interested in writing new filesystems and graphics programs than genuinely useful software.
Sorry, but you're barking up the wrong tree here. I advise smaller businesses to go the open source root, but until Linus et al pull their pants up and turn Linux into a world-class enterprise platform, open source is not for the Fortune 500.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
They must be eager to generate work for their buddies in the legal department if they want to sue without winning.
They are looking for a company with the resources to make and keep promises.
Actually, I assume what they really want is a company that makes and keeps promises. Their mistake is in equating the two. Sure, M$ has the resources...
It's like when M$ pleads for the "freedom to innovate." You can picture John Cleese in a tunic saying, "what's the point of fighting for their freedom to innovate if they can't innovate?"
Well that's understandable. Now would one of those PHBs please cite one, JUST ONE, example of someone successfully suing Microsoft over the quality or reliability of their products or support?
That's odd...
My students are quite capable with Apache, CGI, and databases, but they have incredible difficulty getting someone to pay them anything. They've trained themselves on Free/OpenSource software because it's available, and because they can work with it and learn from it.
These folk will work for dirt cheap.
I ask my friend Ross, marketing analyst and owner of a company, "Why are you installing IIS? It costs much more than Linux, and a well maintained Linux system is far more secure, and comes with good free database software, should you ever decide to grow that way." He says, "Because UNIX admins cost $100,000/yr, whereas an MCSE lackey costs half that."
I've got one student who has set up ArsDigita Community systems, Oracle databases, Linux, FreeBSD, reads kernel source, and has written some programs in C, tcl, Perl, and Python. He's working as a stocker for some odd store. He's configured systems left and right. He's dying to get a $38,000/year job somewhere doing anything. In his free time, he works on studying embedded systems and attending GSLUG meetings.
He's not an isolated case, I have many other well talented students who are working hard and doing well, developing their talents.
They want jobs. Any jobs, just to show off their talent and get experience.
So when I read: "Unfortunately OSS engineers typically cost much more than MCSEs," I wonder: What crack is everybody smoking? There's plenty of great UNIX people out there. who will work for cheap..!
The parent company has a joint venture / partnership / whatever with MS. While we technically "pay" for MS products, so they can claim sales and revenue, MDF funds (don't ask me what they are) come from MS back to our company, and get applied to each sub business accordingly.
So, my take on the issue is, if they've got a deal with MS that sends money back somehow, don't expect much to change
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
"If I want to get g++, I download it."
That probably is a _very_ stupid idea. If you work in large corporations (and we are talking Fortune 500 here) you get fun with configuration management. At a large bank I worked for before you just had to order an upgrade to your development system and you got it. No worry about licenses, they have a corporate license anyway. But it takes time. It takes time for a good reason, they manage thousands of machines all over the world. You do not want to have some weirdo downloading stuff and destabilizing the environment (g++ does not qualify for that but there are other things that might).
Just my $.02
Actually, I agree. That's a good idea, and would be very appropriate. Especially since a key principle in Open and Free Software is to give back to the community.
/.s.
Also, I was a little surprised my comment got modded up, since it is partly an emulation of similar posts from previous Ask
Still I wonder about the line between good questions, and trying to get others to do part of your work (uncompensated).
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Dear Slashdot,
I work for a custom web solutions company and I'm working on a white paper and presentation that outlines the merits of open source software. This looks to be a difficult project, and I really don't want to to work late this week. Please use your unpaid minions to help me get my research done so I can I can enjoy the weekend.
OSW: Open Source Work -- Same great salary, but with reduced workload.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
A bunch of guys from our local LUG (nolug.org) got together and decided to see if we could do a little Linux advocacy, and make a few bucks along the way.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
You mean linux can make my computer blow up?
Integration is in fact one of the easy ways to get open source through the doors of a company new to the idea. For example, microsoft products are well integrated, but not easy integratable. Linux is often used in situations where it's compatibility / interoperability make it the best for the job.
On paper, you may well be correct, however, in my experience, the OSS guys are the ones who do it for fun and as such are often more motivated to do their jobs as well as a bit of background reading. If they cost a little more, they'll probably more than make up for it.
So you know where I am comming from: I have worked in the past for State Farm and for Motorolla. I currently work as a Programmer Analyst for a small but inovative development company. In your comments you state that to the average Corp, the ability to modify software means precisly dick!
:-)
I find this not only illogical, but untrue when it comes to corporate-infastructure systems.
All systems that I am programming are web based. This means that the company already has programmers hired to support and maintain the app-- hired either internally or externally. The ability of the programmer to view the code to the entire system is invaluable when working with complicated N-tierd applications. Having source code is not desirable, it is essential. When working on web-enabled programs the lines between system administration and support become blurred to the point that the system architecture IS the application. A system running a web server, a transaction manager, distributed applications, and a database to support them-- become integrated just like the components inside a car are integrated with each other. By having all of the source, you eliminate guess work and "calls to support", to figure out why database xyz, or webserver Q does not do what it claimed to do. As you stated, lost time == lost revenue
Should you have to call someone for hardware support, or software advice-- I can recommend IBM. They have 24-7 mission critical support-- just like HP (and from my experience with them at State Farm, IBM's OS390 and AIX teams have slightly better support than HP-UX, which is far better than Sun's. With Linux running on OS-390 support or scalibility are no longer an excuse.) But we don't like IBM, then try VA linux (or a whole host of others). VA had a major customer who ran into a bug in the linux kernel--VA flew out a design team who studied the problem and came out with a KERNEL patch within a WEEK! Sun can't even admit that they have bugs in the UltraSparc II Cache-- but this hardware reseller patched the freaking OS kernel! Let's see Dell do that to Win XP! Let me hear of someone calling up MicroSoft and not getting put on hold for $120 an hour. Let me hear of them actually getting listened to, and then let me hear of Microsoft responding by patching windows98 so that it doesn't crash, or that feature-API XYZ works as the book from Microsoft press said it would!
You also state that retraining is not free. What better way to avoid retraining than by basing as many of your apps as possible on web interfaces! Customers and workers only have to learn the web interface (if they do not already know it), and then training costs are forever minimalized! When using free GNU-sytle software to deploy these systems, you can deploy an OS, a web-server, a database, even a transaction manager at no upfront cost-- further cost savings which will off-set the one-time cost of re-training users on a web-interface!
You state that if it ain't broke don't fix it. I am a firm believer in Business Process Reengineering. I think that the people who pioneered computer science, the Web, Unix and most items of progress were not satisfied with your trite quote. They were dreamers who wanted things that worked better, not just good enough to satisy the pointy-haired boss. But if you find that commercial software does in fact meet a need-- such as Novell service directories or Microsoft Office-- then use it if you have it. However, don't forget that other options are going to be continously available to you-- thanks to Free Software-Open Source Software.
Without these priciples at work, a businesses choices would consist of:
1. Gambling on a closed sourced application that has proprietary file formats that may get "goobled" up by a different company-- forcing you to loose or painfully convert your data.
OR
2. Choosing a closed source app that has proprietary formats that will introduce a new version at regular intervals, with lots of new bugs, ahem, features--which will render the current proprietary format obsolete--forcing another painfull conversion. In either case you will face massive retraining costs as well as the cost of purchase.
In closing, in a large number of cases, open source- or GNU solutions are not only cheaper, they are of higher quality. If you want a office suite or a niche app, then closed source may be the best bet for now, but if you are a real Fortune 500 company-- your needs go beyond that. What you need is a scalable, flexible and reliable system-- in other words, what you need is a system based on GNU-like tools and principles that let you harness the power of the community as an asset. Such a system is far more likely to be free of security holes and bugs and is infinately more extensible and supportable than a closed source solution.
FUD like this is a ridiculous troll-- but one that must be responded too, so that the curious newcomers (maybe even someone in business management) don't get caught by lies like these.
It will happen with subscription model software.
Like the subject says. You have to consider the additional training and development time involved in using Open Source tools.
at where I work, a fortune 500 company, the outsourcing of support for closed source applications has resulted in a real INFORMATION GRIDLOCK. Closed source locks you into relying on that vendor and limits your company in ways that can't be measured in dollars.
There end up being numerous versions of the 'truth' because one version gets updated before another. someone does a 'quick reference guide' for procedures that in no way hooks into the main corporate database, but is considered a reference by hundreds of employees.
they cannot upgrade this without breaking that and you can bet your bottom dollar that vendor number 1 doesn't care about what happens to vendor number 2's product when they update. Now instead of hiring programmers to fix this problem, those third party vendors need to fix stuff and they may not (will not) have the same environment available to them because of license restrictions of all the other applications.
The big bad fortune 500 company knows that it's broken, but will never know why, they can only wait for a fix which may never come (to reverse engineer and modify code themselves is illegal right?). Now they're off to shop for more outsourced and closed source crap, and then seeing if that crap braeaks all the other crap. (I can't help but call it crap they make me use it all day) Guess what else, we're all on windows 95 still. In the Internet tech support department, the client software (from one vendor) that is supported cannot be run on the corporate network because it breaks access to corporate websites (outsourced to another vendor) Neither vendor gives a rats ass about the issue and I support a customized browser that I've only ever used once in training for an hour or so (about 2 years ago). This is only one of the issues out of many, and this is just from where I sit.
Fortune 500 companies are HUGE, and in general, there is a feeling of anarchy and chaos with several different versions of "the truth" as it applies to procedures and policies (at least where I work).
If you ever wonder why you sometimes get a real moron on the phone when you call a big company, realize that they may just have their own version of the truth, and it's a product of a "closed and outsourced" environment.
overall I like how IBM puts it:
Who OWNS your DATA?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
"So let's say you are using an NT4 environment. Horrible tcpip stack, no firewall bundled, daily reboots just to keep it running at peak performance."
Daily reboots? I only reboot NT4 after a rolling blackout.
cc:Mail is an interesting case. It did suck, both on the server and for the user, but for a few years it ruled the roost even though there was superior free software. One downside of commercial software is that it suffers (or benefits) from network effects that cause time-to-market considerations to dominate over quality considerations. But note that although it took awhile, the market did select cc:Mail out of the gene pool.
My statements were about general trends. I certainly did not mean to imply that in every single case, commercial software beat free software. I could come up with my own examples to the contrary; Lutris Enhydra is better than most commercial application servers, for example. However, I think it would be sticking one's head in the sand to ignore the fact that generally speaking, commercial software is superior to its free counterparts in terms of:
Tim
No, row level locking isn't coming to a stable release until MySQL 4. Here are some relevant URLs:
Slashdot | MySQL 3.23 Declared Stable -- search for "lock"
10/30/00: NuSphere to Contribute Row-Level Locking to MySQL Database
01/30/01: NuSphere Contributes Significant Code Enhancement to MySQL(TM)
For an example of a real-world application that has suffered from MySQL's deficiencies, take a look at Bugzilla. It seemed great at first, but then it started to bog down badly last fall on a few tens of thousands of bug reports.
Tim
"Free" software is usually more expensive than commercial software. The reason is easy to understand. The commercial software development model applies financial resources to address problems on the developer side, offloading problems from the user onto the developer. By spending money and time on the development side, both are reduced on the user side. The user is assumed to be primarily interested in the results of using software, rather than in the software itself.
Both the free software and open source models invert this, offloading costs from the developer to the user. The user is assumed to be a software hacker with plenty of free time to spend tinkering, and a desire to spend time that way. In other words, the user is assumed to be a software hobbyist. In the under 1% of cases in which this assumption about the hobbyist user is true, then free or open source software conveys value, but in the other 99%+, commercial software is superior.
Tim
Ask the suits and you'll probably get a no. Ask the developers who do the work, and you'll probably hear we already use open source software!
Of course, the same could be said for Microsoft or any other technology. However, I couldn't sit at home with a room full of pirated M$ software - my conscience wouldn't stand it.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
I can't believe you are defending SQL Server. It is crap. The very large organization I work for uses it for an extremely large dataset and it crashes whenever anyone tries to do a large update. At a friends small office, it crashes daily. You are the first person I've met who thinks positively of the product. Frankly, I'd rather use BTrieve.
MS SQL Server makes Open Source look really good. If you're going to put down Open Source databases, at least compare it to a a top 10% product like DB2 or Oracle. They are proven heavy-weights. MySQL, PostgreSQL and other open source databases all work very well while MS SQL Server works so poorly it should be taken off the market as a defective product. It is not merchantable, IMHO.
As for the Bugzilla comment someone else posted, I might add that there are even more websites using MySQL very succesfuly. For example, this website -- Slashdot. We can both point to each others positions and point out poor applications that make the other look bad, but I've seen first-hand more bad MS SQL projects than bad MySQL projects.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Huh? How do you figure? I've used and been abused by Commercial software for most of my professional life. I still have the emotional scars from just the incidental use of Microsoft SQL server. My experience is we buy some expensive package with a slick box, and find out the code isn't even ready for alpha testing. The more money I've seen spent on software, the less ready for primetime use I've found it.
Example: In 1993/94, I had a co-op term at a company that had recently gotten Internet access. I was hired because I actually knew something about the Internet and how to administer it. The high-priced Lotus cc:Mail to SMTP gateway package was the bane of my existence. The commercial TCP/IP stacks were a pain to figure out and install. Then I discovered the crynwr (sp?) TCP/IP drivers. In less than 5 minutes, I was on the 'Net.
Example: I'd used Microsoft SQL server at my previous company to maintain a bug tracking application. The SQL Server ran on a dedicated machine that was about as powerful as the machine I'm currently using. It was slow and prone to crashing. At my new work, we wanted to use a new bug tracking program, so we converted it from MS-Access to MySQL running on my NT machine (the very one I'm typing on and use to develop). I set up MySQL is no-time flat. It's been up 100% and I don't even notice the load on my machine. It is arguably the 2nd best software I've ever used. Apache is the best, most solid, most reliable package I've ever installed and used.
Invoking Sturgeon's law, 90% of everything is crap, but I'd put the 10% of good OSS up against the 90% of commercial anyday in a caged deathmatch anyday.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
The cost of software is one of the lowest cost points for corporations. Among the highest are the salaries for the employees. So if you could furnish the company with low cost open source software and low cost open source engineers, you'll be doing good.
Unfortunately OSS engineers typically cost much more than MCSEs.
The costs don't balance out in favor of OSS.
Dancin Santa
OMG!!! Regional IT Director? OOOOOOOOOk'
Wish I knew what business it was so I'd no to avoid it if I ever ran into it. Hey it's their money. I especially liked answer #3 - in otherwords these genuiuses locked themselves into an M$ contract they can't get out of - Outstanding! Well, then they just have to take what they get. Regardless if they pay through the nose for it.
As long as you are developing in-house programs that you never intend to sell or distribute then open source compilers are the best IMHO. I use Win2k Python for quick 'n sleazy batch style programming, and with Tkinter it is easy to make a full-blown windowed app that you'd never know wasn't made with Visual Studio.
Need a but more umph? Try GNAT, the GNU Ada95 translator and GtkAda. That gives you a compiled executable with the Gtk+ GUI that only depends on a few DLL's and is easily portable to Linux. And Ada is about as heavy-duty as C++ for those big projects.
Finally, you must be a total loser if you use Win2k and you _don't_ have Cygwin installed. I always have a BASH shell open, and elVIs makes a nice handy text editor. Obviously Cygwin gives you gcc and g++ along with Perl, Awk, shell scripts, and all the good stuff. If you can't write a program in 1/10'th the time it would take with the Windows API then you don't have a clue.
Clickety Click
In the year that they've spent sabotaging the Linux evaluation, the number of NT servers at outlying offices has quadrupled. Fifty percent of the business applications that ran on the IBM last year now run on Microsoft systems that are outside the MIS department's control. These old dogs have done such a good job at marking their territory, they probably won't have a treetrunk left to piss on by next year.
You'd think they would have learned something by watching how easily Microsoft conquered the desktop. This time, they won't be able to just slap a token ring card in it and claim victory.
It is the tech workers who only have limited experience in proprietary software packages and lack the expertise to learn something new without expensive training classes that are the real problem. In other words the idiots who know one technology and apply it to all the companies problems.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
The ability to have and modify the source code should not be dismissed so lightly. Many of the Fortune 200/500 companies have systems that are in operation for decades. And what happens in many instances, is that the software or hardware vendor goes out of business or stops supporting that piece of software. This leaves the company in the position of having to pay large sums to either re-write the application from scratch or pay dearly for support from the vendor. I know this from experience. The system that we're building using a mix OSS and proprietary software is intended to replace a system for which both the hardware and software are no longer available. Using OSS software at key locations in the architecture should avoid a repeat of the past.
When we made the presentation, the building manager (The highest official at that location) was blown away. He actually went so far as to pull one of the new PC's we had just received and call the IT peon (A clueless MCSE) in to hook us up with a network connection so we could get started. The project managers who worked for him, unfortunately, convinced him he was being a little hasty and needed to speak with the regional IT director (or someone of that nature) before we started. The next day we were told the entire intranet project was cancelled. Why, we asked. Because we couldn't use Linux. We asked 2 further questions: If they didn't want Linux, why couldn't we use NT? And why didn't they want Linux?
Two days later the answers from the corporate cloud collectively known as 'IT' returned. 1) We couldn't use NT because there was no way we were going to add an unsecured server to the network. Their definition of 'unsecured' was 'not set up by IT', and IT refused to help. Second, there was no way in hell any of the internal webservers was going to host the site, they were all dedicated to the sites they were already hosting.
This left only our last question, why not Linux. And the answer stunned us, not only because they deigned to answer in *multiple* sentences (Something never encountered before or since from that department), but also in it's sheer mindboggling stupidity. The answer was, roughly:
1) Nothing is secure unless IT sets it up. IT doesn't know how to set up Linux, therefore Linux isn't secure.
2) Linux would interfere with the NT domains.
3) Most importantly, EDS had a single-vendor contract with Microsoft and was in the process of replacing all it's non-MS servers with NT, supposedly including our CentreVu CMS system, among others. Using Linux for the intranet would break that contract.
I have no idea what the IT department was smoking, especially if the contract BS was actually true, but it obviously messed with their heads. And perhaps the worst part of the whole thing was their final suggestion to alleviate the knowledgebase problems: We should build the intranet site on Geocities.
I'm tired, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
-Jade E.
Once the culture changes and people learn that it is okay to change the sourcecode each of the problems you bring up will be diminished. This is especially true as the OSS consulting industry begins to consolidate. In terms of that last bullet, as long as there are upgrades there will be a motivation to make changes and rethink the way things are being done.
At the moment I see one big short-term problem for linux. Until a journaling file system is in place I doubt that there will be a rush to adopt linux in many industries. When this comes out in a 2.6 kernel then it may be time to take notice.
SIG:
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
From DOS debug: (using 'e' and 'u' commands)
B8 00 4C MOV AX, 4C00
CD 21 INT 21
Meaning:
Terminate process with return code zero. (not supported before DOS version 2.x, but who cares)
Translation:
can't remember the exact quote... something along the lines of "fear is seeing (?your) death and truly understanding it". if someone has the original quote and/or the author please reply... I came up blank after searching for a while
Wow, this certainly wasted a good portion of my time...
I think that if you, to begin with, stay with the low maintenance features, like file/print services, simple web (or if your web-developers use cgi, also advanced web), DHCP, DNS, mail and other services, you can save alot. Most of these services are fairly simple to set up and requires very little or even no maintenance after setup, have equal to better performance compared to MS and has a fabulous price. Another great thing is that you can often sneak these products into your system (if management demand MS) without management finding out, and when the management finally comes to theire sences and want linux/xBSD systems instead of their MS, you can say 'Ehh... ... ... ehh, we already do' and be the hero of the day
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
This trend switches when you get into big-scale products like server arrays and networks. At that point there's no substitute for a highly qualified consultant or on-staff person, and that person will/should charge a pretty penny.
Miko O'Sullivan
Miko O'Sullivan
Don't underestimate what I will call the resume'
factor.
Why would I recommend a quarter-of-a-million-dollars
for something based on open source when I can
recomend some well marketed and proprietary closed
source solution and add a half-million-dollar project to
my resume without having to explain why I'm doing somthing
different than what the boss was expecting?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Here are some things to think about:
/. folks, but true. Basically nobody really cares about this stuff. If they do care, address them with the above points.
* client access licensing. Some commerical vendors license on a per-user basis. By switching to an open-source product, the cost of these licenses is negated.
* support. The big guys want support, and they want a company that'll be around for a couple of years. They want it 24/7, too. Note that even though MS doesn't give support, really, the perception is they do due to the large number of MCSEs out there. Interesting proposition.
* blame. It's easier to blame microsoft and not get fired than blame some puny vendor nobody's heard of. If the culture is heavily political, alternatives to the canonical vendors will not be considered.
* technical capabilities. The technical abilities of various corporations vary tremendously. While it's exciting to learn new stuff, it's less exciting for the corporation to have someone take 4 weeks to learn stuff that does what their stuff does now for less...and that person may not be able to do it.
The thing to remember is ease-of-use matters. Joe schmoe doesn't have a box at home where he plays with software after work. Joe has a family and a life outside the technical world that is more important than his job and any technical doodads.
A radical idea for
True, true, I am BY NO MEANS approving of HP's pricing, but I also must say that they have VERY,VERY rarely let us down. We do use some OSS here (Python, Perl, Analog), so we aren't a totally closed source shop.
TODO: Something witty here...
Yes, but your're missing some of my points. There's a diffirence between only changing when NESSESARY and not changing AT ALL. As for your comments about NT, daily reboots in a moderatly sized company ARE NOT a problem. We have about 300 employees in the main office, and maybe half that in other offices. Most of our stuff runs NT, although A: we run the databases on *nix, and we're moving steadily towards 2k. It WORKS for us. Is it perfect, no, but it gets the job done. Many of the programs we use have no practical OSS or even commerical *nix equivilants. Our IT staff (excluding the database people) is 3 in number, and yet we average 99% uptime.
TODO: Something witty here...
That's an overall average. Our databases are more in the 99.5-99.7 range.
TODO: Something witty here...
Lets consider some facts now:
- Do the average Corp, the ability to modify software means precisly dick!
- It's often hard to get good support of OSS. Good in this case means timely. If one of our HP servers goes down, we can be on the phone with a HP tech in less than 5 minutes. Trying getting a tech that quick with OSS, without paying through the nose in advance. Lost time == Lost Revenue
- Retraining isn't free. If you're using Software XYZ, it's going to cost quite a bit to train your staff to use Software ABC
- If it ain't broke don't fix it. When our commericial software does what we need it to do, why SHOULD we switch, and risk failure? This ain't somebodys home Linux firewall box we're talking about here.
To sum up, IS IT REALLY CHEAPER? In a large number of cases (not saying all) this is NOT true. OSS software can be GREAT, but it isn't always the best tool for the job, and that, at the end of the day, is what REALLY matters.TODO: Something witty here...
For example, I recently proposed that, instead of sending me to a class to become intimately familiar with Solaris and Sun's hardware (my work involves Solaris on a daily basis), the company buy me a SunBlade 100 and a few hundred dollars worth of books. This would, of course, save considerable money for the company. My manager liked the idea, but that's pretty unimportant, because most Fortune 500 companies have a strict set of rules when it comes to computer usage/acquisition. I couldn't get a home-built computer for my desktop here if I wanted to, because corporate policy, for uniformity, dictates that we buy the Dell OptiPlex.
Unfortunately, it's much the same way with software. I do happen to run Linux here as much as possible, but I'm forced to dual-boot it with Windows 2000, because it's the company standard. Not because we were forced into it by Microsoft, but because we need to have that assurance that it's going to work and not need to worry about permissions.
I'm as big a fan of Linux as anyone, and I've been using it since 1996 now (good ol' Slackware 2.x days)... but the Fortune 500 just isn't ready for it.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
Now, on the other hand, I should think Fortune 500 companies that don't get their revenue from software would be willing to participate in development of Open Source software to fill unmet needs. Perhaps this is where it should start. That would enable IS infrastructures to build up a relationship with Open Source developers by working with them to develop a solution. Then, perhaps in the future, they'd be a little less squeamish about using existing OSS for other projects.
Maybe if we had a list of reliable "big name" companies (like IBM) for OSS support that we could publish in some prominent newspaper, it would aid in this quest.
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
My only gripe to date, albeit small, is the quality of the documentation I've seen. I have recently been working with Apache HTTP Server, Tomcat and JBoss only to find all of the documentation either woefully out of date with the current rev or contradictory.
Case in point: how to make Tomcat v3.2.2 play with Apache v1.3.20. Within the same doc set for Tomcat it gives 2 or more conflicting setup suggestions to make these guys play nicely together.
For all their evils...well, at least a good number of them...OK, only a few they did in 1988...Microsoft docs are usually(!) spot on.
While this does not discourage me (take that Bill G!) it certainly detracts from the TCO of these applications while I spend my time scratching my little pea brain or persuing the boards for the correct method.
But there is nothing at all forcing you to keep upgrading to these newer versions. There's nothing to force you not to.
If your system works don't change it. What do you think this is, Windows? Are all old kernels going to disppear or suddenly stop working because new ones have been released? There's plenty of linux boxes around here, doing their job, day in, day out, with extremely minimal administration, on 2.0 kernels. The same is definitely not so for old Windows machines. You seemingly have little choice in upgrading Windows, simply to get ever closer to that much promised stability and power.
People who upgrade on every single kernel release are suckers for punishment and you don't do it on production servers unless there's a specific problem that's been fixed. In which case the constant release of bugfixes and patches is highly beneficial.
Open Source is proven. It's been around for far longer than proprietary solutions. As always it's pig ignorant management and kiddies who think VB is god's gift to programming who think otherwise.
If you run server systems and want good uptime and efficient support you pay for professional admins and quality hardware. People who reckon that just cos you're using a PC cluster+MSCE combination it's somehow some vast saving on the outlay for a qualified Unix admin? Utter tripe. Using cheapo hardware and clueless point-and-click trained admins loses you just as much if not more through downtime and inefficiency.
There's solid working practices that should be adhered to whether you use OSS or not. A cheaparse MS solution is just as bad as a cheaparse Unix one.
Frink (the little pig in the more costly to build proverbial house made of bricks who can sit back and relax and laugh at all the straw houses blowing down all over the place, silly, cheap piggies running around like crazy trying to keep them up)
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
Whether to use open or closed source solutions is closely linked to how IT is handled in the company. If you have a strong internal support staff and everything is generally done in house, open source provides a much nicer solution. If you only want to maintain a minimal internal staff and outsource all you can, commercial solutions are your only choice.
The problem I've run into with Microsoft and other closed technologies is that you're quite literally dealing with a black box. If you have a very good support staff who know what they're doing, very likely they'll want to do more customization than most commercial programs will allow. In my opinion, this is why open technologies are the way to go, an excellent IT group should tailor the environment to their users' needs as closely as possible. Closed systems are designed based on expectations of what a corporate environment needs, not on their actual needs.
Many companies will prefer to be sold their IT solution outright from another company, this way they don't have to maintain an internal IT staff that needs to know more than pick up the phone. If you go the other way though and build a top flight IT group that are expected to handle all problems internally, they'll end up requesting and using open solutions simply because of the flexibility they provide.
With open source software you just download it and use it immediately. No bureaucracy, no delays. Of course, you have to pay someone to install it, configure it and possibly integrate it to suit your business needs, but that usually gets done by some consultant whom the company had already contracted for the duration of the project anyway, so you don't need to have an additional expense approved; you save yourself the time and aggravation of navigating through the bureaucracy and get the job done faster.
Try it, your deadlines will love it!
Sure, open source software takes time to learn and maintain, but so does proprietary software. If you have even modest expertise in house, many issues that are major for proprietary software can be resolved in a short time.
If you really want to outsource support to someone skilled, you have to pay a premium, whether you use open source, free software or closed source, proprietary software. Your chances of getting someone skilled at a reasonable price are actually probably better with open source.
A major company that runs Linux is a company there the legal department hasn't understood what it means.
No one is responsible for anything and that is just unacceptable.
Imagine if BMW get motor parts for free from free labour. Now cygklos support is there to help them if it don't work. How does this help them when the cars blows up?
Some one must be responsible, "no warranty" means "not usable" in big business.
I work for a medium size company (+- 700 people.) We are now working on a project using Powerbuilder on PC and Oracle on Unix. 1. For the developpement machine, we use Oracle on Linux. The machine has been set up 200 days ago, 7 to 12 people are working dayly on it, and it works just fine !!! Not a single problem and performances are incredible.. --> we avoided the cost and hassles of a traditional NT Box. 2. For the production machine, our MIS insisted on having some SUN hardware. OK. but the C compiler (which we needed) costs a whole lot , as you might know... so we turned to egcs. The port of the C programs from the Linux box to the Sun was a child's play. 3. Furthermore, we had some serious problems with Solaris : we had to reboot after applying some patches demanded by Oracle. Normal. But after the reboot, two partitions of the disk were nuked !!!! And we never found the reason why ... The kind of problem you **NEVER** get with Linux.
You may think that all of this is just some regular Linux advocacy . But Open Source soft helps me a whole lot on my NT box too ! I dayly use vim to edit xml, sql, C or whatever. It's over stable and hyper powerful ! I use gnu awk; it saves me TENS of HOURS of work, and works just FINE !
For me , open source software is stability and money savings. Dnd whatever your MIS may say, support is ***NEVER*** a problem. There are so many websites ... and the newsgroups, of course !!! I ALWAYS found a answer to my questions ! And all that for FREE !
By the way, our 32bits Linux box is twice as fast as the 64bits Sun machine, and it costed 5 times less. isn't that a clue ?
I hope this is of help for your white paper... :(
I'd suggest you try the following: Think up a company and its IT infrastructure needs. Then ask both Microsoft and (e.g.) SuSE for an estimate for a custom solution including support.
As to statistics on this topic, I haven't seen any yet
SuSE have a collection of case studies on their website. Maybe those companies are a good point to start at if you would like to do some research of your own.
I would gladly be a dog barking up the wrong tree. -- Ian Anderson