CIOs Band Together Against Paying For Software Bugs

gmerideth writes: "This article over at cio.com interviews several CIO's who are sick and tired of spending billions every year on software upgrades simply because the creater tells them to upgrade as they wont support previous versions or they get stuck into lengthy, costly licenses. Quoted from the article "Other companies, such as Ameritrade Holding, are opting for open-source technologies such as the GNU and Linux operating systems, the Apache Web server and Sendmail e-mail.". It's glad to see the open source movement doing it's job."

Comments

Sendmail!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, why pay for new bugs when you can get them for free?

Is Open Source the answer?

[UltraBot2K1]

From the article:

There are, of course, other reasons for all the bugs. IT professionals point to a whole litany of causes: bloatware, with all its useless bells and whistles; programmers working in isolation, blissfully ignorant of how people will ultimately be using their software on a daily basis; reusable components that may already contain bugs; an absence of agreed upon professional standards; and developers who take shortcuts to meet deadlines during development.

That could paragraph could describe the shoddy commercial software, but it could just as easily be describing Mozilla, KDE (or GNOME, to be fair), Emacs, TeX, or the RedHat Linux distro. Open source, by itself, can't solve shoddy software engineering practices.

This problem discussed in the article is better solved by the type of licensing model Microsoft plans to adopt: subscription software. That way, you always have the latest, least buggy version of the software you use without having to shell out for a new copy, and the corporation that writes the software is motivated to eliminate bugs, rather than leave them in so they can sell you the new version. This way, you have all the advantages of open source, yet you can take comfort in the fact that your software is written by professionals.