Opposing Open Source?

Carl Nasal asks: "For a college class I'm taking, I have to write a research paper. I chose a topic of how open source software affects businesses, focusing on the use of Linux. While doing searches, I have actually found it hard to find opposing views of open source software. Mainly, what I'm looking for, are opinions, articles, looks, and evidence about the drawbacks of using open source software in business. They can either be online or offline, but preferably from reliable sources. (In other words, I'd rather not just have someone's homepage that loves Microsoft and hates Linux.)" The more constructive criticism we get about the drawbacks of Open Source, the better we can address and fix them.

Comments

Cathedral and Bazaar Criticism

[j7953]

I guess you've read Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. You might be interested in also reading A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It's not directly open source criticism, and doesn't focus on business usage of free software, but it's a good read nonetheless.

Ask Dave Winer

[jalefkowit]

You might check out Dave Winer's site, Scripting News. He's a rare breed, a software developer who (a) is passionate about openness and interoperability and (b) skeptical about open-source software. He is also a pioneer in Weblogging, so you can find several years' worth of his outspoken opinions on the subject on his site.

Some examples:

• "Stallman's philosophy is not open source, it's not the spirit of sharing, it's not generous. It has other purposes, it's designed to create a wall between commercial development and free development." (9/7/2000)
• "Talking with Nicholas Petreley a few days ago I said that the problems that open source addresses have already been dealt with." (9/9/2000)
• "It's possible to be an open source developer with high integrity, I'm sure of that, I know people who do that. But it's not inevitable that all open source developers and middlemen have high integrity." (8/8/2000)

And that's just a few of the more recent posts to his log. Don't get me wrong, Dave is a very thoughtful, articulate guy who's no Microsoft parrot -- he and his company, UserLand Software, were one of the authors of the SOAP specification that is proving so critical for future interoperability. He's just got a keen intelligence and is fond of applying it, which means he'll often come up with a different angle on things than you might expect. Go search his site and I bet you'll find, if not the answer you seek, at least some interesting questions.

-- Jason Lefkowitz

Re:Opposing views

[The Man]

The problem with relying on something like Microsoft's writings for this is that most of what they write is in fact false. There are probably good reasons why open source software might not be useful or appropriate in some circumstances. Of course, it's much more likely that you can say that about some particular piece of software. Either way, though, since most of what Microsoft either believes or wants others to believe about software licensing in particular is outright lies, it isn't really useful information from a research perspective.

Much more relevant are anecdotes from the field, which I will hope you will find here.

I am a systems administrator at a small software company in the valley. Although our product runs on a variety of Free and non-Free systems, many of our developers are working on a very proprietary system and using little or no free software. My infrastructure, by contrast, is almost entirely Free. The drawback is not in the performance or feature set of the software I am using to provide services - in fact everyone is extremely happy with it. The drawback, rather, is in constantly having to fight to use good quality Free software in an environment where the mindshare belongs almost entirely to Brand X. As an example, it gets old very quickly explaining to people why we shouldn't be using Exchange Server to handle our mail, especially when our current Free Software mail server has been doing its job perfectly well.

I don't know how relevant this is, but perhaps you will find it interesting. Good luck.

Microsoft releases on time? Please.

[TonyGreene]

NT5 was due in 1998. Lots of great features were planned. Many companies bought into this plan and waited for the great upgrade.

It finally came in Feb 2000 as Win2k.

NT5 was supposed to integrate the stable NT kernel with the flexibility of Windows 95, resulting in a single OS for home and corporate use. Later, Microsoft said that feature would not make it into NT5. Instead we got a set of fixes for Win95, called Win98. A second set of fixes was called Win98SE. Then instead of the single combined OS (NT5), we got WinME and several flavors of Win2k.

In late 2001, we will finally get the combined OS that was promised in 1998, with most of the promised features. In the meantime, Microsoft released three other operating systems (not including WinCE), none of which had all the promised features. Along the way, costs have gone up and vendor lock-in is running rampant.

There are reasons to use MS software, but the ability to depend on their announced release dates is not one of them.