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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.
Yes, it's FUD, but it's true to a degree -- it's often difficult to find support for open source things. And if it breaks, you get to keep both parths -- if you're not able to fix it yourself, you're at the author's mercy.
Yes, if Windows breaks, you're at Microsoft's mercy to fix it too, but many companies feel a lot more comfortable relying on a big company than on a few guys who program for fun.
Yes, you can buy support for many free software products, but these don't seem very popular for some reason.
I'm not saying that these reasons are particularly valid, but they are the reasons most commonly given ...
This hurts open source software - closed source software generally costs money, which allows them to pay people like usability specialists, graphic designers, and technical writers (people who don't work for free out of goodwill). Currently it seems like only programmers are willing to donate their time to the open source software effort, and I see this as a weakness. Having a larger variety of developers would improve the quality of open source software.
One of the aspects that the Open Source community touts is that support it available on the web, IRC, numerous news groups and of course via source code. However when it's 3am and your server is down, and need to have it back up in 15 minutes, spending 2hrs reading docs on the web or explaining the situation over a chat, even via email is out of the question. Chances are you need to speak to someone pronto. Either by phone or in person, and that comes at a cost. A cost that is generally not figured in when pricing out Open Source Software for your business. Outfits like Sun or IBM will figure in large support contracts along with their software making the price of Open Source solutions look much more attractive. This is a double edged sword. Eventually your business will spend money either on support or in customer related costs due to downtime.
"Profitablity"
I have yet to see a successful business model incorporating Open Source.
Secondly, without strict project management, a lot of confusion can ensue. In a business you hire someone to control everything on the higher scales.
A better example is simple coding style. Looking at code where 4 developers put their braces all in different places adds time to maintainability/reading of the code. I'll come up with more reasons, lemmie think some more.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Can be found here
The heart of the argument is that the GPL is like "Creeping Marxism", since software is written to be shared by all, instead of sold for a profit.
Now, the ADVANTAGE to having the source is that you can technically work around any of these issues, but generally only by hiring specialists, at a great expense to your company. It's the big white elephant that no one's talking about in the middle of the open source bazarre: "Software freedom! You have the source! You are empowered!" Yes, but at what COST? For most companies, fixing an open source program to make it do what they want, just isn't a viable option. Plus, many in the community would view it as a "corporate co-opting of volunteer work," and the company could be flamed out of contention before they even decide on a policy regarding releasing improvements to the community.
Open Source does seriously empower expert individuals who wish to customize and improve software for their own use, and the community with which those individuals share the improvements. But that's not really a business situation.
The only valid reasons to not use open source are the same reasons to not use a particular closed source solution. The only question any one should be asking is "How much will it cost to do what I need?"
Cost here does not mean licensing cost, but the total cost of ownership including customization, support, hardware, training, upgrades, and licesnsing.
The first question to ask about any product is, "How much will it cost to do what I need?" or "How much will it cost me to settle for what this product does as opposed to what I actually need." Very few corporations are lucky enough to find what they really need on the shelf. They tend to either live with what they can find or pay to have something customized. This is the number one arguement both for and against open source. Often there is not an open source solution that is as good as a particular closed source solution. If a corporation has the resources to customize a solution, then often open source is a better way to go, since it is usually cheaper to customize.
Support is also critical for any software application. Every company has to decide to trust an outside support organization or support it themselves. Costs and quality very greatly for both open and closed source solutions.
Training costs do not differ based on wether an application is open/closed source, but instead on the popularity of the application. A company can expect a certain level of competence with popular applications, but not with those that are less popular.
Upgrades and Licensing are really negligable and tend to tie into support costs.
I know that when I decide on an application for corporate use, solving my problem and dependability are my first concerns. If an application doesn't do what I need, why even consider it. Dependibility includes not just not crashing, but how long it will take to get something fixed when it does crash. I would rather use something where I expect to be down once a day for a minute than something where I expect to be down once a year for a week.
In general, though, open source software is inferior to its closed source counterparts in:
Very little application or toolbox-level open source code is ready for prime time, in fact, whether we're looking at GCC, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, GIMP, or what have you. It's still hacker-oriented, better-enjoy-strolling-through-the-minefield stuff, and measurably inferior to proprietary solutions in most of the ways listed above.
One "killer argument" for many people here recently came in the form of consumer advocate Jamie Love's reasons for shifting his site away from an all-open-source footing.
Tim
If he had posted a math problem and asked for answers, that would be another story.
The person best qualified to fight against their view is the one who knows their view best.
funny munging
Many projects start out because college student X hates Microsoft/BillGates/Windows, and decides he is going to drive them into the ground by writing the killer application for Linux. Of course it will be Open Source, because Closed Source is Evil (tm). So he dives in and writes an application that attempts to outdo a major windows application like Word/Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever. Let's say he achieves some success and has a partial clone up and running a year later. Let's say it gets lots of press and looks like it might really be a killer app. Now what are some good reasons not to use it?
As the program is not someone's livelihood, there's no guarantee that the author won't lose interest and walk away from it. There's also no guarantee that anyone else will want to maintain it. With closed source the company could go out of business, but at least they have strong incentive (money) to stick around.
The program was initially written by a college student with no experience architecting large applications, and most likely no experience with any kind of real software engineering of any kind.
Without strong leadership there's no guarantee that the program will remain stable, managable, and continue in a direction that really suits the user base. This happens quite often because, say, a graphic arts program is not written by someone familiar with graphic arts, but someone who wants to get back at Microsoft.
I see little or no documentation out of Microsoft for the stuff I buy, either. Nor did I ever get much out of Sun or IBM. When I wanted good documentation I had to go out and buy it -- either from the vendor like in the case of MSDN, or from some book from my bookstore as in the case of X11/UNIX/IBM.
If you're missing documentation for open source products, you should check out your local bookstore. There is actually a remarkable amount of documentation out there if you're willing to spend some money on it. Much of it is crap, of course, same as with the commercial vendors -- but some of it is very very good.
It regularly astounds me that people who were willing to pay thousands of dollars a year for technical information from Microsoft/IBM/Sun/whomever won't spend a dime on the same kind of thing for Linux. Maybe they should. Certainly there are companies that fill this particular niche.
Can someone make money selling docs on Linux? I think they can. They certainly did selling docs on X11, which you might recall was open source too.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Someone touched on this a bit earlier, but depends on if you mean using open source software or developing it, or developing using pieces of open source.
If you work for a commercial software company, who may not want to make their source open (because they have some proprietary algorithms or whatever - the reasons do not matter for my point), then you simply won't be able to use GPL'ed software. If you have a closed source app, or any software product that doesn't use the GPL, then you can't put GPL code into your app (without making your app GPL essentially). So, my point here is, you will have to beware of the licenses and how they impact your business and your code/application.
Second is a big one: patent infringement. There is a ton of open source software out there that comes with various licenses and such that say "no warranty", or more specifically "AS IS". What this means is that if you use this code (we'll call it "Code A") in your own code, yet Code A infringes on some patent, you can be held responsible for that patent infringement. Through legal wrangling, if the company who released Code A is reputable and well known, you may have recourse and be able to show that they should have known, etc, etc., but not always, and it may be a tough fight.
There are many benefits, but these couple things can be extremely serious issues to content with depending on your use of open source.
Much depends upon the specific open source software, the specific commercial alternatives and whether the enterprise intends merely to use or develop new software therefrom.
Key issues are support (legal and technical), and risk management. Many corporate General Counsels are deeply concerned about issues such as warranty and intellectual property indemnification, areas for which open source offers zero, nada bupkis, and for which varying improvements can be found in the proprietary sector. Technical support is well-covered in other responses.
Legal support in the form of support agreements and/or decent warranties have meaning to corporate lawyers and businessmen, particularly when coming from a decent enterprise. They are not always available, and in some cases expressly not available, but AT LEAST, these warranties are (even for Microsoft) much better than the NO WARRANTY, "AS-IS" warranty given by most open source licenses.
Indemnification *IS* a big issue, make no mistake -- and an indemnification coming from a large corporate enterprise is tantamount to an insurance policy against infringement; as compared to one coming from a small entity (worth less than nothing) or an individual, as compared to one offering no rep, warranty or indemnification against infringement at all.
This is not to say that these arguments are unanswerable in every case. The devil is in the details, and you need to compare specific products before you can balance and weigh the issues. But the questions ALWAYS need to be weighed.
Finally, there is a meaningful legal cost involved with open source compliance. Specific licenses need to be weighed depending how the software is used, and complied with in full. This means that procedures need to be followed, opinions need to be written and so forth, which in some cases (particularly in the development or modifications arena) can be pricey overhead that may outweigh the costs and benefits gained by differences in price. Of course, to do so, I would compare costs of an open source compliance policy against the price of a commercial source code license, but still, I have seen corporate folks decide to go commercial on bean-counting alone.
Last time I checked you had to pay for support of proprietary software too. True, sometimes you get a free phone number that you can call when it's not busy, but's that's not an enterprise level support.
2.Similarly, There is no warrantee of any kind. If it breaks, you have no one to complain to: "you get what you pay for."
This is the most blatant piece of FUD that Microsoft trolls keep spouting. Ever read Microsoft EULA? (or a EULA for any other proprietary software for that matter). It reads, in part, something along the lines of: "To the maximum extent permitted by the applicable law, Microsoft hereby disclaims all liability". You have no warranty, no matter what software you use. About 2 years ago there was a case where some proprietary software caused millions of dollars worth of damage to some manufacturing company. The vendor admitted to producing buggy software but refused to pay based on EULA. The court agreed. (Search slashdot archives, ithe story is probably still there).
3.The programmers may suddenly decide they have no vested interest in continuing the project, or development may slow to a crawl (eg, mozilla), and there's nothing you can do about it.
False. The one key advantage you have with open source is that *anyone* can continue the project, including yourself. The original programmer cannot prevent anyone from developing the project. On the other hand, with proprietary software, you have no such recourse. If the company suddenly decides it is no longer interested in the product, it can drop it and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Neither you nor anyone else can continue the project. You are solely at the mercy of the vendor. This is actually one of the key arguments *for* open source.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Open Source is not a problem, unless you are running a business off it. You want to run the business off supported commercial (not necessarily proprietary) software. This means, you PAY for it. Paying may mean spending the $30 on a RH 7.2 boxed set or $1000 on Windows 2k Server. The thing is you can moan all you want but the difference between the licensing costs for AIX or Solaris is much higher than the licensing costs for Windows 2000. This difference is far higher than the difference between Win 2k and Linux. That is why proprietary UNIX is losing market share (picked up by Linux and Windows 2k). Although BSD is also losing market share, it is doing so more slowly than Solaris, et. al. and I think that it will recover (BSD losses appear to be due to fewer new machines being bought, Solaris, AIX, etc. seem to be due in part to active conversion in certain market sectors BSD is FAR more stable than Linux, though, and will probably retain at least niche markets).
My point is that your business software has to be supportable as well as inexpensive. If you can get support from a vendor, then OSS is great. Otherwise it is dangerous at best. And what if your vendor goes out of business-- you may be better off than if it was completely proprietary, but it may be more likely to happen if you choose a product form a company like Eazel than if you choose a Microsoft product. Can you survive? Yes. Assuming you can support the software yourself. IMO, this is the main reason for BSD's loss of market share to Linux recently is the difficulty in finding people qualified to support it and/or good vendor support (though anyone who knows Linux well should be able to transition to BSD will minimal study-- just most people don't know that-- though the boxed set of BSD has an Awesome manual).
Business questions:
1: Is it reliable enough?
2: Is it vendor supported?
3: Will my vendor go out of business and leave me without support?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you have ever examined the Communist manifesto, this is exactly what Communism is supposed to be. No, it doesn't work on a governmental level, due to corruption and sheer size. But this is where it excels: The program is freely available to everybody - as in everybody contributes his or her skills to better the community, and the authors/coders' skills happen to be that of writing programs. Another added benifit is that everybody can learn from Open Source, hence bettering future programs, as they can learn from all the programs and implement the best elements of them all.
So I leave you with this: Wouldn't calling Open Source Software "Creeping Marxism" be a compliment, as that concept is exactly what the Open Source movement is supposed to acheive? It is a harmless way for the community to benefit itself through sharing. Just some food for thought.
This means that non-coders (read: the 99% of humanity who are not programmers and have better things to do with their time) are second class citizens for the open source community. Not only do they not contribute to the code base, but their suggestions are met with a scornful "write it yourself if you want it". (This attitude is common on Mozilla's development lists, where you can almost always count on at least one "if you want X submit a patch, otherwise shut up" for any feature suggestion X.)
Down this road lies software written by and for hackers and everyone else can either shut up or get in the car. If you don't know C, you're worthless, and if you don't even want to try to learn C, you're worse than worthless. Besides, the common folk suggest really boring stuff that just shows they're stupid lusers. Our time is better spent on stuff we find fascinating. (For an example of "lusers say such stupid things" consider the recent KOffice usability review which found some users are confused by the case-sensitivity of formulas in KCalc. The response was not "Well, it'd be a mere few minutes of work to make KCalc formulas case-insensitive, so we'll do it", but "Don't blame KCalc that these idiots are too stupid to enter cell names in uppercase. If they care that much they can write their own patch.")
Imagine doctors telling you that if you don't know how to take out your own appendix, they're certainly not about to do it for you. Besides, the time they spend on your appendectomy could be so much better spent working on a new scalpel technique for an obscure procedure that's almost never performed in the real world. That is the image many open source proponents offer to the world: if you already know how to do what you want, we'll consider doing it, but what you want us to do is boring, so we won't anyway. And anyway you can do it yourself, so don't be a lazy luser.
This is an attitude that closed source could never get away with, by definition. Since the customer cannot offer code, all they can offer is money and feedback and they will be more than happy to stop offering both if they aren't listened to (or catered to, if you prefer). Microsoft has obtained its market position mostly by giving people what they say they want. (Feel free to insert a snotty "and never giving them what they need" if you'd like. The argument stands nonetheless.) Non-programmers are elevated from second class citizens to kingmakers. They are the ones who decide what software lives and what dies, based not on whether or not it is fun to code feature X but whether or not they want/need feature X. And this infuriates some hackers.
Not doing something because it's boring isn't a great way to run a hospital, and it's not a great way to run a programming philosophy that is supposed to bring freedom to everyone, either.
Open source software is great if you're a programmer. You can look at the code, understand what's going wrong, fix it, etc. But non-programmers don't care about that.
What I want in software is ease of use. If I'm installing some normal, closed source software, it's incredibly easy. I stick the CD in the drive, and a screen pops up asking if I want to install it. I click yes, then I click Next a few times, and it's installed. I open up the software, and it's easy to use. Nearly everything I want to do is intuitive. Anything that isn't is clearly explained in the help file. No problems, no fuss.
Now contrast this with open source. I've only installed an open source piece of software once, but it was a nightmare. I went to the site on Sourceforge, and saw dozens of different versions. I didn't know which one I wanted, but assumed the most recent one would be best. So I downloaded it. But I couldn't install it yet, as I needed to make sure I had the right version of a Java compiler. So I opened up a command prompt and typed in what the instructions had told me to type. Nothing happened. Eventually I realized that I didn't have Java at all. So then I had to download that.
I finally succeeded in compiling the code, and opened the program, only to discover that I couldn't use it at all. None of the menu commands did anything, the buttons didn't work, and the software was completely useless to me. I checked the help menu, only to discover that rather than having explanations of how the program worked, it only gave a link to the raw code. I paused to curse my open source advocating friend who had reccomended the software. Then I was complaining about it to another friend who used it, and he told me that he hadn't had any of the same problems I did. I realized after this that I had a bad version of the software. So I downloaded a different one, which worked, although it still involved quite a bit of finessing and difficulty in figuring out how to do what I wanted to do.
Now, I admit that I'm basing my judgement of Open Source on just one experience, but my experience matches what most non-techy people assume OS is like.
Ask yourself a question. How many non-techy people do you know that use Linux? I have lots of techy friends who use it and love it. But I do not know, nor have I ever heard of, a non-tech type person that uses Linux or even has the slightest interest in using Linux. This is not because they are ignorant. It's because ease of use is important, and Microsoft has invested a lot of time, effort, and money in making windows easy to use. I, like most non-techies, am willing to live with having to reboot my computer every couple of weeks because something crashed, rather than dealing with all the complications of Linux.
Another issue is name brand recognition. A lot of you may scoff at this, but it does have a real value. I know that for the things I do in my job, MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will work perfectly. If someone's willing to pay me $50K a year, they're going to be willing to spend $300 on MS Office so that I can do my job effectively. I'm sure that there exist open source programs that do everything these programs do. But I don't know what they are. I wouldn't know where to look for them. I wouldn't know what different software packages do. I wouldn't know which distros to trust. I wouldn't know what patches to take. This is all things I could find out, but any time I spend researching the issue is time I'm not spending working. It's much better to just go with what I know. It doesn't matter how nifty a program is; it's completely useless if the people who need it don't know it exists.
Finally, there's an economic critique of OS. It's a basic fact of economics that market failures arise whenever someone either doesn't bear all the costs of their actions, or doesn't reap all the benefits. The same principle that makes companies pollute too much because they don't have to pay for the damage the pollution causes will make programmers produce too little when they their code can be copied freely. It's a basic problem of externalities and free-riders.
There are areas where programmers will code for fun, that this won't be a problem. But what about other areas? Oh sure, you might argue that someone who needs the software would hire a programmer to create it, but this only works if there is a single individual willing to pay the entire cost of development.
I'd be willing to pay $150 for an accounting package. There exist closed source companies that are willing to spend millions to develop such a package, becuase they know there are tens of thousands of people like me. These companies hire dozens of programmers to write the code, QA monkeys to test it, tech-writers to explain it, marketers to get it out there, and market researchers to figure out what people actually want. This is simply not an effort I could replicate by paying a contract programmer $150. So I go with the closed source solution.
I could go on for days about this and I'm sure so could everyone else, but not I, too, have got some school work to do.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Here is an upside to proprietary, for-license-at-fee software and a downside to free (as in beer) software. Those are not the categories mentioned in the question, but they do relate to the categories of Open Source and closed software in obvious ways.
Proprietary, for-license-with-fee software has one efficiency going for it that freely available (including Free) software does not: Resources (programmer hours) are more efficiently directed to its development. The amount available to fund development of a product relates positively to the demand for that product. To put it simply, if there is somthing that lots of people really need, then there is funding to pay for its developement. This is because there will be a lot of people willing to pay a for it.
(That is assuming that developers can both both estimate the demand for a future product and predict accurately the outcome of their labor, at better than chance levels.)
In the development of freely available software, there is not that mechanism for pointing resources to purposes. A company such as Red Hat could invest in developing a much-wanted utility, but the portion of gains returned to Red Hat as a consequence of their sponsorship is zero. What gains they do realize are not a result of their sponsorship, but of the improvement. Lots of people gain from the improvement, but those gains are not concentrated back at the source of the improvement to sustain development, or reimburse past effort. The gains are diffused throughout the community.
Of course, if you are a hardware vendor porting free sofware to your platform or supporting your product with a free driver, then that would be a different story. In those cases gains are realized by the sponsor, when the sponsor and the vendor are the same. (Assuming that your port or driver works only with your own product.)
In conclusion, the financing efficiency is the ONLY thing that proprietary and closed software has going for it. That is THE reason its on top. There are efficencies of Open Source: Small changes in function can be achieved with small effort. Just modify a few lines of source and recompile. That's not an option with closed source. Also, in the case of the GNU license, improvements aggragrate accross the community, because the license mandates that if you release an execetuable you must release the source. Seems those two advantages do not trump the proprietary financing model.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The article asked for points against open source, specifically linux. Some people have provided valid and reasonable links (myself included) to articles providing points against open source, specifically linux.
in every other article on slashdot, i would expect these posts to be met with troll / flamebait moderation, but NOT THIS ONE WHERE THE GUY ASKED FOR THESE POINTS.
moderators: get a fucking clue, stop the mindless moderation for this article, and let the guy figure out for himself which are the valid points without having to browse at -1 with all the crap flooders and goatse.cx links.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
site:slashdot.org flamebait
Optionally, you could add terms like "open source", "GPL" or "linux", but you probably don't need to (although -goatse.cx might be a good idea, just to be safe).
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Well there are two main issues here. The first is that if nobody asks for a certain type of software or features programmers aren't always going to know you want them. I mean most people don't read through large files in hex but to a programmer that is a useful feature. Equally most programmers might not know that some sort of business information processing is needed unless someone asks and explains what they are asking for. The second issue is resources. If I'm writing a program the features I need will come first because I've only got so much time to put towards the project. If you want to bump a special feature up the list then you should consider hiring me to add it or at least making some donations. Someone that sends me a new computer or my rent money will be MUCH more likely to get the feature they want added right away. People who give away their work tend to need that extra buck now and then so don't be afraid to invest. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Sometimes it can be seductive to think that you can take an open source project and modify it or extend it to meet certain needs for a company. This is often not the case. Often a company will open source something that they couldn't sell. The internet is also full of projects that someone walked away from after graduating from university. It can be difficult to wade through all of that when you're working for a company that thinks they can take a short cut to getting a product out by reusing some open source project(s).
I was involved in a project to try to get Mozilla to do something for which it was never intended. It was pretty difficult to deal with and frankly we should have done something else. However, to our very non-technical management, it seemed like a cheap and quick way to create a general purpose HTML engine.
That doesn't mean that taking something like Mozilla the browser and using it *as a browser* isn't perfectly fine. Mozilla is a great browser, but it's a poor starting point for making a general purpose HTML rendering engine to run in a small footprint.
So, I like open source, but it can be a trap for people who think it is a "magic bullet" or a shortcut for a project. When you hear the phrase "don't reinvent the wheel" followed by the description of a completely insane project that involves major changes to some huge open source thing - run!
If you were running a telnet based Point-of-Sale system, then Open Source might rule, but for typical corporate computer work it would be far to difficult to install and train employees to use open source solutions. Remember that in the Universities, typically only compsci, engineering, and science students every really get to play around with workstations. Your typical business person just learned to use computers on the job.
Not to mention a lot of companies had unix(tm) systems running before they got pc's, and they were considered to be expensive, mysterious, and associated with dumb terminal POS-type systems written in unix(tm); unibasic(tm) sphagetti code.
The novice X11 user needs a very restricted shell, almost a chroot to home; however, the pro requires group access and a variety of permissions. I think that most MI$ personnel consider the ramifications of 1000's of users on unix(tm) style systems to be a management disaster, and so they quickly opt out for the more expensive yet easier commercial solution.
Business often has to pay for a quicker solution when they know they could do it themselves just because their time is better served elsewhere. In this respect a lot of Open Source solutions lose because of the time required to tailor the solution to the problem at hand.
At home I use Debian exclusively on a SMP system and it is all I could ask for in a PC, but at work it will be many years before the average employee could walk up to a Debian box and know what to do or expect.
I think that if you are smart enough to figure out how to install and use open source software, then you are perhaps foolish not to do so.
Clickety Click
You may not have come to the best place to find OSS criticism. Most of the threads are focusing on support. I have not had much success getting credible support for any windows product I have "experienced." I have not had much success getting support for any of the "proprietary" programs I use for that matter. For microsoft support at work we turn to whoever knows the most. If fruitless, we go to the newsgroups. The same support path is taken for linux issues. We tend to have equal success turning to the respective communities for support. Perhaps better in the open world because more hobbyists are involved.
The shortcoming of OSS in the business world is accountability. Who can be held accountable for the flaws of the program? Cynically speaking, how easy is it to hold any company accountable for the "problems" its software causes? Nonetheless, we like to believe that someone's bottom line is going to be affected by their failure. It is safer to assume that personal greed will compel satisfactory software production than it is to believe that personal integrity will win the day.
Business management is about minimizing the adverse affects of the unpredictable. We feel better predicting behavior driven by the greed we understand than by the integrity we question. This can change. For now, consider the greed factor and lack of accountability as key shortcomings to the evolving OSS alternative.
Success without humility is an indulgence in arrogance
Well, you know that and I know that, and most others who post to Slashdot know it, too. But as a matter of fact, when Microsoft has criticized the GPL, they have not made much of an effort to distinguish it from the other kinds of open source software.
Their vagueness is surely deliberate, and therein lies the ever-present dishonesty of that ethical midget with respect to this particular issue. There are many plausible criticisms of the GPL that the general public can easily understand -- after all, the GPL is not universally liked among developers of open source software either. (But even there, M$ has been misleading, by implying that if you just use a GPL'd tool like emacs to develop software, then you have to GPL the software you developed with it; which is sheer nonsense.) By failing to state clearly that there are other models besides the GPL, M$ leaves the impression that these criticisms apply to any open source software. That's dishonest, but as always, they're probably not sorry about it.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
... Do Linux companies go out and market to the kids? Do they get them hooked early? Windows and MacOS do. Apple's biggest acheivement is maintaining such a high % of education sales. After a kid grows up knowing so much about Windows, learning linux is a big hassle.
I grew up on on MacOS, and for the most part, you might as well consider it windows for all the differences between it and Linux. I have now changed to be exclusively a Windows user. I am "the network guy" at my company. I want to bring our website in house, and have bought into the hype that linux would be a much better choice than Win2k.
Now I'm at an impasse. How much would I have to re-learn on the linux side in order to do this. I'll have to know how to set up a box that is hardware compatible. I'll have to choose a distro. I'll have to learn a shell and its commands. I'll want to install a windows manager. I'll have to learn where to go for help, and what do do in the event of hardware failure. I'll have to learn apache for the webserving. I'll have to learn how to assign permissions for visitors...
That's a lot of work, or at least it seems that way to me, when I know how to do all of these things, with relative proficiency, with Win2k. Maybe with some effort I could get the linux box running everything, but I'd be very uncomfortable, worrying about a failure of some sort, and having the company website down while I try to muddle through some fixes that would probably take me 1/10th of the time on a windows box.
You want the reason I don't think open source is viable? It's because the companies and individuals backing it aren't being the drug dealers. They don't have gobs of money for advertising and marketting to get people hooked on it. They're not, as others have pointed out, spending the priority money on the graphics artists, sound technicians, and UI specialists.
Technical acheivement is all well and good, but without the marketting to get people, especially the kids, comfortable with it, it's a big hassle.