Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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