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

Support is the usual reason given ...

[dougmc]

The usual reason given is the lack of support.

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 ...

Re:Support is the usual reason given ...

[zerocool^]

another thing to consider is that there are no deadlines or date accountability in open source software. There's no "i have to get Emacs21 out by the end of july". It's done when its done. If its not done when you need it, then you just have to wait, there's not anyone you can call and complain. (course some people would say the same about commercial software: Diakatana, anyone?) The negative side of this is that if you're waiting for features, you could be waiting a while, unlike microsoft: when they say they're gonna have windows XP out by a certain date, they may push it back a coupla months, but if they say october 12th, its going on sale october 12th. If they said it was going to have a CD burning program, email client, voice recognition software, image-editing software, and a new media player, they may be bad, but damnit they're there. In open source, you get a lot of "well we meant to include it, but... it didn't make the code freeze, sorry, mabey next version.

Another downside, as mentioned, is tech support. You can call microsoft and get tech support, but a lot of OSS companies are doing that now, also - when i bought Mandrake 7.2 from best buy, i got a card in the box that said that i had 30 days of help for free, from the date of install, and that was in the $30 version.

Of course, i have no right to complain, as i don't actually program, beyond "hello world"

~z

Re:Support is the usual reason given ...

[Happy Monkey]

There's no "i have to get Emacs21 out by the end of july".

On the other hand, there's no "You have to install Emacs21 by the end of July" from the developers, either.

lack of funding

[jchristopher]

Well, one big problem with open source that I've encountered is that almost everyone working on open source software is a programmer. There are by comparison few/no people working on documentation, usability, design, interface, etc.

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.

Re:lack of funding

[rkent]

Well, one big problem with open source that I've encountered is that almost everyone working on open source software is a programmer.

Argh! You are SO exactly right. I was going to write an essay about this once. Still might. Basically, the problem boils down to the fact that the supposition, "open source projects are built to scratch an itch," is precisely correct. And, the only people scratching are old, wizened programmers (and those who aspire to be like them).

The thing is, old wizened programmers are satisfied editing in emacs, compiling on the command line, and doing a pure text debug. In fact, they're downright happy with it. Not that there's anything WRONG with this; it's valid to argue that emacs is actually one of the most powerful editors out there, once you get to know it.

But computer USERS by and large don't want to reach that point of expertise. Nor should they be forced to, to use their computers for other ends. But they're not the ones contributing to the OS movement. Partly because they can't write the code, but PARTLY at least because those who can, just won't listen! And that might be the strongest argument of all against use of open source by business and casual users: the software just wasn't designed for them, and so it probably won't meet their needs (or perceived needs) as well as a more rounded product.

The easy ones:

[rkent]

... which even a lot of OS-advocates don't contradict, but rather step around:

1. There's no support built into the product. Yes, you can hire people to support it for you, but it's a seperate cost.
   
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."
   
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.
   

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.

lots of reasons

[tim_maroney]

I've been calling out reasons for a while here. You could try going through some of my back posts for detailed arguments.

In general, though, open source software is inferior to its closed source counterparts in:

• usability
• aesthetics
• integration with other software
• performance
• feature completeness
• support
• documentation
• stability (at the application level -- not true for kernels)
• ease of installation
• support for hardware
• availability of software
• total cost of ownership (TCO)

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

Missing documentation

[jimfrost]

Well, there's certainly some truth to the fact that you get little or poor documentation with most of the open source software. The question I always ask of people who bring this up is, what documentation did you get with the Microsoft software?

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.

It varies, as you would expect. . .

[werdna]

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.

Better viewpoint

[einhverfr]

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?