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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.
Well I have looked for those myself from time to time, because I like to understand both sides of an issue when i am attepting to form my own opinion, and discuss it. Quite often I run in to serious road blocks in doing so the public opinion is overhelmingly positive, esspecially on the web where Open source is the core of everything, and the majority of participants are Open Source followers(Just try and find a decent opinion peice on what W3C's Rand Proposal is a good Idea, I've had no luck)
Of Course the Microsoft web site is an excellent place to start they have many comments about the "evils" of free/open source software. I know there were a couple artticles in the NY Times, and on MSNBC(take pinch of salt) with some reasoning agianst as well.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Thats like going to Landover Baptist looking for arguments for atheism.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
A valid concern of open source lies in the liability of the compay using it. This opinion can be validated from any number of companies, and is a real business corncern.
For Example: Company A uses an open source software app/platform to conduct business. For some reason, a bug happens or an uninvited visitor pilfers, changes or otherwise damages data held in the open source app/platform.
If the damage is severe enough, it can cost the company jobs, clients, reputation ect., and could be a thrust of a law suit. Picture telling a bunch of shareholder that your linux box was hacked and the company lost X amount of money during the time it took to repair the damage, and that is why their stock value fell. Somebody says "whats a Linux?" and you say open source blah blah blah. All they have to do is say "why dont you use oracle or microsoft or apple"
The names they know in other words.
The question of 'perceived' liability regarding open source should be part of your study. What are the extra burdens a company/individual takes on when using open source?
There's no fix for this one, other than simply avoiding anything that requires a restrictive NDA.
I can think of 3 ways to circumvent this problem, but neither of them is very nice (still better than proprietary code, if you ask me):
(I'd probably pick this option if I had to)
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In many open source projects, documentation, usability, design, interface, etc. are deliberately made bad. Take SourceForge, whose business model appears to be to focus only on power and not bother making the product something that is downright painful to configure, because installation / consulting is one of the few ways an open source software company can make money on their product.
Missed deadlines: The open source projects that we worked with had limited commitment to deadlines, and frequently missed them. When you're counting on product launches, this can be very painful
Lack of Support: Things never go wrong at 3PM. Instead, they always happen at 2AM on Sunday. Commercial outfits have dedicated people to help when this happens -- open source people aren't around.
Development of commercial features: Any commercial product has features or enhancements that aren't strictly bug fixes or new enhancements. These are unsexy jobs, but they need to get done. We found it difficult to get people to commit to them
Obviously, your mileage may vary. I'm sure there are some great stories about open-source, as well as even worse ones. But that's my $0.02.
One thing that has always annoyed me about certain open software licenses is the restriction that the software in question can not be used to make money. (Read: included in a product.) If the open-source ideals of free flowing information for the benefit of all are to be fully applied I think that open-sourcers should recognize that a lot of good development happens in a business setting and allow that development model (the commercial one) full access to all open sourced software. Better products would result, benefiting everyone.
Has anyone seen this opinion written up (read: expressed clearly in a paper)?
Complexity costs money.
I write for a couple of Australian Computer Magazines. I've spent the last week interviewing a couple of people for an article I'm writing about server appliances.
One person I'd spoke to got the appliances to replace a Linux based firewall. The firewall worked, but nobody knew how to use it, and it seemed too complex for anyone on staff to operate. They couldn't read the logs, so they didn't know if anyone was attacking them. It was different from all their other systems, so it was hard to learn. And if they wanted to open a port for their Outlook Web Access (which they did) they couldn't. Hiring seperate IT staff to do this work is a cost they couldn't afford.
So they replaced the system with a firewall appliance - specifically a NetGear screening router.
These devices generally use some form os Linux inside them anyway, but the lady I spoke to presented an excellent argument against using traditional non embedded Linux firewalls in SMEs.
He's outspoken against open source, but that's because he doesn't truly understand it. Many have tried to explain it to him, but he doesn't quite get it. If you do a google search on his name, you'll find reams of stuff.
Oh, and try not to laugh too hard at his hair. The man looks like he was a member of Abba.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I have yet to see a successful business model incorporating Open Source.
*********
Then you haven't been looking. Cygnus was profitable for years before being bought by RedHat. ADA Core Technology seems to be profitable (they've been around forever), Mandrakesoft was profitable except for a brief stint where they were run by some flashy US CEO. Penguin has jumped back into profitability. Many, many consultants spend their days developing open-source software for their clients.
I think that people are looking for a big company like Microsoft, but that's just stupid. You can be profitable with Linux, but you can't gouge people. It's kind of a built-in safeguard which prevents people from squeezing people out of money year-after-year. It doesn't prevent profit, just abuse.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Hehe, I've saved my clients hundreds of dollars each by pretending to be a student requesting research reports from trade groups. It pays to have a relatively high pitched and youthful voice. However, make sure you do you calls from home (in case they have caller ID) and have the materials sent to your home address (much less suspicious that way).
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think the point that is being made is that a small company is not necessarily in a position to hire additional employees or retask existing employees to fix or enhance an open source project. Not all costs are monetary. Things like time, resources, etc can often exceed the percieved monetary savings.
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 are right in that there is no legal guarantee of a warantee, but there is often a defacto warantee that stems from that fact that proprietary vendors want to make money, and if one of their customers starts complaining about bugs publically, then there is the potential to lose money. Consequently it is in their best interest to address the problem. Of course this doesn't always work since once a software company reaches a certain size, it can ignore the requests of smaller customers since shear momentum may carry its profits along.
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.
In the long run, this is why open source is better, but in the short term, there is not much you can do if the open source project you were counting on disappears. Of course, you are even more screwed if a proprietary company drops a product.
FWIW, I'm working on a big ERP implementation. I'm the technical team lead and I worked on the technical architecture at the start of the project two years ago. Linux could conceivably have been a candidate for our database servers, but we didn't short list it (we wound up using Solaris on Sparc). Why?
:)
1) Scalability: Our production servers started life with 8 CPUs and 8GB and were designed to grow from there. Our development servers were smaller, but switching architectures between development and production environments wasn't considered a wise move.
2) Hardware Reliability/Availability: We were not convinced that even high-end Intel boxes could measure up in this area.
3) In-House Expertise: Our sysadmins had extensive experience and certification with Solaris.
4) Vendor Support and Experience: Sun has been doing Solaris on Sparc, and Oracle has been doing Oracle on Solaris on Sparc, alot longer than anybody's been doing Linux on anything. That counts.
5) We didn't need to muck about with the guts of the operating system
Short answer: not enough RAS, too much risk. I see this changing thanks to IBM.
We did find a home for Linux on our developers' sandboxes, testing out the latest and greatest. One of our custom utilities runs on Tomcat.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
While there is nobody forcing them to release Emacs21 on a particular date, you can fare more easily get pre-release versions that might provide the support you need. It may be that you just need one nasty bug fixed and instead of having to wait for a whole new released version you can either fix the bug yourself or apply a patch.
If you are fixated on hard releases then open source is a little trickier, but if you can be more flexible then open source can be really helpful.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
try this link
e ns ing/Gpl_faq.doc
http://www.microsoft.com/business/downloads/lic
In addition to the good (and less good) observations below, recall the single biggest (IMO) reason businesses don't choose a given open-source solution: they need to use a particular closed-source product for business reasons.
For example, if you're a consulting firm exchanging documents with your clients, and most of them use MSOffice components, you really have no choice but using those same components. Open-source products just don't interoperate well enough for bulletproof use. This is not to say that plenty of organizations can't use an OS document processor; but if seamless document exchange is required, you need to have the real closed-source product in its current release.
Same thing with many other proprietary components: If you have a business reason to be in bed with Microsoft or Oracle or whoever, the benefits of Open Source are irrelevant. This is the flip side of the good argument made below by Jodka: the financing efficiency of closed-source product development means you can bundle a particular development organization, license, and support infrastructure. Many businesses want or need to do this as customers. Or to put this in more consumer-oriented terms: If you want to play Myst III, there's no open-source substitute.
IMO this is a fundamental barrier to open source in the "real world": Life is great in the bazaar, until the day you need to rent out the cathedral for a wedding. Then you talk to the priest.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
No, I was serious. Microsoft is the most vocal opponent of& acsFlg=accessBought)
0 3sharedsource.asp
/ ss faq.asp
Open Source (see citations below). If I was looking for
an opposing view point, I'd start with Microsoft. There
main points seem to be that open source is a threat to
the software industries profitability (hint: look up
Microsofts profitability at http://finance.yahoo.com/)
and that Open Source uses an inferior software development
methodology and software project management resulting in
an inferior product (Hint: see http://www3.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=340962
See http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/exec/craig/05-
where Craig Mundie states:
"The phrase "open source software," or OSS, is often used
as an umbrella term for a collection of product
development, distribution and licensing practices, many of
which have existed individually since the early days of
computing. There are actually a number of different
approaches within this community, but the common traits are
providing people with access to source code and allowing
others to modify and redistribute that code.
As a result of Microsoft's statement of position today,
many people will attempt to say that Shared Source is
Microsoft's failed attempt at being an Open Source Company.
This could not be a more incorrect statement. Shared Source
is not Open Source. We recognize that OSS has some
benefits, such as the fostering of community, improved
feedback and augmented debugging. We are always looking for
ways to improve our products and make our customers more
successful, and to that end we have incorporated these
positive OSS elements in Shared Source. But there are
significant drawbacks to OSS as well.
The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of
unhealthy "forking" of a code base, resulting in the
development of multiple incompatible versions of programs,
weakened interoperability, product instability, and
hindering businesses' ability to strategically plan for the
future. Furthermore, it has inherent security risks and can
force intellectual property into the public domain."
or
http://www.microsoft.com/LICENSING/sharedsource
which contains this:
"Software providers need to assess the different business
models to determine how sustainable, growth-oriented
business can be built. Businesses built around a strong
intellectual property (IP) base have a much greater chance
to thrive. The contraction in the dot-com industry over the
past few months came about, in part, due to the pervasive
model of companies giving away valuable asset, like
content, with the hope of making money selling something
else later. The GNU General Public License (GPL), one of
the most widely used OSS licenses, poses a significant
threat to the IP base of companies seeking to build a
business around GPL-covered software. Even businesses who
may believe they are "mere users" of GPL software are
threatened since they combine what they believe to be
separate applications with GPL code. This licensing model
has the effect of foreclosing a business's choice of what
IP to share with the community and on what terms."
Finally, there's an article in an old CACM which describes Microsoft's (closed source) development methodology. The primary focus is on testing. Contrast this with OSS which concentrates on public code reviews.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Solaris 2.5 had a routing issue (I don't remember all the details from back then, but it was a bit complex). I spent about 2 hours diagnosing it w/o even needing to shut the system down and had it identified, and had a solution. But the boss didn't like the solution, so I was instructed to call SUN to get support. After 2 weeks of calling, being called, messages left, being forwarded around, the answer finally came back "Sorry, we don't support that, but our consulting people can build a customer solution for you". So I asked them to make a proposal and send it to me so I can give something to the boss in writing since it would cost money. Their estimate was $20K to $30K of consulting time and we wouldn't get either exclusivity or source for the results. My boss laughed at that. And while he still felt SUN should have just "fixed it", and that I should keep calling until they do (I thought this to be a waste of time), I finally did convince him to let me try out my solution. So I put a small Linux box running a 50 MHz 486 on the LAN with one 10 meg ethernet card, and default routed all the Sparc 2000 traffic through it. Performance actually improved. The boss not being entirely happy with a Linux box handling mission critical traffic, ended up opting to buy a well decked out Cisco 4700 to do the job (which it did just fine). Of course if it ever failed (it didn't) we'd have been down for a few hours before a replacement would arrive. If the Linux box were to die, we had replacements ready to go (I had Linux loaded on about 80 old no longer used hard drives sitting in storage, and we had plenty of old PCs around).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
One might argue that is a good thing. If the people a product is designed to serve do not even want to use the product to begin with, then why should it be produced? I have been programming for years, and only used an IDE when I was forced to by the environment I was working in. I generally find that they hamper my work instead of help it. I also have seen several halfway-decent windows programmers be thrown into the shell-only world of UNIX, and this is what generally occurs: They whine and complain about the lack of an IDE for about a month, then they start playing around with the shell a bit as well as vim (or emacs, depending on the preferences of whomever they ask for UNIX help the most), and then they actually start to prefer not having an IDE.
While I most certianly do believe that the development of GUI tools for the office types is a very good idea, programmers should use whatever gives them the most power, and the standard GUI is most definitely not it. All of the effort being put into KDevelop would probably be better spent on KOffice, or even more enhancements to vim, emacs, and the standard code libraries of the various programming languages out there. I know that I would appreciate these as a programmer a whole lot more.
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