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

Opposing views

[haplo21112]

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.

I'm all but anti-open source, but here you go...

[bero-rh]

I've read a lot of FUD from Microsoft and similar companies - it all comes down to a number of arguments that can be easily refuted (classical example: "Open Source is a security problem - since everyone can see the source, everyone can see the bugs"), plus exactly 2 somewhat valid things:

• NDAs. Since we aren't in a perfect world, some information is released under NDAs only, and those NDAs include not publishing the source code of applications that use the information.
  There's no fix for this one, other than simply avoiding anything that requires a restrictive NDA.
• Making money is somewhat harder. For an Open Source OS or server, you can always sell support and services - but how do you make a lot of money from Open Source games?
  
  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):
  
  1. Delayed Licensing: Release it as proprietary code first, Open Source it a year later.
  2. Make the code Open Source, but keeping the data files (graphics and all) under a very restrictive license.
  3. A combination of the previous 2 things: Release the code from the beginning, but don't allow copying the data files for a year or so
     (I'd probably pick this option if I had to)
  
  

Lack of commitment

[togilvie]

I've worked with some open source projects, with disappointing results. A couple of reasons that we prefer commercial development:

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.

Complexity costs money

[Nailer]

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.

Brett Glass

[PD]

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.

Re:1 quick word:

[johnnyb]

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.

Re:FUD

[Maryck]

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.

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.

The flip side of that argument

[sterno]

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.

Sounds like a problem I had with SUN support

[Skapare]

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).