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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.
You should talk to Jim Allchin, he has some non-biased views on open source and he's an industry leader.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4833927.html
Kidding aside, it's probably relevant to your assignment.
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.
I mean, how can anybody argue with the notion that a Cathedral is somehow inferior to a Bazaar? We all know Bazaars where it's at, that's what people look at these days, and travel to Paris and Rome and places to see and marvel at. Hardly anybody stops by the Notre Damme.
It's also pretty clear that anarchy by design and design by anarchy work well. After all, open source has brought some exceptionally innovative technologies to IT consumers in the past few years. We now can finally parse flat text files with greater speeds and more flexibility than ever before! And we keep bug-compatibility to programs written for 1960s computers that can be outperformed by a wristwatch! Now, that's what I call technology! Object orientation? component programming? that's for wussies who can't code in C, sh, or perl!
Finally, how can traditional software businesses compete with the multi-level marketing scheme of proselytizing users that become testers and developers and finally evangelists? It's obvious that all great engineering and scientific endeavours have been benefitted by active recruitement and by popular opinion, not some arrogant dude's idea of what 'right' is.
After all, software is tantamount to *speech*, not machinery. It should be spoken and transmitted freely, not designed and crafted like some piece of steel.
Oh, yeah, there was something else, but I am sure the replies to this will fill you in... something about advocacy or something...
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.
I guess you've read Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. You might be interested in also reading A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It's not directly open source criticism, and doesn't focus on business usage of free software, but it's a good read nonetheless.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Some examples:
And that's just a few of the more recent posts to his log. Don't get me wrong, Dave is a very thoughtful, articulate guy who's no Microsoft parrot -- he and his company, UserLand Software, were one of the authors of the SOAP specification that is proving so critical for future interoperability. He's just got a keen intelligence and is fond of applying it, which means he'll often come up with a different angle on things than you might expect. Go search his site and I bet you'll find, if not the answer you seek, at least some interesting questions.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
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
Much more relevant are anecdotes from the field, which I will hope you will find here.
I am a systems administrator at a small software company in the valley. Although our product runs on a variety of Free and non-Free systems, many of our developers are working on a very proprietary system and using little or no free software. My infrastructure, by contrast, is almost entirely Free. The drawback is not in the performance or feature set of the software I am using to provide services - in fact everyone is extremely happy with it. The drawback, rather, is in constantly having to fight to use good quality Free software in an environment where the mindshare belongs almost entirely to Brand X. As an example, it gets old very quickly explaining to people why we shouldn't be using Exchange Server to handle our mail, especially when our current Free Software mail server has been doing its job perfectly well.
I don't know how relevant this is, but perhaps you will find it interesting. Good luck.
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
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.
Well, if you think about it, Richard Stallman is always talking about freedom, and talking about talking about freedom... presumably this means that you have the freedom to telephone Richard Stallman in the middle of the night and ask him to give you free tech support for Emacs. I don't think he has any choice other than to provide it for you.
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My god, this whole article is like some kind of special troll trap! Maybe Slashdot is going to delete the accounts of anyone modded up on the thread... (are you listening, Taco?)
What do I do with all this crap? Do I start posting reasoned replies? That would be troll-feeding, and might take hours. Do I mod them all to hell? Not really fair, since they asked for anti-OSS, but they're all so, so... WRONG!
It's like having my eyelids forced open to watch the XP launch or something!
Aaaaaugghh!
Quick, click on the Science section! Ah, that's better...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I have yet to see a successful business model incorporating Open Source.
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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
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
NT5 was due in 1998. Lots of great features were planned. Many companies bought into this plan and waited for the great upgrade.
It finally came in Feb 2000 as Win2k.
NT5 was supposed to integrate the stable NT kernel with the flexibility of Windows 95, resulting in a single OS for home and corporate use. Later, Microsoft said that feature would not make it into NT5. Instead we got a set of fixes for Win95, called Win98. A second set of fixes was called Win98SE. Then instead of the single combined OS (NT5), we got WinME and several flavors of Win2k.
In late 2001, we will finally get the combined OS that was promised in 1998, with most of the promised features. In the meantime, Microsoft released three other operating systems (not including WinCE), none of which had all the promised features. Along the way, costs have gone up and vendor lock-in is running rampant.
There are reasons to use MS software, but the ability to depend on their announced release dates is not one of them.
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