Joel On The Economics of Open Source

Stephen writes "The ever-incisive Joel Spolsky discusses the economics of open source software in his latest Joel on Software column. Why do so many large companies want to develop open source software? It's not because they have suddenly converted to Stallmanism."

Comments

Re:good point, goes too far

[TWR]

Ugh. Sorry, but this one is a bit hard to swallow.

Ugh. Sorry, but you must be a youngin'. C has called "high-level assembly language" for years. As it says in the Jargon File:

"C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as 'a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language'. "

-jon

Vladimir Butenko had said that already

[Anonymous Coward]

Vladimir Butenko had posted

similar comments
on comp.mail.imap.

I always use this post to show that everything has a price.

TCO

[Gleef]

Tony writes:

The secondary costs of installing and using MS-Windows is about the same (or perhaps more) than installing and using Linux. That, coupled with the primary costs of using MS-Windows (licensing and media fees) puts MS-Windows at a higher cost than Linux.
...
This idea that MS-Windows has no secondary cost because it has a primary cost is stupid.

Yes, and to add some figures behind your statements, Paul Murphy has done some extensive TCO studies of Windows vs Various unix systems, and found that in many cases, a sanely configured Solaris solution (far from the bargain basement of the *nix world) can often save over 60% compared to the comparable Windows solution. The real world numbers are likely even more slanted towards Unix, because he leaves out the expensive hardware replacement that Windows pushes on you to keep running their software.

A strategic comparison of Windows vs. Unix, LinuxWorld, October 2001