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How Would You Argue for Open Source?
Nate asks: "I am currently working for an international corporation, and the site I am working at was (until very recently) entirely run on Windows. We recently purchased a Solaris server, and I am in charge of setting it up and resetting the global UNIX standard. The problem is that management doesn't want to install software that does not have 24 hour, worldwide support available along with it, yet they want the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..) without spending insane amounts of money. I was wondering how the Slashdot community deals with convincing management that Open Source software is safe to use when creating a global standard, and what your solutions have been to supporting users working with open source software." Two years ago, Slashdot tackled the Enterprise Support question. Now, say you had that particular problem solved and the only thing left is that all-important pitch to Upper Management. What arguments would you use in your attempts to get their approval? What statistics and references would you point to, in order to back everything up?
I've had the same problem at all organizations I've been at, except for one.
It usually ended up in me in a shouting match
"We'll have access to the source code, and be able to update the app as needed due to new requirements or OS upgrade."
Worked for me.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
if they want to take responsibility for aligning their IT strategy to their business objectives, or their systems provider's.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
For statistics about open source software / Free Software, see my paper, "Why Open Source Software / Free Software? Look at the Numbers!", at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html . It has a large collection of information you'll probably find useful.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Show your boss how easy it is to ind online troubleshooting documentation for the various software packages you are proposing to use, as well as documenting the entire install so a monkey could reinstall the software if something breaks.
Your company wants to make sure that anyone who might administer those servers has access to the information they need to fix any problems that come up if the person who initially installed the software falls off the earth.
A 24hour support line is one method of getting that support, you just have to show that there are other less expensive support routes that are just as viable.
If need be remind your boss that it is your ass on the line if something goes wrong with the servers and you'll be the one showing up to work at 4AM on a Sunday to fix the issue.
Do you Gentoo!?
It seems odd to me to decide on a solution and then develop arguments to use that solution. IT is generally a service provider for business needs. You present the business users with the available options, outline the pros and cons, and allow them to decide. The other danger of engaging in proseletyzing is that if something goes wrong, everyone will be quick to point out the guy who did all the yelling about open source.
When telling my boss why it would be foolish to use Oracle for a web content database when MySQL is cheaper and faster (I know, I know), she wanted to know what the TCO is on it. Huh? I just said it was free other than labor. "Well I'll have to talk about TCO. My bosses don't believe that OSS is actually free." I wish they would just leave me alone and slip the checks under the door....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
questions to management:
1. How many times have you been bent over the rail for 'minor enhancements' to proprietary software?
2. How many times have we bought software from companies that have later gone out of business only to find later that they are bug-ridden?
3. How many times has a vendor BS'd us about a product's capabilities and all we could do was nod silently?
Add all these together and while I'm sure they're a small percentage of the overall benefit, they're something alot of tech managers have had to deal with in the past.
I guess it depends on how much money is considered 'insane'. RedHat offers support, HP sells contracts supporting Linux... I would think the support costs would not exceed a comparable contract supporting Windows systems.
.:diatonic:.
So give her estimated labor costs of installing and supporting MySQL vs cost of purchasing, installing and supporting Oracle. Don't forget hardware costs.
Talk about two things:
Cost: Cost of rollout of a commercial product is comparable or more than the cost of 3rd party support contracts for open software.
Risk Management: Buying proprietary software gives you support, but the support is with a monopoly supplier who can then choose to charge whatever it wishes down the road for both software upgrades and support. Tying yourself to a monopoly supplier is a poor risk, since every move a monopolist will make will not be for the benifit of your company, but for the benifit of thiers. Similarly, with Open Source, since our company has the right to modify the software, every change you make will be for the benifit of your company.
Upper Management does not grok Geek. Upper Management groks Dollars and groks Risk.
Just keep that in mind.
-- Funksaw.
that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..)
VNC and OpenSSH are available for windows so they might not be convincing. Try using ROI and TCO as persuaders.
that was the whole business model behind OSS: charge for support not for the software.
My penguin ate my sig
I'm assuming if you're capable of setting up all these systems, then you should be able to support it.
Hire 1 or 2 other people to work for you that can cover the other hours that you cannot be there... and there you go, you now have 24 support.
Now, say you had that particular problem solved and the only thing left is that all-important pitch to Upper Management. What arguments would you use in your attempts to get their approval? What statistics and references would you point to, in order to back everything up?
I wouldn't even bother. I would call the local IBM Global Services office and ask them to pitch for the job, and dangle the carrot (whether it exists or not right now, it might to in the future) of outsourcing the management of said Open Source infrastructure to them. I assume that you don't actually care who runs it from day to day just so long as it's Open Source. They'll make a far more convincing argument that you can alone - remember they employ people full-time to do nothing but research and put together fancy presentations (as do all consulting firms... you don't think the slick performers doing the presentation will actually show up to do the work, do you?).
First, there is no one size fits all canned argument. You need to identify a few things before you even ask this question:
1. For what kind of server[s] do you want OSS adoption
2. How many of them are deployed
3. etc etc
Then, rate these in order of importance, and your bullet point cost/benefit arguments to the director or executive will be more succinct. You see, you don't want a hodge podge of OSS evangelizing, you want relevant points given the specifics of your organization.
Or, if you just really want them to be conviced to go with OSS, just make it seem impossible to do with commercial stuff.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
That will cure them for sure, support and Sun is like mixing oil and water...
What you need are testimonials from others running mission-critical applications using FOSS.
One Fortune 500 executive won't achieve comfort with this kind of a spending and deployment decision (face it, they don't know the tech) until, unless, and, only if, they have seen more than one other Fortune 500 executive put their own necks on the chopping block, made a courageous decision, and have it succeed wildly with no glitches whatsoever.
Getting those testimonials might be hard for an individual on their own ("Mr. Big's office, how may I help you? Right...."), but the web is full of articles showing different businesses using FOSS successfully.
If you were tied into a vendor with a lot of FOSS contacts (eg, RH, IBM), then they could probably help you find those important reference testimonials. Sun is late getting on board the FOSS bandwagon, despite having produced a lot the standards and technology that has made it possible. Their Solaris servers will run FOSS just fine and interoperate with Linux machines, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Does "submitting a bug report and getting a patch in under 24h" qualifies ? In any case you can get any half-decent developper and hire him/her to fix things that are found to be broken.
As for not spending insane amounts of money, I have yet to find OpenSource software that is not free as in beer as well. And the code is auditable, too.
An Evans Data survey published in November 2001 found that 48.1% of international developers and 39.6% of North Americans plan to target most of their applications to GNU/Linux. In October 2002, they found that 59% of developers expect to write Linux applications in the next year.
Waiting for Linux apps...tapping foot....still waiting....
I would suggest running Linux instead of Solaris.
...give it to them:
Form a new company with you as the only employee.
Submit monthly invoice for $50,000 to your current company for "OSS Platinum Support".
Sit back and watch the money roll in.
This works to your benefit since they'll probably call you at all hours of the night to initiate the support call, anyway...
- Tony
There are so many different angles to attack this issue from, and unfortunately there are more sides to the issue than we'd like to admit. However I think there are several areas that would be good to discuss:
- Closed source has more bugs, and the exploits are typically more severe.
- Actual turn around time for Closed source is much slower than open source for new features and enhancements.
- Closed source hampers IT productivity as the fear of sharing "Intellectual Property" infects and permeates many people that work in closed source environments
one of my favorite all time articles is written by Clay Shirky, entitled In Praise of Evolvable Systems
This article addresses what many people consider to be open source's weekpoint. It is however it's strongest point. This is a fantastic read and is a must in any presentation to management about open source and open standards in general.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
software that does not have 24 hour, worldwide support available along with it
... and say hello to the 24 hour, worldwide support team.
I would say, "Hey, you there, use open source or I will kill you."
Your management's point is valid, but it is made less so by the fact that telephone support for proprietary software is not all that it's cracked up to be, and also by the very strong support for free and open source offerings.
The people who provide support for proprietary products are often quite good, and they are familiar with the most common issues you'll encounter with their software. But I've found them to be rather bad with unexpected issues. They'll sometimes tell you to upgrade to the newest version, which is the last thing you want to hear.
On the other hand, if you deal with free or open source software you'll often get support from people who have an active role in developing the software - perhaps even the founder of the project. These people can identify problems, and even fix them and release a new version to address your needs. No joke. I use a program called MIMEDefang to add an annoying disclaimer to our company e-mail (a legal requirement, but a PITA nonetheless). I regularly get list e-mail about this program in which the core developers answer questions posted on the list. They do this numerous times a day.
Ever get a support-related reply from Bill Gates when you've had a Windows BSOD? It's a different world, and one I like a lot better.
Greetings,
We have a number of clients, from mid- to large enterprises, who have switched to *NIX/Linux over the last 3 years following our advice. The key for us was to define quantifiable targets in terms of $$$ and time-to-resolution, and kept statistics of similar environments running Windoze or commercial *NIX software.
Two test cases that immediately come to mind are Samba and VNC. In the first case the monetary quantification was instant: $0 against licenses for a 75-person department. There were no calls to support at all once we switched the servers. For the VNC case at another company, we pitted it against PC Anywhere. Once users understood the new logon sequence, they began champion VNC by themselves because they realized that *NIX machines and Macs were opened to their control, some of which had been closed before.
Both of my examples focused on solving specific problems, with a set time line and quantification targets. Don't try to implement everything in one single deployment because if something non-mission-critical breaks that affects a mission-critical app or service you'll invalidate your own case.
Good luck and have fun!
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
We all know *NIX is easy to administer and troubleshoot. That's not the problem.
Consider a company that contracts out support and/or deployment. They'll be more or less liable for downtime.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Easy. Go out and do all the research you can on finding the services and support they want for the lowest price. At the same time write up another proposal using all opensource/gpl/bsd/whatever software and present that at the same time as the other. Besure to have the final total cost for each printed in a large bright red font.
Don't be lazy - do the work they want, just be honest. This has worked for me several times.
A small presentation showing the cost of Microsoft Word VS. gvim on 5000 desktops should be a good start. (And yet there is still that grumpy old guy with the beard who insists on compiling Emacs on all the servers....errr...)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
It seems reasonable to want worldwide 24 hour support for certain critical pieces of software (say, your customer database). But isn't asking for worldwide 24 hour support for VNC and OpenSSH almost getting to the point of absurdity? These are extremely common tools that have been around for quite a while. Do they want worldwide 24 hour support for vi as well? How about that bash shell? Or the calculator applet?
If your company wants 24/7 support go with a company that provides linux solutions. Buy IBM servers with linux on them and get a support contract. Likewise some Linux distros like RedHat provide 24/7 support contracts.
First, I pointed out instances in the past where our software vendors would not, could not meet our needs. We had to turn to internal development which would in turn find a open source project which we could modify (if needed) to get the job done.
The success of previous projects was enough to convince them. I didn't even have to bring up the need for extra machines, licenses, etc that it would require to conform to the specifications of a close/proprietary software where we would not have source code flexibility.
My software is free and that makes it better..NEENER NEENER NEENER!!!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
this guy if you want all the Microsoft dirt present and future.
http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit021.html
That is his latest. Look around on the site a little. Lots of stuff there with many current references.
Blogging because I can...
"sir, we should open source this because in building you something proprietary i will be giving myself job security. you will need me forever." ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What makes you think that those developers were making "off-the-shelf" applications? It's likely that some of them are, but I'd wager that most are meant for internal use.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I wouldn't recomend ANYONE giving a dime to IGS, they'll charge a lot and deliver little, I've had to unF%*k IGS code on a number of occasion, it was really crap, IGS epitomizes all that has gone wrong in the ASP industry. MM
Just the fact that this question ended up on Slashdot says a whole lot about open source.
CIO: My techie's say that UNIX is the best and is backed up by the entire Slashdot community.
CEO: Your telling me that you trust techie's over marketing droid's?
CIO: Yes, sir.
CEO: Your fired. Have a nice day.
MS has stopped releasing security updates for NT4, so companies using it are forced to decide between having security holes or paying MS for a newer version that locks them into a more draconian license agreement. How long until your company faces the same problem with whatever version of windows they use?
With open source, you can patch whatever version you're running, or just upgrade whatever is necessary without the draconian eulas.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Someone should start their own support company only supporting OSS. They could list the projects they support, and the versions they support officially on a webpage or something.
Corporations could then pay these folks directly for the apps they use.
There doesn't need to be any vendor affiliation or platform affiliation, just that they support something like MySQL on Redhat, Suse, MS Windows 2000 server, Solaris 9 etc..
If you want to use that particular app, but don't want to trust support to the internet masses, then you could use something like this.
Plus, it might help employ OSS programmers while allowing them to work on the stuff they love.
Oh well, just a thought.
They'll ask you "Why go with Solaris over any other Unix variant?" Better have that answer.
They'll ask you "Why not Linux?" Have an asnwer.
They'll ask you "Will it work with our existing Windows infrastructure?" Answer that as well.
They'll ask "How much will the rollout cost?" Better have those figures handy.
They'll want to know "Why not just stick with Windows, especially since Windows 2003 is about to ship?" Have a retort ready for that.
They'll want to know (if they're savvy) how the data crunching numbers will compare UNIX to Windows, MySQL to MS SQL. You'll want that handy, too.
And finally, they'll want to know why should they switch to a different platform when they're already so heavily invested in Windows. Got an answer other than "Windows sucks"? You better know those things, becuase bosses aren't about to "just take your word for it" they demand facts, figures, and spreadsheets for proof--and if anything goes wrong it's your ass. Switching is fine, but you better be ready for the backlash and have oodles of proof ready or the resistance will be an unsurmountable chasm.
A good product should be able to sell itself.
I have no desire to go into marketing.
Just use open source, if its the best solution for a problem, it will be seen as such and embraced.
All of the philosophy society-revolution bullshit rhetoric from the "OSS Leaders" is pretty much ignored in the real world.
And if you want your employer/client to completely dismiss you for a zealot idiot, just write "Micro$uck" into an email, or yammer about the MS Palladium world-domination conspiracy theory. Or give them some false information about how windows cant do this or that, nothing more pathetic than a "computer nerd" who knows less than someone who's thumbed through a copy of "Windows for Dummies"
Thats the best way to show your lack of objectivity, and guarantee your position in the mailroom is secure for all eternity.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Easy. Stop making it a big deal. What you are meant to be providing is a solution that suits your company's IT needs. You are not the company Open Source advocater, shouting blue murder every time someone implements a system which isn't open source.
Use clear cut facts. Show the TCO, show the support channels, show the migration cost and schedules, provide a backup plan if things go pear-shaped, etc. Basically, the FACTS. And while you are at it, keep your own mind open. Y'know, often, closed source solutions are far superior than open source solutions. Don't be afraid to keep an open mind and have the openness to choose a proprietry solution if that is the best way forward.
And if you manage to keep an open mind, you'll be superior to the vast majority of open source advocates...
to ask forgiveness then permission.
Before you go to upper management find out how much the non-open source applications are going to cost. Factor in any consulting fees for setup. Then factor in the cost for global support on an ongoing basis over say the course of the next five years. I'd also suggest adding in any special hardware requirements.
Next find your open source "products". Then find developers who are very comfortable with the "products" that you are recommending. Factor in the cost of hiring them and their salary on an on going basis. They will be your "support" team. Also factor in hardware if needed.
The first hurdle is to prove that it will cost less or at the very least no more than the "off the shelf" products. Then you'll need to put your sales hat on and do a side by side "feature comparison" of the OSS alternatives to the products that you evaluated.
Most of all, be objective and very matter of fact about your presentation. Prove to them that OSS is the way to go becuase it costs less to aquire and maintian and has an equal or superior feature set. Apache is a great case study...
Good luck!
the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..) without spending insane amounts of money.
Since the two examples you cite are available on Windows, perhaps you need to get a better understanding of Windows. In fact, Windows Remote Desktop feature in XP is superior to VNC in functionality, response, and seamless integration, so VNC is hardly a compelling argument in favor of open source operating systems.
Perhaps you need to have someone with a more balanced perspective come into the organization and evaluate where Unix derivatives are the best choice and where Windows is a superior pick. Those who blindly promote *nix and open source as the solution to every computing problem are no more enlightened than those who automatically choose Microsoft products for every function.
Why do you think that they're going to be anything other than in-house apps?
Heck, I expect to write a Linux app in the next year. Frankly, I expect to be doing it in under 6 months. And nobody will ever see it since it's the core infrastructure for a service my company is offering. Pure backend stuff.
The vast majority of software written is not written for the commercial marketplace. It's written for inhouse use.
Sun's solaris comes with quite a few supported Free and Open Source packages, and if your boss doesn't like that he can pay for Sun's own equivalents (or from other vendors) as he sees fit. Note that Sun actually supports some Free and Open Source software in the same was as it does its own; however it also ships unsupported free software. Don't get the two confused.
Stick Men
I think I would use the free access to the latest techologies and the quick security updates.
I have never really dealt with this issue my self but I guess most people in the company top would like things like: Total control of the techology in the company.
http://linux.bryanconsulting.com/stories/storyRead er$45
I work (Sysadmin/Webmaster) at a fairly big corporation 70000++ employees. Their IT strategy: "If there is a good Microsoft solution we'll use that. If there isn't, we'll use it anyway". Our business unit (400 employees) is pretty rogue and my boss see all the benefits of free software and community supported software. Apache is de facto and Linux as far as we can go. (HPC, Infrastructure and so on). But still, the IT organization is breathing down our necks and wonders what the hell we are doing but we don't care and there is no end in sight. We are even about to deploy an open source framework for content management and administrative applications. (project management, document management and so on). Java based running on Tomcat along with MySQL. Hey, I love my job! =)
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
I work at a university, and over two years ago, they asked me to help evaluate authoring systems for online courses. One of their requirements was that the company we chose needed to be willing to partner with the institution to extend the capabilities of their software to meet our needs. We gave several suggestions, but I told them they should get on board with MIT's OKI and OpenCourseWare.
They had two concerns about open source solutions: 1. There is no company behind most open source solution. No company means no tech support. 2. OKI was just getting off the ground and would not be ready for prime time for a while.
Over a year later, the university finally chose a company to go with for their authoring system. We paid for a 30-day trial and got 5 days into it before we realized their marketing people had straight-up lied about its feature set.
So, we went with the company our university had ranked number two on the list. We worked with them for 6 months, hired one of their people to work for them on a university paycheck, and gave them a substantial fee every month for licensing. Then the company decided to get out of the authoring systems market, pulled our license and left us with nothing.
In the meantime, OKI has picked up steam, and the 11 universities that got on early with them have been developing solutions that will soon be GPLed.
The long-short is that having a company behind the product is a double-edged sword. Sure, they could give you tech support, but what happens if/when they're gone?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Has anyone actually been happy with support from a closed source company that they were satisfied with?
We have had to various vendors for various reasons, 75% of the time we figured out the problem with little help from the vendor and 95% of them were pay-for-support calls. Veritas for example always tells us to "reboot" and the backup system will see all the servers, or reboot the server and they will "see" the tape drive or the fiber. Wow, we pay for that? Why not FIX or help us troubleshoot the problem for that money we pay and not just provide a short term solution like rebooting. There are a few times where a company was able to help out and it was NOT directly their fault for the problem. The state of specific vendor support and that 24/7 support line you get is a complete joke and they will all jump at the chance to blame the one that they are not, like its the network or software or hardware you are using, not our product. Can anyone say otherwise? I see this "support" as complete FUD.
Error: Not Found
This guy IS Mr Upper Management. Maybe we could ask him? I am sure there are /.ers who work at MSDW. I am sure he would be glad to be featured on slashdot....It's every geeks dream come true.
- RLJ
Try getting support for Solaris after M$ buys Sun. You'll be able to bitch on IRC for BSD help years after all the funding is cut and SCO sues the different BSD forks.
Stability is also a good reason to switch. You won't need support for Linux if the admin knows what he's doing or chooses a beginners distro like Mandrake. Microsoft OTOH won't tell you that foobar~1.dll must be updated for NT 5(.5) the day after it's retired.
IIRC, many companies provide Linux support agreements. The submitter should look into those.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Well, I'd start by preaching to the choir, and I'd follow that with getting petulant everytime anyone disagreed with me.
If that didn't work I'd swap intellectual semen with a bunch of undergrads and social retards on a web board.
Edit:OH SHI
And then let the lobbyist "say" (read: cop out mad free shit/money) whatever it is that they are so good at saying that gets laws changed.....
I mean thats how microsoft argues open source, why shouldnt we?
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
- Find out what the biggest concerns are
... are they feature availability, cost of aquisition, cost of support, availability of support, ... you know what I mean.
- Make 2 matrices of the commercial options versus the open source ones, including the vendor companies who will provide/support these solutions.
- In the first matrix compare the commercial solution with the Open Source alternative, feature for feature, and remember conforming to open standards is a feature.
- In the second matrix compare the 2 for pricing, including cost of aquisition, support, upgrades,
...
- If possibly throw in a few (relevant) case studies of companies who might have already made the transition.
Numbers dont lie, and you should be able to make your point without having to resort to savage beatingsAll you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Likewise, don't confuse a specific product with a class of products. If there's a market for it (especially a corporate market), there's probably a vendor selling something that will meet your needs.
Also, don't look at list prices and scream: when you're buying for a corporation, you're rarely paying list price (unless you're only purchasing a few licenses).
It always worked for going to the pool.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
In the beginning, no large company would use Apache because it was open source and therefore was not supported by any specific company. Nice thing about OSS is that large projects like Apache are supported 24x7 worldwide by MANY companies -- so if one company provides poor support, you can use another one. BTW, Apache is up to 63 percent of all websites now. :-) And now that it runs on windows, it will become even more popular. Same is true for Linux which has the backing of many large companies, so there is no shortage of technical support. And I haven't even touched on the web forums, newsgroups, list servers, websites, of free support avialable. And traditional media too -- books, magazines, etc all cover OOS projects like Apache, OpenSSL, Linux/*nix, etc.
Support is not an issue. I think the reliablity factor of running on a *nix platform will help a lot.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
The only arguments that make any sense to bean counters are ones that may be reduced to dollars and cents. All arguments should be of the form: If we do (not)? X, then we will save Y over Z years for the following reasons: A, B, C,.... If you cannot reduce the argument to ROI, then there is no business reason for doing something - Mind you, ROI takes on many forms - You need to apply your insider perspective to figure out an ROI model that your management will swallow Forgive the RegEx notation
You don't need open source to get the features of OpenSSH and VNC.
You could use the commercial SSH rather thann OpenSSH and something like Windows Terminal Services or Exceed in place of VNC.
The best argument for Open Source that I have used is that because the source is open, everyone can improve it and find/fix bugs or security holes, and cannot have spyware-type code inbedded. And you can be assured that when a problem is found, it can be fixed, because you have the source. Google for a news article about MS refusing to acknowledge a security hole that later was proven to exist. This has happened enough times to scare my boss to allow Open Source in our Corp.
I'm a little surprised this hasn't come up yet...
:)
If you're looking for "enterprise" level support (God I hate that word!), Red Hat offers exactly what you're looking for, from what it looks like. Maybe you should give Red Hat a call and get one of their sales people to pimp themselves to your boss?
The Free desktop that Just Works
Congrats on converting to something manageable and decent to work with.
Sun offers various software suport contracts, and there's a good chance some of them will support the OSS you plan to run, especially minor utilities like OpenSSH and VNC.
Covalent offers support contracts for Apache.
Support contracts can be nice, both for passing the buck on intractable problems and for resolving those issues that never come up except when the local expert's unavailable.
"Worldwide and 7*24h Support" and "Open Source" are no contradictions. I think we (NetUSE) are not the only company to offer support for Open Source products like SSH, Squid, Apache etc.
Typical customers purchase support like helpdesk, patch services or (espescially for Solaris) packaging.
It's not a lot of work to offer SSH packages that you can remove and install in a newer version without a new host key. But it's those small things a lot of customers pay gladly for.
Thanks to Open Source and the community, companies like are ours usually faster with patches than a lot of other big software companies i could name.
On the other side the Open Source products get a benefit when enhancements on the request of customers (LDAP support here, there another command line option) find their way back into the community. I believe this is win-win at its best.
Open Source says "you can patch/modify/package it by yourself". But it's not a holy duty to do so.
Yours, Martin
P.S. If you want to use OSS and don't know where to spend your huge support budget, feel free to contact me ;-).
...that it's "free" not open source. And every time they say "Linux" tell them it's "GNU/Linux," and then refuse to participate in the conversation until they agree to only say "GNU/Linux." Wear a cardboard halo on your head too.
:)
This works for RMS.
I wouldnt lay my job on the line to support a set of software (open source) that is bound to collapse soon. It will - just like communist russia with no incentive for people to do what they do it will crumble. In the end money puts food on the table and a roof over your head and these freebie open source developers will eventually dry up and there will be nothing left.
You get a friend to start a support business.
You tell you boss there is a local company that supports said apps.
Your boss calls the company, and your friend quotes some reasonable quotes.
split the profit with your friend.
You get Open Source, and money.
QED.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your best bet to arguing is to wear a Blue Jays/Maple Leafs jersey and cough violently.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
PeopleSoft is on its way - a pretty significant addition to the Linux world, I think...
Yours,
tom
The Army reading list
There are several points you have to pitch to management.
1. First you have to pitch to them that the box is not a piece
of hardware + software. It is a piece of hardware. What you
run on it is entirely under your control. As a sysadmin or
developer this is a combination of your own management scripts,
development code, borrowed code to speed development, software
development tools (both free and proprietary), and whatever
else.
2. YOU are responsible for the box. No support people who give
you software ever know how their software works, interacts
with other software, or how the operating system that the the
software runs on really works. The support people are there to
give the pretense that you have a safety net, and to espouse
the features of the software. They don't ACTUALLY have a clue.
The real people who know the software works are too busy
developing the next version.
3. A solaris box (like most proprietary Unixes) is completely
UNUSABLE without GNU tools. The very first thing *I* used to
when I got a sparc is to install all the GNU tools, IceWM,
rxvt, mc, and cooledit. Then I could breath a sigh of relief
and actually start doing some work. It's not a matter of
degree: If you yourself feel that your solaris box is AT ALL
usable in its default state, then you don't know what you are
doing in the first place and should spend a few hundred hours
learning FreeBSD or Linux first.
If you are asking the question you are, it means that your
management is not convinced that you can solve a solaris
problem if it arises. In this case I would learn a lot more
about Unix to convince them that you are in control and can
handle any kind of problem that comes up. Also...
A business's value is in the business processes it sets up. If
an employee leaves, it should not break the business. This is
why management wants to define what resources are required to
keep the box working. They don't want you to be the sole
recourse in the event of an emergency.
To convince management, you have to: to write documentation
that defines a business process that is greater than yourself.
In this way, in the event of your leaving, things will not
break down.
You can define a business process by writing a document
describing exactly what GNU software you install on the box
and how to use it. A process that explains how to train a
person to manage that software is essential.
-paul psheer@icon.co.za
In many cases, finding solutions through commercial support has been much more expensive in terms of the actual contract cost and *time* spent.
It takes a lot of time (and luck) to call the support number, wait for a call back, and maybe get someone that knows about your problem and an appropriate solution.
I'd say that in 70% of the support calls I've had to make, I've had to escalate the call because the level one techs don't know how to solve the problem, and this takes time. Sometimes, I've even had to escalate to the developers of the product, which were only available 8-5 weekdays, further delaying a fix.
Searching for a solution to an open source problem is easy. Search Google or a product's bug tracking system for someone else having the same problem and see how they solved it, or if a solution exists.
The main disadvantage of going the open source route is you don't have anyone depending on your support $$, who will fix problems for you in a timely manner. You can write to the developers or enter a bug request, but this doesn't guarantee a fix within any particular timeframe, which can a substantial risk from a business point of view.
Nate, tell your bosses that with Microsoft, you are getting stuck with Microsoft support only. They are the only game in town and they abuse it.
With open source, you can get support from HP, IBM, RedHat, among other Big Names. Say you have a high volume site running Apache. A Big Name such as HP or IBM would happily sell you a service contract guaranteeing support. And if they screw you up, you can give them back their box and give your business to a competitor and they know it.
That should be the starting point.
Then you can answer the cost questions.Get some quotes. Call HP, IBM, RedHat.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
No, I don't work for them, but Linuxcare has a professional looking website using the CEO-lingo that might comfort the big-wigs you need to convince. There are other companies that support Free Software too, check out Red Hat's Support Services. A site called OpenEnterprise looks to have a ton of resources on exactly what you're asking for.
Also, take a look at IT Management's special report on Linux. It offers a lot of ammo to you in making a presentation. You can point to the other heavy-hitters that are using Free solutions and have concrete examples of success.
The same site even has an article entitled Selling the 'Suits' on your IT project which looks to have some good advice for you.
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
convincing management that Open Source software is safe to use
Most Open Source advocates really need to think about something before they go charging in assuming OSS without vendor support is really better for all situations: Management wants 24x7 support not because they think the software is unstable, but because they cannot afford downtime when that software does fail.
"So what?" you say, "I've been using this stuff for years and I can solve pretty much any problem they might run across. I am 24x7 support!" What happens when you're gone? On vacation? What happens when you get burned out and sick of being the only guy capable of supporting an application that's taken off in the enterprise and now has a hundred installations all over the world? What happens when you have trouble finding someone with the skill sets needed to replace you?
This "guru" support model simply does not scale. This is why management wants 24x7 support: so that no matter what happens to their gurus, they always have a toll-free 800 number to call to get someone that knows what they're doing on the problem. If that person can't solve it, a good maintenance contract might even involve getting the vendor to fly an engineer out there to fix the problem. This is very much about making management feel good about getting the support they need to solve their problems.
The alternative is to spend an exceptional amount of money training a staff equivalent to the staff of the vendor to be just as smart and available as a vendor offering 24x7 support. It's not just about hiring two or three strategically-placed gurus.
Now, with that out of the way, OSS can still work in the enterprise, provided you approach the situation intelligently. Can your organization staff up a support group internally to support this application without requiring a maintenance contract with a vendor? (And can you keep them busy enough to make it cheaper in the long run?) Certain skillsets are pretty common nowadays, such as administration of Apache. It may be perfectly realistic to be able to staff up a small group to support common OSS applications in an enterprise. If someone leaves the company, it's realistic that they can be replaced or someone else trained to fill the vacancy, but you can never count on being able to hire a small army of "gurus" capable of adapting to any OSS application at the drop of a hat. This is very unrealistic (not to mention extremely expensive).
But not all OpenSource projects fit into this category. Frequently they'll be smaller projects that might be used plenty on the Internet, but either because there's a guru out there actually setting it up and administering it (that can adapt to just about anything), or because the author made it exceptionally easy for a novice to get it running. Neither of these options is acceptable in an enterprise setting! Your guru won't be there forever, and your army of novices won't have a clue how to fix a novice-friendly application when it breaks.
The bottom line is that you need to consider your company's true support expenses here: if an application needs 24x7 support, you either need to have a staff of people on-hand to guarantee support for this application (across your enterprise), at a significant expense, or there needs to be a vendor out there willing to assume 24x7 support for a fraction of that cost.
Sounds like a company I know about...
Anyway, what sort of support does Red Hat give? Is that a route this guy can go: Buy Red Hat, get the support contract, and voila, the support management demands?
Seriously.
Applying the paint, or making the pitch, is the smallest part of the job. It's the prep work that takes most of the time if you do it right, and which determines the success of the job.
If the decision's already been made before the meeting then the better your arguments, the deeper the hole you dig for your career.
If your company makes decisions on a rational basis, get down on your knees with gratitude. If it's more typical, then remember your job is to soothe fears and not to win a debate. Read "Flawless Consulting" to understand what it means when you get too many objections in a row. Read Dale Carnegie for examples of selling without arguing.
Get allies, in house or out of house. A high-priced consultant who went to college with the CEO will have instant credibility. Quote the Gartner Group about the wisdom of using IIS.
A rational argument I've seen is that savvy buyers demand source code escrow for critical systems, which you get trivially by definition for OSS. You might also check whether network intrusion insurance is cheaper for OpenBSD than for Windows.
I work for a large software consultancy, and my full time job in the last few months has been converting Windows and *nix software to work on Linux for various companies. While our company has always offered these services, recently we have seen the number of "migrate to linux" type projects skyrocket. Every other project we get these days is centred around it. In a way, it's kind of annoying since I would like to keep my skills current on ALL platforms, but I've seen nothing but QT and Java on Linux for the last 4 months!
For example, the phrase proven technology scores high on the management-style terminology vocabulary. Show that products as Apache have a high acceptance rate (proven by statistics) and is therefore the proven technology they are looking for.
This will work a lot better than telling management technical reasons, such as that the tools supports the latest PHP, makes use of MySQL, have higher throughput and so on...
... and if you try to convince them, first take your Dilbert T-shirt off...
The article mentioned in the parent is a good one... I've used it successfully in several seminars on value proposition of open source software. It's generally been very well received.
As far as arguing with upper management, when I was working in cubeville, I never worried about it. I just implemented it the best way I knew how, and presented it as a completed solution.
Once the solution is in place, nobody ever seems to worry about it. Then at some point in the future, it's easy to point to it and say: "but we've *been* using open source all this time, and don't have problems with it".
I think that's still the most successful implementation strategy. It's the one Microsoft used for pushing Novell out of mid-sided businesses.
It's really hard to sell to people who raise irrational objections. You know the sort of thing, you phone and tell someone about a new type of mail server you've invented. "Oh no, we've already got anti-virus," comes the reply.
That said, a lot of the objections are real. In a large company, IT systems have to outlast any one developer, and starting again is very expensive.
To answer the first point, you must show that OSS skills are available in the marketplace, that it's easy to learn, and that you can document the system you set up. Show your managers companies that offer Linux/OSS training, so they know it's easy to give other people the skills if they need to. Show how IBM is basing their business around open source, because that gives them an alternative pool of skills to draw on.
The second point raises the issue of unsupported software. I have a suspicion that a lot of companies were burned during the dot-com time, installing software from companies that then went pop. You need to show how the availability of source code makes OSS different.
Also, I think if you have the source code, the rate of bitrot is much slower. If you download a binary for libc5, it would be a real nuisance getting it to run on a modern Linux distribution. Download the source and it will probably compile with no problems.
get SunPS instead - they'll do both Solaris and Linux (and generally a better job at both) - SunPS is typically outsourced by IGS anyhow and they won't try and take over a department the same way that GS or PWC will
Personally, in your position, I'd build several possible scenarios...
That would be a minimum, the important thing is that every one of them has to achieve what the company needs. The costs will differ, the risks will differ, the long-term implications of things like scalability will differ and these will all play into the management viewpoint. They dont care how "good" the software is or isnt. All you can do is the risk analysis and the cost/benefit presentation, making them aware of precisely the levels of risk each solution exposes the company to and precisely how much it will cost to avoid those risks. Every software package is a risk, whether open source or not. Every piece of hardware is a risk. Lose your main production data server and how much business do you lose per hour whilst its down? How long will it take to get it back in each of your scenarios? How likely is the outage in the first place? Since every solution you present meets the same needs, does it matter which one they choose?
Now, my personal opinion based on experience in the past is that when the analysis is complete the case for open source in at least some of the application areas of a unix environment will be a complete no-brainer. As you work up the results, however, you might be surprised at some of the places it doesnt give an appreciable benefit. Remember that the time you spend scripting and configuring stuff is part of the cost, as is employee learning time. Dont leave anything out. Be absolutely straight presenting the best comparable info you can and dont try and slant it either way. If they make the wrong choice and it bites the company in the butt it then wont be your fault, even if the wrong choice was your recommendation too.
I had a
...is that many large proprietary businesses make their money through both sales AND support- and purposely make the product confusing and hard to develop for so that you would have to use their "gurus". Remedy ARS for example, purposely (I think) created a totally archaic reports generating system that you either work around (by using perl-- where they also throw a few obstacles in your path in ARSperl) or hire someone to do it for you... it makes almost no sense and the docs are really bad.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
..called Unix Haters, it has all the benefits spelled right out. Lets give him some more Slashdot "bru ha ha" http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters. html
In all seriousness the best way is to just use open source where ever you can and not let the boss know. When your division is making money due to lower expenses you get the bonus!
1) Be more thorough than management can hope to argue with.
2) Don't be dishonest or try to show only part of the picture so it enhances your argument. The more thorough and honest you are, the better chance you'll have.
3) Keep the needs of the organization and realistic probabilities of potential problems in mind. For example, don't go nuts on MS security flaws for IIS if it's going to be used in a relatively secure section of the network for perhaps an intranet that you can do without for a day while someone restores it from backup.
4) Don't come across as a zealot (not starcraft).
5) TCO is a big fat myth that usually gets skewed. But when talking to management types, don't be afraid to use it. But be specific. Show them exact amounts projected, and show them all of the many factors you put into those figures (employee time, training, support, etc.). Again, don't lie or skew your facts.
6) Show them a path to make any transitions, and provide a plan that makes it easy.
Then you shouldn't even be thinking about open source.
/. users spit out.
... what do you do then? Go down the list to every available developer hoping to wake them up from their slumber because you need help? .. first off you get fired.. and if yer firm is big enough... you get blacklisted from working in the industry...
... usually the ones that happen to be software development companies) you just be damn well sure you have someone to blame when systems roll over because nobody will listen to "well that open source developer guy said he was going to help us" which of course is going to have yer manager remember "Who was it that offered open source again?"
Because you aren't familiar enough with the concept to even propose such to a production environment. Which says that you're expertise is definitely not in the open source world which doesn't put you in a position to make that decision.
now I'm not saying all managers are smart but I'm saying you dont want to be the fall guy when shit doesn't work. If you do suggest something like this you better be damn well positive on ALL the facts and not just some things that
As with paying the developer for the support... That's the dumbest thing I've heard in years. What doy ou do when yer system rolls over at 3am in the morning the the guy is too busy looking at his internet pr0n?.. What's this ther'es another developer to call.. so you call him up and he's prolly too busy getting into a flame war about windows/nix to care
well if it's an importnat system
So if you really think open source is the way to go (and it is for some firms
In addition to other arguments made above, never lose site of what really motivates the decision makers. They are not techies, they are 'business people'.
Three key buzzwords for you to use relentlessly:
R.O.I.
R.O.I.
R.O.I.
When you keep hammering the topic, sooner or later, a key decision maker will figure out how to convert the IT budget slated for the MS tax into a nice fat bonus for himself and then *bingo* your company will become an OSS/FS haven!
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Maybe she is 'right', but she's a bitch.
Anyone who uses TLA's like TCO for short ideas like labor costs is fucking stupid.
My advice?
Kill her.
Sure it may look good on paper, but I wonder if these guys have thought about the opinion of the general public of Open Source/GNU/Linux etc.
I have been involved in the marketing (dirty word I know!) of software and hardware to non-technical people for a number of years. The consultancy group I work for numbers many of America's top blue-chip electronics and software corporations among its clients, I have over 11 years experience of marketing, and 4 years experience of software development (VB) and systems administration (NT 3.51), in addition to a marketing science qualification from one of America's top business schools - so it's safe to say that I know what I am talking about when it comes to computers and marketing.
I have been keeping an eye this forum for quite some time now, as part of my daily intelligence gathering, I find the robust exchange of views, and technical arguments make an interesting diversion from some of the other corporate bullshit I have to deal with in my working day. I also read corporate intelligence reports from the Gartner group, Forrester, the Meta group, and Olsen Online Business Intelligence Services. Slashdot has often proved to be far more accurate when it comes to the technical details,and I am often amazed at the incredible levels of intelligence and insight shown by its readership, some of whom demonstrate a knowledge of Linux and Operating systems far in advance of anyone I have ever met, even in the IS department of major corporations. For this reason, I feel I should contribute my 2c to the debate about the future direction of Linux and the whole Open Source movement in general.
I feel I can do my bit for the Open Source community by offering (free of charge) some of my hard-earned knowledge straight from the bloody trenches at the front-line of tech-Marketing. Normally I would be paid over $4000/day for my perspective, but Slashdot - this one's on me. You people can think of it as my small and unworthy attempt to "give something back" to the Community.
Why Linux/Open Source has an image problem in major US Corporations and what the community can do about it. Like any movment, political or religious, Open Source/Linux has its Leaders, High priests and Gurus. These high profile individuals represent the public face of the organization. Like it or not, these people are associated with the product in the eyes of the buying public. One of the first things the Linux movement must do in order to gain acceptence by middle-America and Joe-and-Jean Sixpack and their 2.4 kids, is to develop what we in the Marketing profession call a "Happy Face".
When Joe Sixpack drives past a McDonald's, he associates it with the smiling face of Ronald McDonald the clown,and quality food served quickly. When he is choosing a collect-call company, the smiling face of Al Bundy (of TV's Married with Children) springs to mind, and when he thinks of fried chicken in large capacity bucket-like containers, it is the image of the happy-go-lucky avuncular Colonel with his associations of good old Southern hospitality that sticks in his memory. (In marketing terms this is known as a "positive association". Because the image puts the consumer into a "buying-receptive" mental state).
Linux/Open Source lacks any kind of "Happy Face". Now this in itself is not a problem, were it not for the fact that Linux has several extremely high-profile advocates who are the exact opposite of "Happy Faces" in that they invite negative associations into the consumers head and put him/her into a state known by Marketers as "passive-aggressive sales-message rejection" (In layman's terms they don't
The March 15th edition of CIO magazine had a front page article about Open Source: http://www.cio.com/archive/031503/opensource.html. My favorite quote, very applicapable to this situation:
"We will guarantee the same [service-level agreements] for Linux that we do for proprietary OSs," says Dan Frye, director of IBM's Linux Technology Center. "Response times, fix times, uptime--we'll sign all those same contracts for Linux."
That pretty much says it all: 24/7 support with contractual guaruntees for Linux. There are plenty of other places willing to do similar for other open source software. Best point though: if you don't like the vendor you first choose for that support, you can actually pick up and move to someone else WITHOUT changing your software too!
"Actually, I enjoyed this in the same vague, horrible way I enjoyed the A-Team" P. Opus
Why bother...? It's not as stable, as good, as well supported, as well trained on in schools or in the professional world, and not a good solution except for companies that can't afford anything else (which is worrisome enough that I know I wouldn't bother working for them or would take a job at a more stable company rather than risk it).
You know when you've been widened.
I was once working for a leading financial information provider (>16,000 employees), and I was tasked with setting up a listserver, at minimal cost (read no expenditure beyond the cost of my own labour). I ended up opting for an open source SMTP-based listserver, which was far cheaper than the closest closed-source equivalent (free as in beer vs. over 11,000 pounds). I also used Mhonarc to provide a web interface to the message archive, with Perl bits bolted on to add functionality.
I had to put the listserver on the far side of the SMTP gateway, since the company was using some really fucked-up mail system. When I told one of the company software architects that SMTP played a role in the listserver functionality, he told me that SMTP was forbidden on the internal network. He then (very helpfully) pointed out that I should go ahead anyhow, since by the time the PHBs found out, the listserver would be up, running and proving its worth.
I left the company five years ago, but as far as I know the listserver still sees a great deal of use. The moral of this story is this: if the PHBs tell you to solve a problem, don't start evangelising about open source. Just implement the solution in open source, and after six months the software will have proven its worth. Hell, in my case I'm not even sure whether the PHBs realized the listserver was a) using SMTP, or b) using open-source software.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Finally someone who recognizes the truth and speaks it.
'nuff said.
People make decisions for their reasons, not for yours. They don't care that it will make your job easier, they don't care that it will run better, they don't care that it will save you time and frustration.
So find out what they do care about, and then sell it to them based on those points. Don't mention why *you* want it at all; talk all day about why *they* want it.
(Incidentally, you can copy and paste that response with almost no changes for any "How do I convince..." question.)
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
I've seen an argument that open source is only free is one's time is worthless. I work for a multi-national and we have similiar requirements of twenty-four hour worldwide support. From what I've seen in technology three is never a swiss-army knife solution despite what many people here on slashdot believe, open source is not always the best answer.
Nowadays, management has a very different spin on IT. Gone are the days where IT wrongly drove business and the CIO had the company by the privates. Management teams are now IT savvy, and no longer write blank cheques to IT based on IT's requirements.
The argument that, if it is broken we have the source and we can fix it is no argument at all. Unless you are an IT company, your core business is not the business of IT. Why would you pour resources into IT to develop a skillset in your company to maintain software? How does that improve profitability? It doesn't. The cost of having one expert to fix a handful of problems, will never be competitive against an organization who's business model revolves around maintaining their product.
Take a look at how commercial software is built and maintained. Direction is driven by customers and revenue. How is open source driven? I don't know, maybe someone can help me. Who manages the product life-cycle in open source?
I am not anti-open-source, nor anti-Microsoft. I believe that for your case, you should ask management for their requirements. If one of their answers is 24/7 world-wide vendor support. You just have to accept it and move on. Sometimes their answers are not technically driven. Remember you are probably working for a company built on capatilism. Again, accept it and move on. They sign your paycheques not the other way around.
-Many recipes are "open source." Why do people still eat out? You'd pay less than half, and have control over the source if you cook yourself!
Lie like the dogs you are. Yes, documentation is available and comprehensible. Yes, the interface is intuitive. Yes, you can get good support 24/7....
See? Easy.
It's simple, just use small words.
Try to place yourself in their position and try to identify problems with OSS and advantages of non-OSS.
/., and it's an article in the CIO magazine about OSS for large enterprises: Your Open Source Plan
This was a story earlier on
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
If your using solaris your probably alwredy using opensource software... This is the main argument you can have... Solaris 8 and 9 include some opensouce software and Solaris 9 include OpenSSH(by default i think)... Nothing force you to go to Linux to use Open Source...
Give me a copy of the Windows source code, a baseball bat and ten minutes alone with the PHB, and
you will have your Open Source.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Your management has run into the main drawback of open-source software. There have been several times (not a lot, but a few) that I have run into roadblocks with open source software that took longer to correct than it would have had I had Sun or HP support on the phone.. For 95% of your problems, you are going to find the information you need online easily. But when you start running into hard core integration and compatibility problems, it is going to be very hard to find the fix, and you have no one to call.
Unless you can find a vendor to provide support for each of your open source software packages, I would not argue the case for open-source. If I were the boss, the first time something breaks and 1000 users are off-line for a day or so, your head would roll. Remember, this is NOT your home computer you are talking about... you are talking about MANY users being down for several hours/days. 1000 people making an average of $30/hour is a lot of money.
If things broke, replacing you would easily pay for itself.
Don't try to sell them on open-source. That's just a technical detail that doesn't interest most managers. Pick a distro -- like Red Hat -- that offers 24x7 support for a price. Then compare the cost for one copy of distro plus the cost of tech support against what they would pay for the cost of support plus per seat licenses for the competing product. That turns it into a bang-for-the-buck proposition that can be cost-justified.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Who exactly can you turn to when that code you
rely on is no longer supported because the
developer is no longer interested (or at
school, pregnant, etc.)
Let's say you maintain the code - now the
work your boss is paying you for belongs to
the world - you had better publish your
derivative works back to the community.
Many eyes makes for shallow problems, but
one mans hobby should never be another mans
mission critical infrastructure!
Now if you buy a distribution and have
someone to ask for help - maybe you could
get it past the PHB.
I implement parrallel systems on my own time
and then show my boss the
price/performance/reliability comparisons
over time. Sometimes the Linux wins,
sometimes it don't...
Ever used OpenServer? It's a complete bitch.
They might come after BSD when they're done with IBM.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I wouldn't. Open source is hella-gay.
Successful open-source advocacy is not based on statistics and references, it's based on religion. Hasn't slashdot taught you anything?
Because, frankly, no one does tech support anymore. Everyone hires $5 an hour flunkies whose only solution to any problem is 1.plug it in or 2.reboot.
I work with a lot of different software and hardware products at my company, all of which have *cough* 24 hour worldwide tech support. bullsh*t!
From multi-thousand dollar software packages to a under $100 Barricade wireless router, I have always had to find and fix the problem myself. Sometimes that meant sending the product back and finding something else! All the companies pay lip service to it, but none provide real tech support anymore.
The biggest joke in the world is today's current crop of Indian phone tech support. It's gotten to the point that, when I hear an Indian accent on the other end of the line saying "May I help you?", my only response is "yeah, put me in touch with someone that understands English!" This is not bigotry: every problem I have had with Indian tech support involves a misunderstanding of simple, basic, 4th-grade English. I always dumb-down (think they'd understand that idiom?) when I deal with these people and I always find that I just can't get stupid enough!
At least with OSS stuff you have a wealth of info to help. With far too many proprietary products, it only comes down to "...only God and (pick 1 of M$, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, etc.) know for sure!"
If you are working with a large organization, you are most likely working with quite a few "home grown" applications. The *only* support available for those applications will come from you and others on your team. Make sure your team is sustainable, and that your management can rely on them to handle any crisis. Remind your management that closed source software, no matter how well supported by the vendor, by its nature *must* force you to rely on an outside organization for critical support. You shouldn't need to go to MS or Sun or anyone else for information about how to run commercial software. That type of knowledge is what *you* are paid to provide, and you had better provide that or get out of the businesss. Real problems with commercial software are usually handled by patches that execute "workarounds", not fixes. If you are very, very, lucky, your problem will be fixed in a future release, but usually, you will have to figure out to reapply the same patch (modified properly for the new configuration and version of commercial software), or wait until the latest bug surfaces at the most inopportune time possible. Open Source software gives you and your team the ability to fix the bugs that bother your organization. They could be insignificant to any other company, undetectable by most otheres, but killer bugs to your company - bugs that have to be fixed NOW! There are many 3rd parties who offer Linux and other open source consulting services. Use those services to educate your own staff, and put a few of the people on long term retainer for gnarly problems.
Search enterprise linux.com has a four part series on open source support that might help.
For well known software just call it "industry standard software". This would include things like EMACS, CVS, GNUmake, gcc, Apache. Tell the management you would suggest using the Industry Standard Apache web server, or the Industry standard revision control tool CVS.
You could list examples of companies that use these tools already. You can get some examples of current corporate users at the home pages, or by e-mailing the support team. Concentrate on listing Fortune 500 companies, your company's competitors, and well regarded high tech companies.
Good Luck in your effort!
So meet requirenments!
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
Everytime I've contacted Sun they've worked through the issue and gotten back to me without a hitch.
Best way is to use Maintence logs of the current MS setup... How much downtime... time to resolve issues.. frequency of problems.. type of problems.. ect.. once you have compiled all that you have your baseline of what is curently acceptable level of support... Then you can do research on the OS software you will be running and gather stats to compare to... Then play with your stats to prove your point....
:)
Should be fairly easy as MS security is very poor when it comes to alot of thier apps and time to resolve is not allways speedy where OS software beats MS for time to resolution hands down 9 times out of 10.
After all MS's secuirty though obscurity model just doesn't cut the mustard. So there should be loads of data available of MS flaws on secuirty. Then show stats on OpenBSD to show how good security can be with OS software. Secure systems tend to have a drastically better Uptime than insecure ones
As for product support.. again demonstrate What kind of support is currently needed and how often its mission critical/effects the way business is done...
Once you have the setup up and running with a testbed to try out patches before they go live its pretty much smooth sailing from there... as Patching is the only headache you will ever have.. so having a near production testbed is essential.. Not to mention make damn sure you have a way to quickly restore any changes made so impact of a "OOPS" is kept to a absolute minimum.
But comparing level of service that you currently get is gonna wind up being your strongest case and point. Upper management is rarely aware of what it takes to keep systems up and running so it will be a real eyeopener for them and will make them more forgiving if you still have a few weak spots in your case or they come up with angles that your arn't 100% prepaird for.. But Have all your stats with you on how the current system runs and equivilant stats on OS systems so you will be able to rebute unforseen lines of questions.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
RealVNC.com provides Enterprise support for VNC. Send email to enterprise@realvnc.com
SSH Communications Security provides enterprise support for their own closed-source SSH server and client software. They have information available at http://www.ssh.com/ In the case of SSH, I don't think the complaint that only open-source provides the functionality holds water.
My arguement for Free Software has been that it allows you greater control over how the software improves. Most companies that provide closed-source software packages will only add functionality that they are convinced will improve their market-share. There have been several times where companies have told us that show-stopper issues would require "custom work" to fix and even when they quote huge amount of money we also get estimates of 6+ months for the work to be done. In several cases, the "custom work" is for things most customers have come to expect anyways and should be fairly simple like adding LDAP authentication support. With Free Software projects, I have found that making these modification can usually be done with existing libraries and one-three additional lines of code.
Sorry, Jon, these are old ideals here. With Global Services' "On Demand" initiative, we consolidate and migrate servers and applications onto new IBM and Sun gear and turn the keys back over to the company. However, the servers are now bugged to report utilization back to IBM, and IBM bills the customer based on average utilization instead of the cost of the box. No more of the typical "SO jobs" you used to always hear about where IGS just hires away failing IS divisions to revamp them.
README
Oh, and PWC's consulting arm became part of IGS last summer.
README2
Intelligent Life on Earth
At the company I work at, I'm junior tech support but I also double as a web developer and network guy.
So one day our main techie/network guy gets asked to draw up firewall plans for this subnet of servers we have. This tech guy happens is no Beaver Beard, though... I bet you thought I was going to say he was a dirty GNU hippy. I would have, but the excess hair happens to hang not from his chin but from the back of his head... Yes, god save us all... It was the Open Source Mullet! And yeah, you can guess what he thought those firewalls were gonna run.
Fast forward two days. I'd caught wind of the plans and had charts, graphs, and comparisons written up detailing OpenBSD and Linux security. Since this GNU guy had a mullet and dressed like a slob, I got taken seriously. Not to mention my data, impenetrable by any hippy "logic." OpenBSD was the more secure, even to the beancounters and idtiot management.
So thanks to me, our firewalls happily run OpenBSD 2.9, protecting our subnet breach-free. NOT Linux, buffer overflowing into no-man's land every other hour.
Man, the Open Source Mullet gives me a lot of dirty looks lately.
I think that if you start your Open Source crusade with something hard, then you are doomed to a painful failure.
Scenario A:
You: "I've decided to replace our Oracle financials back-end with MySQL"
PHBs: "erm...has anyone else done that? Will it work?"
You: "Well, someone runs a big web-site using it...er..."
PHBs: "you're fired"
Even if you do persuade them that it is a good idea, replacing the typical 20+ CPU Oracle HR/Financials database with MySQL just ain't going to fly without a hideously expensive conversion project, and even then you will have a mass of functional and scalability issues.
Scenario B:
You: "We could provide some back end sevices using free Open Source software. This new project (web site/file server/test domain needing DHCP etc) is a good test bed for trying this out"
PHBs: "erm...has anyone else done it?"
You: "Yes, and it will save us a shed load of cash" (produce vast list of Apache/Samba reference sites)
PHBs: "I've had a great idea...let's use Open Source..."
Seriously, whatever you do needs to be simple and containable. It also shouldn't be in the front line in the first instance. Once they are happy that it works, and that other people know how to fix it, then you can go further.
I've been sacked twice, once explicitly for using Free/libre software (Apache and Perl rather than IIS and ASP - tho' I left the server running NT4, and if I hadn't told them, they wouldn't have known... it wasn't them that had to keep running up to the server room to reboot the damn thing!) and once partly because I kept banging on about Free software and how shit most closed code is. (There were a lot of other factors in the latter, too, like calling a co-worker a fuckwit - in email to my manager. Well, he *was* a fuckwit).
.Net, or whatnot.
Naturally I've had a couple of lengthy, depressing & stressful periods of unemployment - 18 months of 24 more or less. I've now got a *fantastic* job doing exactly what I always wanted to do, with pleasant, intelligent & helpful colleagues. And if I hadn't been sacked from those other jobs I'd be grinding ASP for A.N. Major Management Consultancy, still. Or
These days you wouldn't be as reckless as I undoubtedly was. It was partly hubris and partly karma. I wouldn't have been happy working in those places in the long term, and me leaving really *was* for the best in the long term. No doubt -a-n are still an all-Microsoft shop, and spending zillions on support, licenses, helpdesk people etc etc just as they were back then. Well the tide has turned, and I don't believe it's going to slow down. The all-MS/Novell shops will still be around in 5 or 10 years' time but they'll be dinosaurs. No doubt there will be downsides to this - increased *nix clue amongst script kiddies, f'rinstance, and clueless paper-RHCEs rather than MSCEs, only in it for the money - but as far as my selfish concerns go, it means I should find it easier to earn a living doing in future doing something that doesn't make me feel my soul is turning to ashes every morning...:)
In summary: if they won't buy your sensible, well-reasoned arguments once you've put them, start looking for another gig.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Poorly, most likely.
sic transit gloria mundi
Give me $10,000 dollars, and I'll guarantee you that VNC will work for you.
If it doesn't, and I can't help you resolve your problem (or if I can't be bothered to) then I'll give you your money back in full. That's a better deal than you'll get from any closed source vendor.
You get the software you want. I get money (or at least interest on that money). Everybody wins, guaranteed.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
1) Walk right in that office...
2) Reach across that desk, grab him by his big, fat head...
3) And yell, "ALL YOUR SOURCE ARE BELONG TO US!!!"
- If that doesn't do the trick, nothing will.
(This psychotic moment was brought to you by Klink)
The vast majority of software written is not written for the commercial marketplace. It's written for inhouse use.
Or embedded, or targetted at a specific industry. I've got *mumble* years of experience working on plenty of software that was sold to customers. It was written for specific target markets. It was never the sort of stuff that would fit in a shrink-wrapped box on a store shelf.
Anyone writing code that isn't targetted at desktop users (embedded, turnkey, server, etc.) who doesn't at least consider open source platforms is overlooking a possible area of cost savings.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
yes, lol.
When you use open source, you should spend at least the same money on in-house staff to improve/continue/support it. That way, you have complete control over upgrades and obsolescence, and you have free access to the improvements those people make.
You are paying for the staff either way; the question is, who reaps the ultimate benefits: you or the vendor.
Solaris 9 includes Sun's Secure Shell server software which is their version of OpenSSH and uses the same configuration and setup as OpenSSH (with some minor modifications of course).
i'm listening....
but you will have to post some facts, because your anecdote not withstanding, you can't convince me of the numbers no matter how many instances you personally witnessed.
you are not god, and you cannot know what you profess to know.
personally i think you are parroting something you heard elsewhere.
There are plenty of companies which specialize in support for Linux and Open Source.
I mean really, you don't need to pay millions of dollars for support, though it is more difficult to find 24x7x365 support with 4 hour turnaround when you're talking $10,000/year instead of $250,000.
Then again, does your company really *need* that level of support? I would venture to say that they probably don't. If you build redundancy into your systems, you should be able to get by in most cases, albeit under heavier load. For 24x7x365 support, expect to spend $$$$.
You might actually try to locate a certain problem in your company, a need for a service or whatever, for which FOSS can be help.
Different FOSS applications and tools can be combined in both crazy and wonderful ways to solve various complex or simple tasks, that no single proprietary app can. Or maybe some app can, but it's just so expensive that there are other problems/needs that have higher priorities at the moment. Anyway, introduce say a GNU/Linux system to deal with a particular problem/need - it's one way to demonstrate the power of FOSS, when management can actually see a problem fixed or a need satisfied, out of the blue.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
According to your description, your employers have given you a clear, comprehensible and not unreasonable-sounding mandate: don't deploy any software that doesn't have 24-hour, world-wide support.
Why not, then, do your job by finding and implementing packages that fit their requirements, rather than wasting their time trying to shoehorn in unsupported crapware because you happen to think it's K-Rad?
As a rule, companies that have requirements like the ones you describe have them for very good reasons.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Consider this: Digital Equipment Corp. was once the #2 IT company in the world, with a huge software portfolio supported by an army of "world class" IT professionals. In the late 80's their products and support were awesome. Then it got ugly. By the time Compaq bought the remaining scraps, the "world class" software portfolio was sold off in bits and pieces. Where are those products now? Where is the support? If I had invested heavily in any DEC's software development tools, it would be a total write-off today. GNU is still there, isn't it?
When you buy a commercial software product, there is a real risk of failure, for all the reasons described above. When a manager makes a committment to a commercial software package, he or she can expect to be held accountable for what happens to that investment. If you start with open source products, the approval chain is generally short-circuited because the expenditure of $0 is with almost everyone's approval range. If the product fails to perform, you walk away from your investment of $0 and migrate to a commercial package. Of course, the people who sell commercial products are well aware of open source, and each has a reasonable migration path. Try calling Microsoft and tell them that you want some help in switching from Samba to Windows 2003 and watch them open the floodgates of support. On the other hand, if the OSS product performs well, you demonstrate the success to every level of management that will listen, calculate the ROI and deploy even more open source products in the future.
Now let's consider the risk the other way around. You buy Windows 2000, Microsoft IIS, and SQL Server because M$ has wonderful 24x7 commercial support. But Code Red, Code Blue, Nimda, Klez, and SQL Slammer come along and now your server is now owned by a 12-year-old who is renting it out as a spam gateway. The criticism for a technical debacle is bad enough, but then you get the CEO asking why it was necessary to spend big money AND face this nightmare when open source alternatives are proving to be somewhat more secure at a much lower cost. I doubt that my CEO would say such a thing, but open source is now getting coverage in Forbes and WSJ, so you never know. If you had installed Linux/Apache/MySQL and the same thing happened, at least you don't have to explain how the purchase price is now a total writeoff.
There are many people who use risk as their logic in support of closed source. Having seen more than a few defuct products and vendors, I say that risk really is the central issue, but that open source risk is more managable.
You mean they haven't chained a pager to your ass yet? It's only a matter of time my friend...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sure I use it (and help out where possible) but I don't see any point in considering OSS anything more than a hobbiest's adventure. That's certainly not to imply that it's commercial quality, much of it is (and some more so). I just can't figure out why it's not enough for me and others like me to simply use it as we see fit without attempting to foist it on the corporate world. The corporations see value, they'll invest their time and $$ into it without being force fed. I have no interest in moving from a paid developer to a paid tech support tech anytime soon.
Easy, just fire you... save 30,000 - 60,000 a year. Then hire an application hosting company that uses Microsoft products for half the cost of you that has 24 hour support.
Just give them the options. On the one hand, they can choose a proprietary option that does is expensive but has lots of support. They can also choose an Open option that while unlikely to break, is unsupported. Leave it there. It may be that they are perfectly comfortable spending too much money in order to ensure that they have a throat to choke if something goes wrong. Don't be deceptive about that. They might have that kind of cash and a matching lack of on staff technical talent.
Open Source software is significantly earier to support because its ... well OPEN.
In practice, I have found open source maintainers to be far more motivated at supporting their products than big name corps. Case in point, I ran into trouble with software from that big OS company up in the north west USA. I ended up filing a problem report and after a few days they came back with a "Yep, it's a broken, it MIGHT get fixed, oh let's see, in 2005 !". WHENEVER I've reported a problem on a newsgroup or on a mailing list for open source maintainers, I've usually got a reply within MINUTES ... yes minutes ... and usually by the engineer who wrote the code. Usual responses are, bug is fixed, get latest release doofball or, I just fixed it and here is your patch or a discussion about alternatives. I've never had to resort to the worst case, which is only an alternative for open source, which is "fix it yourself" ! The worst case for closed source proprietary systems is you're SOL - find a different vendor ...
I really need the money right now, out of a job-n-all, so if you want to write a check to me for say $US15,000/month, I'll support ALL the open source software you choose. Terms are negotiable. BTW I extend this offer to ALL corps :) I promise !
I ever so recently got a job for a company whose incomes relys heavily on Microsofties. Their big concern is that they wanted to support Microsoft as much as possible and I wanted to go towards an open source solution (specifically an LAMP architecture). I managed to get my way on everything but the server (still have to run Win2k) and am quite pleased with how much I was able to maneuver.
My best suggestion to you is do your research. Show those benchmarks. Show the community support (which is far better than 24 hr support because when you post to a news group, IRC channel or even a bulletin board, your solution will be found in a matter of minutes).
Also, show them the vast amounts of documentation freely available online (and with each product). Trying finding how to configure the intracies of IIS in comparison with Apache.
Also, look for product comparisons of software packages. For instance, MySQL vs. SQL Server; in recent benchmarks, MySQL was rated alongside Oracle 9i for speed and comes with it's own ODBC-to-ODBC bridge which SQL Server does not (and which can be purchased for $5400).
Make as strong a case as you can and gear it towards their pocketbook and level of tech experience.
And if that doesn't work, remind them that Code Red and Nimda took out 80,000 Windows machines; that's 80,000 machines that run proprietary code which is not cross platform compliant. Does ASP work on Unix, Linux, BSD or MAC? How about Visual Basic? IIS? You get my point. Cross platform compliancy is another good one because if they want to ever move to a different OS, they are screwed if they go with Microsoft.
The savings in cost, the community support, cross compliancy... what is there argument?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
You do have 24 hour support with many of the open source projects. At least bigger ones. They usually have very active mailing list where, if you're not too lame with questions, you can get pretty fast feedback.
Take from someone who's been there. Upper Mgt. does not want to know about any of the technical arguments (a generalization, I know) They want to know from a purely business perspective, in order 1) cost of solutionS - gotta have alternatives 2) reliability - gotta show it's reliable - no suit likes being called a 1am for anything 3) proof of concept - who else is using this s/w? happen to have a working solution in place (lab? test machine? guinea pig developers?) if you can show those things, and you mgr. doesn't have an agenda (hmmruph, read kickback) - you can make progress. without those points, presented succintly, you won't get a second chance. -K
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
Yup, thanks to the good folks at OSSI for the heads up on that article...
Tom
The Army reading list
Your corporation will always have 24/7 access to tech support on open source solutions. All they need to do is "Ask Slashdot", and within an hour they'll get hundreds of insightful, informative, witty, or (regrettably) flamebait suggestions.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Once the solution is in place, nobody ever seems to worry about it. Then at some point in the future, it's easy to point to it and say: "but we've *been* using open source all this time, and don't have problems with it".
:-)
I think that's still the most successful implementation strategy. It's the one Microsoft used for pushing Novell out of mid-sided businesses.
You mean there someone who can point to a MS box and say "...[we] don't have problems with it". What were they using it for a paper weight.
I've discovered that there is a time and a place for every battle. Sometimes it's better to let people figure it out for themselves. I've been down this road with companies that I've consulted for many times. They all follow the "hit-by-a-bus" strategy... if our admin gets hit by a bus, we need software that any other person can support if we need to bring them in. Sadly, there aren't many people out there actually worth their salt and too many of them only specialize in certain commercial apps.
:)
My strategy: Make the case to the management plain and simple. Open source software is constantly being improved and will [potentially] always be free (unless the author goes to the dark side...). Tell them they can save XXX dollars and get great features. If they still argue, say OK fine. Get quotes from all the major vendors of high-dollar commercial apps (i.e. Citrix Metaframe instead of VNC (yes there is a Unix version), commerical SSH (yes there are plenty) instead of OpenSSH, etc.) Compile all the costs, slap it on the CFO's desk and say "Ok I'm ready to implement all this just buy all that stuff." Then the CFO will scratch his head and say "Maybe this open-source stuff isn't such a bad idea after all."
Reminds me of a very similar battle I went through wtih a client some time back. The CEO *insisted* on M$ ISA Server (becasue people with "MCSE" after their names are a dime-a-dozen. Trust me, I know, I have one as well, only because my employer paid me to go get it) I told him that it was a waste of money. He didn't believe me. So I set up two servers -- one with ISA Server and one with Linux and IP Tables. He quickly saw the light when I dropped the $2400 quote on his desk to buy the license for ISA when the demo expired, and had no such quote for the other server.
Sun Tzu.
What?! And have yourself replaced by a monkey! Are you insane? :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Having been the recipient of a lot of commercial
support, I have to say it's extremely overrated.
The only thing it really buys you is the ability
to push the blame for something onto someone else.
Hardware support is probably a good thing, and
I've seen some companies provide great support
for malfunctioning hardware. Software, though,
usually costs you more time waiting for the
people to a) agree that it's their problem, b)
assemble their people to work on the problem, and
c) getting those people to a point where they can
actually be more of a help than a hindrance.
You're far better off just hiring people who know
what they're doing and having them troubleshoot
software issues. You have to buy the software
support expressly because you're using closed
source and some information won't be available
to your local developers. With open source,
this issue goes away. Sometimes you can even
get free expert support from the author as well.
I know that Damian Conway was very accessible
to us when we had an issue with one of his
Perl modules.
One of the big issues I've had with some support
is that the 'developers' supporting the product
aren't the people who built it and only really
know what they've got in their Support Handbook
or personal experience from past support issues.
They don't actually know how the application
really works, and they don't seem to have all
that much of an advantage over any good developer
given the same amount of time you have to spend
to actually get the support person ready to help.
Some companies I've had personal experience with:
IBM - (sysadmin didn't know what 'ps' did and
didn't know how to kill processes)
Informix - (on-site support had to use trial and
error to determine what the correct config
variables were and took 8 hours to get a simple
install up and running)
Blue Martini - (although they had some heavy
hitters they would bring in that really knew
their stuff, multiple on-site support people
were found to have no real clue how anything
we were using worked)
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
"management doesn't want to install software that does not have 24 hour"
;)
Tell them for about $40 a month, they can buy you a cellphone and make you their 24hr on call person. And of course since you'll be salaried, you won't get over time for those 2am calls. They'll like that.
I did not see anything about demos, installs or Gnome skins outside of your flames. Nor was there any good reason to flame free software as a "summer project".
Your points about presenting a whole solution are useful when you need to replace a whole system in a lethargic micormanaged work environment. All that "Oracle, Sybase, HP, Compaq, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, SAP, etc ... certifications" blah blah is so much dated marketroid bable with good bad and out of business mixed up. Wake up boss, HP is Compaq, Microsoft is worthless, Sun is good and IBM uses Linux. Well, OK, You've got a point about selling a "solution" in such an environement. It's negligence to not do your homework about the bottom line anywhere.
At the same time, it's a good idea to talk to people you trust about what free software is all about. It is important that management understands that free software is simply a co-operative community of software writers and users. They should know that such communities have always created the software that some companies tried to comercialize in a closed source way in the 1980s. The closed source experiment is just about out of gas, becasue the free software community has ignored it to create viable alternatives. Corporate managers understand co-operative research as well as they understand bottom line issues. Free software is not such a great leap at reasonable companies and most people are tired of being jerked around by comercial software pimps.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Whenever people bring up Enterprise level applications and the need for corporate level support, I'm always left scratching my head. Are people who work for large corporations less intelligent than myself? This may come off sounding trollish, but I've never bought a support contract for any piece of hardware I've ever purchased in my life. I can't honestly recall a time where I couldn't fix a computer problem myself. This has become especially true since the advent of the Internet, it's typically very easy for me to find a solution to any computing problem I come across.
I'm not talking about running a single desktop Windows machine from my home either. I currently manage a mixed 50 machine environment consisting of Postgres and MySQL databases, IRC servers, and multiple mail servers running Linux that maintain 24/7 uptime in two states.
Are people who work for corporations incompetent or do they just make poor purchasing decisions? I fail to see why you would need 24 hour support for a product, besides it being a feel-good measure for management. Why not save money on huge support contracts and simply hire intelligent employees and perhaps purchase some spare parts instead. I'm sure there must be a reason why these large corporations like to waste money on support contracts, but I must admit I'm failing to understand their logic.
This touches off a rant: I saw that CA just instituted a dress code. That and your concern over language and a "professional" atmosphere spell doom for tech. If I had CA stock, I'd sell it. Dunno where you work, but I'm glad I'm not there.
Neckties reduce circulation to the brain. IBM pulled out of an epic stall when they dropped the dress code for employees who don't have customer face time. That wasn't what saved them, exactly, but it is indicative of the mindset that did save them. Don't put nonsensical restraints on creative intellects.
Yeah- your salespeople have to put on the costume to get sales. Just like a peacock has to have a larger than optimal tail in order to attract a mate.
I think it's wrong to suggest that clear communication (with apt word choice, imo) is "unprofessional" unless by that term you mean "insufficiently stuffy."
The first signs of MS' doom were when they codenamed some office construction projects with the names of golf courses. Golf courses! I can't imagine anything less techy, less geeky, less inspired. This is what the IBM PHBs circa 1975 would have picked. This is what Safeco insurance would have picked. Yeah, they've made some money since, but I don't see them winning through superior tech. Sure enough, they haven't introduced any since 1998. I don't see them ever creating anything cool, which dooms their content ambitions. And if you are convinced that MS is going to continue to be successful, consider the language and clothing patterns: their weasels use weasel words, their geeks speak straight. Their sales droids dress business casual+, their coders...dress.
That argument only works assuming you have people in your company who actually have the skill to play with the source code. It seems that the longer I'm in this field, the more apparent it becomes that there are only a small number of people who actually know what's going on when they look at code, and maybe a smaller number who have actually have the skill to modify it to their needs.
It depends on a great many factors. Some questions you will need to be prepared to answer for upper management are:
- Are the cost savings you receive in using Open Source software going to outweight the real/perceived benefit of having access to a vendor support structure? Generally, the answer is yes when your IT infrastructure can support the technologies in house.
- What value does using a predominately OSS based IT Strategy over a packaged, Vendor solution provide? In other words, how will OSS provide easier, faster, more efficient access to the business information that the company has developed?
- What will the training/retraining costs be associated with a "re-tooling" of the IT department?
- Will the OSS applications and solutions fit within our current IT Strategy, or will we need to revisit the IT Strategy? Perhaps, this will provide you (company) an opportunity to make process improvements within the IT dept.
- How will the IT department affect the change over from Vendor specific to OSS solutions? Similarly, will this transistion be seemless to end-users in the business itself or will there be a retraining effort?
I could continue with the list, but these are the most "generic" questions I could think of. Generic in the sense of not industry or business specific. I just wanted to provide some questions that would get you thinking along the same terms as the management staff will be thinking. Obviously, if I were to sit down with you and discuss the needs/goals/processes of your business in particular, I could generate more meaningful questions (and answers).To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Do the following,
1. List the benefits and risks of using open source software.
2. Provide a cost breakdown (There is allways some internal cost).
3. Talk to your network provider or any other large company and ask if they use open source software and if they would mind providing a "reference" for open source (eg been using it for x years, hasn't cost anything, free patches etc etc).
Knowing most management types they will believe someone external to the company than the people they pay for "knowledge" and "experience"
I've worked for small companies that have grown quickly and with good direction, becoming quite profitable, as well as for one huge company in particular that over managed and wasted stupendous amounts of money and eventually died.
One of the most glaring differences between the two environments is how well management reacted to change. Where management was burdened with lots of BS terms like TCO and EBITDA, they made bad decisions, and made them far too late in the game.
Business is cut-throat, but its not hard. I've run departments before, and I can tell you the best way to manage a company is almost completely a matter of diagnosing problems and adapting.
Sure, time is money, and your environment being down costs something, but observations about efficiency don't require stupid code words.
Those who decide to go create and repeat acronyms instead of paying attention are sooner or later left behind and should be.
"Accountability", in this case, means, "someone's ass gets fired." Granted, this won't fix your problem, but it makes your CEO feel like a stud.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Which means that it would be a good idea for them to make part or all of those apps open source. If the company derives its advantages from running the tools, not selling them, they might as well give them away in hopes that someone else will improve them in a way that saves the company some development time.
Of course, the results will probably be scripts and libraries, rather than full applications, because the full applications are generally very company-specific.
This sounds like great grounds for web conferencing companies like WebEx, GotoMyPC, etc. to sue Microsoft for Sherman Anti-trust Act tying violations. Particularly since Microsoft purchased one of their competitors, PlaceWare recently.
Triple damages, mmm.
--LP, who doesn't mind MS software actually, but *hates* the EULAs coming from that lawyer's-son Gates.
You will certainly find SSH already distributed with Solaris 9 as well as quite a bit of "Free Software" and it comes with support.
With your question I have to ask : Is your goal to sell you company on "Linux" or is your goal to have your company purchase what it needs?
If it is the first "just sell them on linux" I really would suggest stopping and taking a step back. Tearing up existing infrastructure and replacing it with what you want instead of what you need will make your environment much worse than it was with mickeysoft. IT departments do not run well when the equipment and or software was purchased for it's geek factor or even personal/politcal reasons.
From the subject it looks to me like you have made your choice based on political or personal reasons. Don't get me wrong I am not against linux, I've been a linux geek a little longer than a Solaris admin (about 11 years). I just think that if you actually want a decent environment you need to first evaluate what you need out of your IT infrastructure then evaluate which product(s) would best suite your needs. If linux then so be it but certainly don't choose linux unless it is right for the job.
Your management has legitimate concerns, but these can be addressed with some open source packages, if the project is sufficiently mature and well-supported. This is where I see you making a common mistake: you speak of open source software as if all open source projects are the same.
For some of the very well-known open source projects -- such as Apache, much of what constitutes Linux, sendmail, Perl -- the documentation is excellent, the online resources are extensive and up-to-date, there are many opportunities for simple customization, and above all, there are full-time consultants and consulting firms who know the stuff very well and can be hired to help. In fact, if the latter is true, then your management can get exactly what they're looking for: full-time support.
Many other open source projects are obviously someone's part-time diversion, and it shows. There are many missing features and a few bugs, and no one who can get around to fixing them. The options for configuration and customization are limited. The documentation was done as an afterthought, it has whole critical chapters saying nothing more than "TBD", and it was apparently never proofread by a native speaker of English. (Sorry to have to add that last one, but unfortunately it's an all too common problem.) This is the stuff your management wants to stay away from, and they have good reason.
You mentioned two specific services you need: VNC and SSH. So why don't you research the quality of the available open source solutions? Evaluate them with respect to project maturity, online resources, quality of the documentation, and especially, find out if you can hire someone to provide support. I personally don't know what you can get, but if you're lucky, you can present your management with a professional solution that will satisfy their needs. And if you can't find that, then you shouldn't be going with the open source stuff anyway -- then your bosses may have saved you from a lot of heartache.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
If you base the argument on that, you are fighting a battle you can't win.
Your battle should be about choosing the best tools for the job.
Yes, the fact that a tool is open is a plus... but seriously..
The reason many of us would rather use linux over solaris is NOT because of the cost.. it's because linux is more flexible and has more tools readily available. IF linux cost the same amount, we would still choose it.
Okay, first off I'm not going to get into an argument about the cost of support etc, that has already been covered in an excellent post Maybe management has a point?.
Anyway some of the apps, and probably the ones that your most likely to use, like openssh, are already supported in Solaris 9 (see the Solaris Freeware section on the Sun site. Assuming that you after getting new machines, your probably going with Solaris 9 anyway.
You've mentioned that your management wants 24x7 support which means that they are probably going to be getting at least Gold level support from Sun anyway so these apps are already supported.
That's not the point...
accountability is a big thing in corporate politics.. nobody got fired for buying a microsoft solution that thousands of people use, no matter how badly it works in practice.
On the other hand, if theri open solution fails... they will be seen as personally responsible for it.
Does it make sense technically? no. Politically? hell yes.
If the management asks you where this or that part comes from, you just answer: It comes with the package from Sun.
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
I would do it by arguing that ass sex isn't really THAT painful and some people actually enjoy it.
What are the capabilities that you are looking for? If you bought a Solaris box, you already have a ton of OSS stuff built-in and supported already (like Apache and ssh).
> A good product should be able to sell itself.
That is such a naive comment, it astonishes me.
The best technology does not always win...in fact I'm not sure that it even wins the majority of the time.
Business is based on people. It's messy...it's full of politics, prejudices, preconceptions and downright greed sometimes. Note that "best solution" is not in that list.
Products rarely sell themselves, which is why the initiator of this thread was asking for advice.
One approach I have used is the "toe in the water" approach. If you have a project that is not mission critical, say some higher profile, but non-transactional system, it might be easier to get management to agree to try something new out like OSS. If they get a taste of success, with a huge cost savings (on a TCO basis) then watch them become converts and push to do some mission criticals next.
Chaeron Corporation
"With the money saved by using open source technology" - proceed to present a detailed report on the costs of upgrading using propietry hardware and software and the support costs involved - "we" - always use 'we', they like 'team spirit' - "can afford to hire X people to provide our own support and work on improving the software to provide an even better experience."
Then list all the extra benefits of open source - all the new free programs you can introduce to further improve things.
You have to convince them that with open source the only support you'll need is hardware support. And things like callouts and warrantees are standard with manufacturers like Dell - so that's no extra cost as you are most likely already paying it.
Other than that, you're own personal knowledge and that of the extra staff you can afford to hire should more than adequately support the open source software you install. Just make sure you understand it.
Last install VNC ans ssh on solaris. Don't tell them. First look at the sun cd full of extra's. If its there then its supported by Sun and its no big deal.
Also look at there website and make downloads for solaris there. If they question the software tell them its from SUN.
They invested alot of money in hardware and bussiness has no sense in sunken costs or bad investements.
If arm twisting was used just to ditch Windows then by all means keep you mouth quiet. Someone likely betted his reputation and his job on Sun.
Solaris is a good OS. Expensive but good and is a Unix just like Linux or FreeBSD.
Running open source software on SUN will let Linux or FreeBSD later on after they get used to running it.
http://saveie6.com/
I have spent the last decade working for companies that mix open source and commercial software on the same systems. There are plenty of solid open source solutions that are perfectly happy coexisting with Windows. Just look at stuff like cygwin, python, and OpenSSH.
One of the senior engineers in my government office proudly revealed he had talked to the agency's lawyers and between them they had decided to draft guidance to disallow the use of Linux.
And why?...
Their interpretation of the federal procurement regulations prohibits acceptance of "free" products!
*sigh*
Ye-e-es... I tried to explain....
Just start using open source systems in small, unimportant and easily replaceable places, mail relays, dns servers, the occasional web site, a small file server here or there.
The business people will become used to the systems sitting there, working 24/7, no fuss. They'll become comfortable with the systems over time and making more use of them won't scare them. Then when you need to make more use, you can point to the existing systems you have running and to RedHat or SuSE's support line.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Do you use MS software in the real world?
I'm not an MS troll... I use Linux/FreeBSD on my workstation and server at home, but I also use Windows 2000 client/server at work.
If what you need is something you can customise, or use cheaply, or have specialist requirements, then Open Source is great.
If all you need is file sharing, e-mail, and some office apps, and you have the money to burn, then 2k is fine.
We run a publicy available online centre which supports employment courses, and IT training. And you know what? If you're doing IT training, running MS is the only way really. Some of these folks can't use a mouse - if you train them on Open Office, and then they use MS Office in the real world, they'll be terrified.
I found in the time I worked for Crap Company (real name omitted to prevent libel suits) that they refuse to consider open source options because of one thing: Accountability. :)
They want to hold another large company (buku $$) responsible for their (Crap Company's) own mistakes and bad judgment. If you install iPlanet on several hundred servers with a promise from them (iPlanet) that it will perform function X, then it fails to perform that function to the level they want*, then they (Crap Company) want to be able to go back and recover costs from iPlanet... or get nice little license discounts as settlement.
In this particular Crap Company, they used their manufacturing data analysis and quality control processes to measure and control information technology. Their quality control directives were geared towards the manufacture of large machines, not the experience of a user sitting at a web browser filling out part orders.
The users want fast response times and solid uptime, but the basis for comparison is a server ping and a hit to a static page, not the end user experience. How does that accomplish anything? Right. It doesn't.
If they use a vendor, they can just force the vendor to come in and spend time analyzing their bad decisions and bad architecture, then sue them if they don't provide an immediate solution (read: free products or consulting time.)
Instead of asking the technical experts (the IT staff) what the right way to do something is, they ask management and vendors. Management is driven by cost, and the venders are driven by profit. Is this starting to all come into focus now?
* Measured by data. For instance (loose example), you can have up to 100 client threads at a time simultaneously serving up pages at the rate of Y per second. Well, that's only if it's static HTML, not if the freaking server's connected to a crappy application server farm.
A common corporate concern with platform strategy has been to chose a platform that will survive "over the long haul". Years ago, as a consultant, I functioned as architectural advisor to a fortune 500 financial services client trying to choose a server platform between OS/2, Unix and a new thing called Windows NT. My client was convinced that one of these three was sure to take over the world and the thrust of their platform strategy must be to pick the winner. I told them to stop asking the wrong question. Stop asking which platform is going to take over the world and start asking which platform is never going away.
It's a very good advice, the business plan line of query.
Also I'm not clear exactly what open source we are discussing ... just operating systems? What about applications and other infrastructure?
It is possible to devise hybrid strategies in which you deploy open source application servers on proprietry OSes. JBoss on Sun is a pretty common deployment, I'd guess. I've written applications to run on that combination of infrastructure before.
-A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed-
Start your own company ... Kinda reminds me of this
t ml
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/30517.h
and this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/29226.h
Good old BOFH, nice to know there is always somewhere to turn to in toug times.
--you seem to be asking how to become a salesman when you are a technician by trade. It's not your expertise to do "sales".. You know what tools and products you need to accomplish your IT tasks. You then assemble the list that fits the criteria that you know will *work*, with the included contacts to the shops that actually sell the 24/7 support. You can make the initial contact, seek bids and some additional information, narrow your list to the best possible contacts, then introduce these people to the people in your shop who will be making the decisions. Your boss gets to be "the boss",make the decisions, he's happy, the service contract guys are happy-everyone wants the work, you are happy, you get the products you want and that back up service from when the problem or you are out of the loop for one reason or another. Everyone is a winner! It's up to THOSE shops sales staff to "sell" YOUR bosses on their service, initially based on your analysis and recommendations. They are way more suited to the task, that's their job, and if you are a good IT tech, you will know what you want, what is the best for your corp, and will be able to sort through the market speak in the first contacts. In a specialised industry, use the appropriate specialists.
If OSS isn't popular because it doesn't have the 24x7 support built into it, show them how good their commercial support really is. Tell them to shutdown the local helpdesk and just call the vendor everytime something goes wrong. They'll balk -- for good reason. Nobody in their right mind would actually RELY on vendor support for 24x7 support. It's there when you need it, and even then it rarely helps at all.
Now, with OSS you pay for support because that's all they get paid for. You can keep the software and not give them a dime if the support sucks. Take Bea (decent product)... if their support doesn't live up to what you want, what are you going to do? Switch vendors? Sure, you could, but you get this "cozy" feeling because you still got software that you paid for and it works most of the time even if support isn't great.
On the other hand if you deployed everything on JBoss and the support just wasn't what you're paying for (which I doubt) you'd just drop the support and keep the software.
I really just don't get it.
Most likely, you will not have to come in at 2:00 AM to support ssh, VNC, etc.
Forget about XYZcorp going out of business. XYZcorp is still in business, but you need something and after forcing the salesman to get a real answer (not the typical lie that many will use when they don't know or don't like the right answer) you discover they won't do it for any amount of money.
With open source you just hire a programer. Sure I know nothing about package foo, but if you off me a job modifying foo I will learn foo, and modify it for you. All I need is open source code, money. (Possible legal help if there are patents to get around.) I can't do that for whatever XYZcorp will give you. I'm not good at giving estimates of time and cost, but there are contractors out there who are willing to give them, and stick to them. (You of course pay extra for the assurance that your modifications will come in at exactly some amount)
"...and I am in charge of setting it up and resetting the global UNIX standard"
Holy crap, what a lot of pressure. Seems like I would have seen a press release or something... "Celltech to reset global UNIX standard".
Most small organizations tend to have small IT budgets, and thus might benefit from open source software. However, this support issue works against them as well, as they would tend not to have a budget for developing/debugging applications, or developing and implementing the necessary development and testing procedures to support this.
I may be a typical geek who rarely goes anywhere or does anything other than comptuers. I'm in the group that considers a cell phone in the theator worthy of death. I may only attend one play a year, (often a high school production) but I still want to see it uninterupted. I may not get many dates, but when I have one I don't want to go to work.
Sure the odds might be against it, but that isn't enough when I'm the only support guy. When there are 10 support guys no problem, you rotate who has to stay home that night. Someone has a lawn to mow, or book to read anyway. Not when me alone though.
I'd do much the same thing. Slightly different, but not much.
(1) But don't cut the tellephone sanitizers, they do a vital function
(2)But all the individual departments that make it up, go back to whichever department had them before, plus all the extra jobs.
(3)No, raise them to pay the dept. No, lower them to create ecconomic activitey which will raise the amount collected.
(4)But don't cut the fighter plane they make in my state.
(5)FudgeFactor7 can't count, don't elect him. I probably spells potato with an e too. And other attacts that are baseless.
(6)Along with your ammendment we need a clause to ban abortion. Any likely some other pork.
(7)But what about the enviorment? Don't give me facts, cause I got artist renditions of what your proposal will do
(8)Like what? He just needs a good sound bite, and has no intention of ever delivering on this.
(9)But we need federal involvement or internet companies will just have big loopholes like catalog companies have.
You forgot my favorite one: education belongs to the local school board. Anyone who wants to control education should run for school board. The president, and congress should have nothing to do with it. (unless they want to resign to run for school board, nothing wrong with that)
P.S. I hope you enjoyed comparing response 8 to the rest of them as much as I enjoyed creating it.
is lack of personal responsiblity and fear of risktaking.
my car crashed. sue ford.
I spilled my coffee. sue mcdonalds.
I stubbed my toe on the sidewalk. sue the city.
my linux enterprise infrastructure went down. sue...my own company?
thank goodness my CEO is a japanese geek.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
open source people are getting too caught up with market share. open source software is about hobbyists expressing and implementing passion for the software development technology; many technical innovations happening as a result of not being bounded by management and deadlines. money adulterates our cause. keep our cause pure and noble; keep money out of open-source software!
At an opportunity where you're required to setup your initial 'test' system you simply set up two boxes... identical, 'cept for the OS , etc and you let them see the differences.. If the linux can do what the company needs, the facts supporting that concept will be self-evident. If not, then your options are to convince tht the company ought to rethink its computer needs, or just give up and let them do what has to be done. In the latter case, its not your fault nor is it the open source community's fault that a solution just might not exist for your particular company. jon tkjtkj@charter.net
The kind of businesses that "enterprise" level companies contract to provide "enterprise" level support are generally not the kind that disappear overnight. Barring Enron-level fraud, of course... and even if you consider that kind of thing, my experience is that many suits simply don't. A company that is going to ask for a million bucks for their portal software and a million more to train you all on using it, is not viewed as the least transient.
And really, most IT/consulting firms don't disappear overnight. Even the beleaguered ones take years and years to die. The likelihood that you're going to be left holding the bag on promised enterprise support seems slim, especially to a suit.
You're going to need a better argument.
Tweet, tweet.
Senator Bill Frist(R-TN) is probably ashamed that you have FAILED to make the first post. Instead of glory of a successful first post, you must wallow in your FAILURE.
YOU FAIL IT!
There's a presentation available about making a
Business Case for open source under:
http://linuxvm.org/present/
as
http://linuxvm.org/present/SHARE99/S9320PS.pdf
The disclaimers at the beginning are a good read
all by themselves.
Gauntlet kicked ass! [hehehe, you're old...] = ; ^ ) >
/me ducks
I've had some experience with costly 24-hour support contracts for commercial software. Some of that experience couldn't have been better--patches written while I'm on the phone and shipped right out.
Other vendors ship out a large annual support bill, but provide support so useless that we wouldn't waste our time calling them, but turned to customer mailing lists or searched newsgroups when we had a problem.
Excellent support seems to be increasingly rare. Terrible support seems increasingly commonplace. If some of your vendors provide worthless support, that might help illustrate the error of putting too much faith in those commercial support contracts.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
If you want to run stuff like Debian or FreeBSD, though--might be a tough sell. Even still, you can say something to the effect of 'well, IBM and a great number of their professional services customers run linux, Yahoo and Pair Networks run FreeBSD, (etc.), and they seem to be doing just fine.'
Even if you have to pay for vendor support and it's not your favorite distro/OS, the cost savings and the ease on your responsibilities would be fairly substantial, I should think, with the usual suspects of large linux distros. So, be prepared to bend a bit if they crinkle their nose at, say, Gentoo or OpenBSD--just as examples.
The major selling point that geeks often miss, however (IMHO), is not just the cost savings, but the ease of it all. Even if you have to pay, you pay one company one check once every set interval and never have to worry about the number of seats you have, the fees associated with upgrade cycles, voiding warrantees, getting hit with an audit, etc, etc. And you have access to volumes more software for testing, patching, and reviewing without having to worry about money either. The long term benefits and TCO are, potentially, enormous.
Good luck!
Red Hat's primary business is support, unlike MS which regards its primary business as writing code. The biggest difference between commercial open source support and proprietary support is that there is *more* support for open source software. Why? Because open source code is supportable by more than just the original vendor. You want support? You can hire the original coder or a third party. You can choose to debug the code yourself, add features, or change features. You have options.
What options do you have with proprietary software? Well, you can guess at what's causing the problem and change configurations. If the problem is an actual crash or something, you can reboot, reinstall the offending program, reinstall the OS. If none of that works, you can call the vendor (who will start by having you follow those three steps, along with applying patches, blame the hardware, etc.). The vendor may or may not be able to help you. Further, it is entirely up to them whether they give you real support or not (for example, if behavior is considered to be a feature, you cannot make a software vendor change the behavior). If they choose not, then there is no recourse for you (other than switching software).
A university where I worked considered switching to one of those MS license all your software from us and we'll give you a really great deal. As part of that, they considered moving the yellow page servers to the MS product. The deal was sold, they were ready to start. They asked MS to make a tool that would convert a flat text file generated from the information stored in the previous software's format into the MS format and MS refused. They had a nice point and click interface, and they expected the university to manually retype 60 *thousand* accounts with it. An overnight batch job would have become a multi-month project. Yellow pages info now resides on OpenVMS boxes with a custom written interface that took a couple of weeks to design.
http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-02/wall_street_01.ht ml
http://linux.bryanconsulting.com/stories/storyRead er$162
75% of all statistics are made up!
You can buy support for MySQL. It will still be cheaper than going with the Oracle solution, and now your boss will be happy because she can use her business degree and put together a spreadsheet.
Also, the parent of this post should go back and look at the post to which it responds. It is the boss who is insisting on TCO (which is not 0 for OSS, although one facet of it can be: cost of software). The best way to handle this is to give her what she (and presumably her bosses) wants. Go to www.mysql.com and have them price out a support contract (and ask them if they have TCO numbers, which they should). Point out that with MySQL you now have two support options: call the vendor or debug it yourself. With proprietary software, you can easily get in a situation where only the vendor can see enough to do proper debugging. Thus, proprietary software has *less* support.
Don't tell them, just do it, deny it if you have too, but be there to collect the pat on the back once its all good.
Cheers,
PS Check out www.sapdb.org
I know it sounds silly, but at the government agency I'm currently working at, I just asked if we could go with it.
I'm not even on their payroll, permanent or contract. It's more of a work placement thing as part of a government training scheme.
It might have something to do with the fact that I promised it'd be easier to use that updating it in MS FrontPage.
> If what you need is something you can customise,
> or use cheaply, or have specialist requirements,
> then Open Source is great.
What company isn't looking for a cost cutting "edge"?
Yes, but aren't we all? :)
I work at a Fortune 500 company in the US and this article called Why Open Source? really helped me convince my bosses.
irc.freenode.net /join #linux /join #debian /join #redhat
....
What else do you need?
The prospect of a computer crashing is hardly a selling point. In sun's case it's a spurrious point as well.
Why not be the expert? Sun is worth their money, are you? You can, like google does, replicate the reliability of Sun with gnu/linux on comodity hardware. Do your homework and see which solution will cost your company less money. Comodity equipment or fancy stuff. Free software running on sun equipment might be part of your planning. Only you know what your company needs. When free software gets the job done with the least amount of trouble and money, advocate it. I would not blindly recomend free software, but I would not let the sun safety blanket blind me either, you have to get the company's work done.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just set a linux install up 'temporarily'. Put all required services on it, in parallel with the solaris&win boxes they are 'thinking' about...
A couple of months later they'll realize that it's never down, that questions are easily answered with the many free 'on-line' support options, etc.
Tell them that the only way to have everything but pay for nothing is to go with open source. Or just make that statement and watch them struggle to prove you wrong.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
One sure way to turn off the businesspeople is to use GPLed software. One look at the GPL and the GNU Manifesto, and the bosses will go running for the hills due to the blatant anti-business nature of the license and the organization that promotes it. Instead, promote BSD, Apache, and other truly open source products that have business-friendly licenses. You'll get much farther.
...and the boss says 'This will cost how much? I have to hire new people? Who is accountable? Why don't I just pick something off the shelf? Even if the cost over three years is greater, I have clear costings, accountability and support from the company that makes the software, which makes planning and accounting easier. Why are XYX corp going out of business? Even if they do, someone will buy their customer base?'.
It's hard enough to find good general IT staff, let alone competent programmers. Most businesses don't want to get anywhere near software development - they don't make their own cars, vans or lorries for God's sake, they buy them. Same goes for software.
The environment I work in is so conservative that we have customers who need convincing that major established vendors can meet warranty commitments on standard hardware. Suggesting to them that having the source code for their applications solves all their support problems is crazy. Source code is utterly irrelevant to them.
Your argument would come across as a sneery techie answer to these types of questions. You need to talk to management about solutions, rather than individual components. 'Mr Boss, this is how this works, this is the business benefit that we bring to the table. The components used are x,y,z and these are the routes we've evaluated regarding support. We believe we can meet SLAs based on the resources out there and based on the experience of other companies out there'
I honestly believe that 99% of busiensses out there really don't care about source code - they want something that works, integrates, scales, etc. They don't want to get into the sofware development business.
Note that technical support IS often on hand, and more capable, with many of the OS choices you have. Of course, these cost some money. They are, however, cheaper than the M$ alternative. And the community is generally more capable than any M$ trolls you'll find on IRC at 3am.
And it only works against some vendors. We're a vendor that sign an escrow agreement with customers so they do get the code should we fold.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
DUMBASS!
Just buy a support contract from SUN!!!
Sheesh, you bought the hardware - the same guys offer insane software support also!
It's dumbasses like you that help UNIX take a step back once again....
OpenSSH is included in Solaris 9 as a standart package, so you will get the same level of support as, say, for SunONE Web server; btw, this is also true for many other software packages (Apache, if you need it); VNC was part of SUN PCi suite AFAIR, but somewhat patched.
If you need support why just not to buy it? There are plenty of companies worldwide, which sell it.
I know that the core infrastructure might not be something you or your company would like to give to your competitors, but a large percentage of inhouse software is not really part of the company's core business. This means that they would probably be better off sharing it -- even with their competitors, as both of them will gain equally. In all probability, the originators will retain the advantage simply because they had it first.
This is what I gleaned from the cathedral and the bazaar.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Usenet is available 24/7, so what? And so are a load of forums, websites, mailing-lists and so on. More peeps inclining to help you and often better "response times" than your average customer support.
If it is a really big corporation than there should be much place for experiments. Why not proposing them to switch a small part of the firm to OSS just to check how it is working? It is always wise to diversify the technology that supports the business.
Firstly, Calculate the TCO for them. If it shows that the application is indeed cheaper, then present it to them. Mostly, the cost of aquisition will be the main selling point. Otherwise, why try? Then, request to spend some time on feasability research.
A good TCO includes, and itemizes, the fallowing
- Price of aquisition; how much you spend on it and how much it will take to install.
- Price of Reaquisition; how much it costs if it's stolen or broken. You put things like insurance here.
- Price of upkeep (in manhours per day, not $$$); How many verifyable manhours a day it costs per day to keep it running (don't factor in unexpected crashes, support of staff, and failing hardware). If it takes you 40 minuts to backup 10 servers onto tape, then you factor that in manhours. If you're ordering 10 drives, then it's going to be 4 minutes per drive. Try to use old statistics as well as examples instead of estemations. - Cost of retraining. Give an approxamate amount of manhours to train someone to work with the application. Remember, do this in manhours, not cost. They can calculate the $$$ later.
- Price of consumables per day; electricity, AC, canned air, backup tapes, etc should be factored on a per day basis.
- Price of support ; how much does it cost per month for the support line.
- Cost of downtime per hour (if it goes down and nobody can work, # of workers ^ average pay per hour is this cost).
After you establish it is indeed less expensive, you then need to argue the quality to them.
The quality revolves around 4 key consepts: Security, Features, Support and Expense. We've already established it's less expensive at this point. Feature wise, that's something you do but make sure to give them the technical info you dig up anyway. Make sure they know it will do what you need it to do.
Security is likely an easy one. If it's a popular application, then it's undoubtedly patched a bunch if the people making it have a rep. If they stick to microsoft solutions and say "Microsoft patches too" it might be pointient to point out Microsofts less than shining history with security. Pointing out that it took MS 6 months to patch an exploit that allowed a webpage to delete everything on a harddisk while with a linux solution it takes all of 2 days, which includes testing, to patch a bug will probably get them thinking. On the other hand, if it's some 3rd party app that works well but has no support and an unknown on the security, it's something you shouldn't be trying to push.
Support is where people get caught up on. Replying "We are your support staff" isn't good enough because you probably won't be working their 3 years down the line and the idiots maintaining it may need to find information. Showing them a google search is a bad way to present support: the internet may not be up and it takes time to find information, although it is certainly something to do while waiting for 3 hours on the tech support line. Make sure to factually assure them that, unless the world ends, the 4 layers (You, someone else, support line (PHONE NUMBER!!!), then a contractor in that order) will ensure they can sleep safely with the network being up.
Another facet of support is competance of the staff. You are the first line of support, and you fix 90% of issues. When something truely bizzare comes up, then you call a comrade to help for a 2nd opinion, and if need be, a 3rd opinion can be supplied by a guru. When that all fails, then you look for support via a phone number or google. And if that fails, then you hire a contractor.
All-in-all, it should take you about 2 days to figure out if a given solution is good enough for a company and to convince management. Remember the biggest thing here though:
If it works, use it. If opensource doesn't work, don't use it. If your experience with a given thing is good, then use that. If they are microsoft only, and say upgrading from win2k to winxp, it may be in your interest to convince them to stay with win2k and wait a bit longer for suse.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
There is one thing technical people (including myself) often forget and that makes the difference. You are working with people. Make sure your approach is correct. A big part of what is accepted or not is purelly based on how it is presented. Believe it or not management will be go for the solution that is packaged the best. This is where opensource fails miserably in many instances. So basically make them like you. Don't lie but trust is a big part of what is acceptable to clients (and management). Work on your human interaction skills. You'll find that you get a lot more information accross as well as having descisions made for instead of against you.
It's a funny situation. But the usual reasons for management not wanting to use open src is:
1. Have the ability to finger point when things go belly-up.
2. Have the ability to 'call' a named party for assistance, (usually complete with SLA).
The stupid reality of it all is that:
1. You can't really finger point these days because of EULAs.
2. If you have a good SysAdmin team, you very rarely get to use any support provided.
We have around 80 systems, (HP, Sun, Linux, Windows). All running varying development/test environments. We use open src very heavily. This mainly is due to the fact that we're a development house, (yes - they still do exist!), and also we've managed to convince management that it actually saves money. But, of course, it depends on your environment.
We also use some third party software, (we really can't get away from ALL of it). We use Oracle, ClearCase, Rose, JBuilder, plus others. We pay close to $1m per annum for support costs, and we haven't called up once in the last year!! For that you could add another handfull of developers and SysAdmins to your team. But....
The other problem that I've come across is that you can argue till you are blue in the face. But you might find the bean counters say that there's no money in the budget for extra people, yet the budget clearly says you can spend $1m on software costs! Doh! Different money buckets you see. Head count/assets versus software costs.
Sometimes you just have to think like 'them' sometimes to be able to put your argument.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
But in that case, I wouldn't care. I'm not so much concerned about F(f)ree software at work. I'm concerned with access/maintainability.
Btw, kudos to your organization for taking such a reasonable stand.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
If you read what I said, I didn't say that my employer cared about source code. What I said was that we would be guaranteed the ABILITY to have the app maintained, regardless of the vendor. (HINT: That's "the business benefit" being brought to the table)
I believe it is much more of a sneery techie answer to just assume that management is completely impervious to logic. Oh, and it worked, btw.
And as an aside, most businesses of any size are in the software development business, whether they want to be or not. (they just don't sell it.)
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
You're going to need a better argument.
No, actually, I didn't.
Even in an "enterprise level" organization, there tend to be numerous niche applications. In mine, (and we basically belong to the evil from Redmond), a number of applications' vendors HAVE gone out of business.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Let's see if I got this: your boss wants to have high quality support for software but doesn't want to pay a lot for it? Sounds a lot like my boss. Cheap bastard. He also wants written guarantees that the software won't ever fail, as if there is any general-purpose software that doesn't include a "No Warranty" clause.
So the business benefit is that you have a load of source code that only an expensive consultant can manage? What's the business benefit in that? The benefit applies to a tiny minority of companies.
I think you are mistaken. My organization, and most large organizations, have programmers ON STAFF! (I happen to be one.)
I'll try to explain the business benefit in little words: IF vendor goes out of business THEN we will be able to maintain the app (business requirement changes, OS upgrades, etc -As mentioned in my origional post).
If you don't want to see that as a benefit, that is your right.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
As I mentioned in my other post, most orgs have programmers on staff.
Now, let's assume they don't. Which is better:
1)"We have a broken app, and the company went out of business. We're screwed" OR
2)"We have a broken app, and the company went out of business. We need to hire an "expensive consultant" to fix the source code we have on CD."
*I* know which one I'd rather be saying. YMMV.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Access to the source code is not automatically a Good Thing. Modifying the source code creates a fork in the source tree. What happens when the main tree is upgraded? Now you have to merge your custom code with the main source tree. What this means is that if you want to be able to modify the source code, you will lose the low-cost advantage of using Linux. Every security patch or upgrade to the main source tree has to be integrated/tested with the custom source code. You could try to get your code into the main source tree, but good luck with that. Developers tend to be very territorial with "their" sections of code.
In case you dont know what this is ...
/"prä-s(&-)l&-t&-'zA-sh&n, "prä-s&-"lI-t&-/ noun /'prä-s(&-)l&-"tI-z&r/ noun
Main Entry: proselytize
Pronunciation: 'prä-s(&-)l&-"tIz
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -tized; -tizing
Date: 1679
intransitive senses
1 : to induce someone to convert to one's faith
2 : to recruit someone to join one's party, institution, or cause
transitive senses : to recruit or convert especially to a new faith, institution, or cause
- proselytization
- proselytizer
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
Extendable ... and the big one....
.Net in colleges. If you want to spend 6k per class times 4-5 classes per programmer, then pay exhorbinant licensing fees, run Microsoft servers, and still pay for support, by all means, do it. It is your money.
Scaleable
Transparent
No license fees
Computer Science graduates are already intimate with it.
Resulting in reduced training costs for the programmers.
I taught myself php and already knew ANSI C and java. My startup cost was next to 0 when I started in my open source shop.
Take that to your Microsoft Representative. They don't teach much
You will sacrifice a lot of money for an insecure system written by people who only care about "How much money will this make for us".
Open source stuff is written by people who do what they do because they like to do it. The resulting craft and programming is usually better.
my $.02
AC
BSA Audit
Could someone put together something with all the best info and comments that could be put up and used? I have found that trying to use any kind of technical argument/reasoning just doesn't work with the PHB's. They want answers to questions that have no bering on the issue or situation yet the answers to these questions are what makes or breaks the fielding of Software Libre solutions.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
You can argue Open Source and not lose. It can be like the argument for Democratic, Free Market, Open Societies; these are things that can not be easily contended, when debated in a forum open to Peer Review. It is difficult to overcome the fact that even Microsoft has gone Open Source with its largest clients. Microsoft Operating Systems ARE Open Source to NATO, the Chinese, British, & Russian governments; governments demand it -- there are reasons for this.
Trust & Security:
The principle of Trust Services is based on Peer Review. You cannot be Secure without Trust in your Systems. Peer Review is an incarnation of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Without Peer Review, what kind of Government do you have ? What kind of System do you have ?
Flexibility:
Milton Friedman's theories on "The Role of Government in Education" & how to introduce flexibility into school systems, could be employed to solidify the point that there is merit in Systems designed with Flexibility in mind. The fact that Open Source solutions run across all levels of computing, from PDA to Supercluster, should be sufficient to quell any questions regarding its Flexibility. [ref: YOPY & SGI Altix 3000]
Support:
Peer Review & Peer Support are very similar.
Cost:
IT'S FREE !!!
You may ask your foe: Why would you want to implement a System model based on central planning & subject yourself to countless regulations, restrictions & licenses ? [ref: MS EULA & how it changes] What would Hayek say about that ? Is that not "The Road to Serfdom" ?
This may also be a good time to reference Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
I would flap my arms up and down, and screech at the top of my lungs "I WANT IT!"
Here http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/ you have a list of what GPL components are supported by Sun. You can buy a heap V210/V240/V100 that includes 1 year support and you will get best of both worlds (cheap GPL software big company support).
Regards!
Or thinks it does. The "support" provided by commercial software vendors means one don't have to read the manual or explore the menu trees on their own. Even with "premium" support, the chances of having bugs one discover fixed (or even admitted to) is VERY slim, as are the chances of having any complex application usage question correctly answered without at least one or two more (very long) calls. The web community provides better support for most commercial software than vendors do. And of course the license terms of most commercial software expressly absolves the vendor for any loss as a result of their product. The more a PHB worships vendor support contracts, the sharper their hair.
Fuck'em, let them spend vast amounts of money in stead if they're to pig-headed to consider opensrc solutions.