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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?
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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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
"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 ;-).
PeopleSoft is on its way - a pretty significant addition to the Linux world, I think...
Yours,
tom
The Army reading list
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.
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About five years ago when Microsoft actually supported their software without additional costs I was able to get very good support on MS Project. They had people whose entire job was supporting that one app and they knew all about it. Their support for NT was not quite as good at times, but a real live person actually walked me through some registry edits and reregistering components once.
That was also when their online knowledgebase was good. Then it sucked for a long time, and now it's good again.
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.
SCO is a linux problem, not a BSD problem. Berkeley settled with SCO a decade ago.
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isnt mysql $1000+ for commercial use?
No, it's GPL.
It isn't quite that simple. The problem comes if you want to distribute an application with a mysql backend. Because not only is mysql GPL, but the ODBC and JDBC connectors are also GPL. Which means your application has to be GPL, otherwise you have to pay Mysql AB for the license that let's you distribute a closed source application with a MySQL backend.
Read the licensing section on MySQL AB's site.
Um, I'm all for MySQL (we use it locally on my company's web servers), but are you also going to estimate the labor costs involved in recovering a failed MySQL database, or the labor costs involved in making MySQL fault-tolerant?
MySQL has many strengths, but reliability on an enterprise scale isn't one of them. MySQL is best suited for "edge" services, or for convenience services in-house. Oracle may gouge you for every cent they can, but there really aren't any databases that can compete with Oracle for enterprise features.
That said, TCO shouldn't be one of your arguments. In my experience, the best arguments address the suitability of the package/software to the problem, the ease of deployment, and scalability. Every time I've heard someone bring up TCO, somebody else asks about support. And USENET is not a suitable answer for most technical directors. If your company uses Oracle, BTW, you should point out that Oracle's recommended platform for new installations is Linux. You don't get a much better endorsement than that (at least, as far as your bosses are concerned).
#include "disclaimer.h"
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
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?
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um - actually sun support can be surprisingly good, but it often depends on who you talk to like any other large IT vendor. You might also find that they've got a really good handle on openSource and may even know the code better than some of the development teams.
It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable. It's a lot wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
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.
They'll want to know (if they're savvy) how the data crunching numbers will compare UNIX to Windows, MySQL to MS SQL...
If they're savvy, they'll laugh their asses off when you try to equate MySQL with MS SQL, then show you the door.
Why oh why does MySQL get all the attention when vastly superior alternatives that are actually free are ignored? I'm thinking of SAP DB, PostgreSQL, and Firebird.