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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?
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!?
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.
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
Microsoft's license agreement for Win XP makes it illegal for you to use any desktop remote control software other than Microsoft's built-in stuff. That means that if you use VNC to control an XP box, you are in violation of the license agreement. It also states that you can't access an XP machine from anything other than another XP machine. From the license agreement:
"Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop features described below, you may not use the Product to permit any Device to use, access, display, or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer, nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display, or run the Product or Product's user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product."
*This page intentionally left pointless*
Sorry, trying to get a "first post", and now for more details.
Anyhow, my tenure has been at a large document and imaging company, a not-for-profit professional organization, entertainment conglomerate, internet security development company, e-learning and training company, a small IT consulting firm, and now a large energy company. The easiest minds, at least I encountered, were at the small companies, less levels of crufty management to deal with. It also counted that I had a bit of autonomy in driving the technology vision, mainly because whatever I was tasked with "had to get done". So, I think size combinied with mission critical decisions may help leverage a case.
The "shouting" match occurred at the entertainment company and at the not-for-profit. The first was in the case of some top brass brought in to trim budgets, where we had everything successfully running on open source stuff (which used to run on expensively leased Sun hardware [E250] and software) but was moved to some discarded Acer desktops and FreeBSD. THe stuff ran better and without any hassles on the open source stuff, but because these jokers couldn't get out of their lease with Exodus for the hardware, I was told to support the Sun environment or walk out the door, I chose the door. The latter, in the not-for-profit, the shouting match there ocurred with one of the three (yes three) IT Directors we had there during my tenure. He didn't like the idea of open source at all, in fact, that old argument of "I can get a manager from Sun on the phone 24x7" for support was met with my retort "yes, but can that manager ever give you a technical solution. WHen was the last time he sat in fron of an E450 wondering what happened to the OS when it took a dump". It was later brought up that the organization supposedly didn't run any open sourced software for important tasks (he'd been there about 4 months at the time) and I think he took a look at our SUn, Windows, and Apple machiens at the time and thought that, but I said... "well, what about Sendmail...", he replied, "well, that's and exception...", "then how about BIND?","um, well", "and Perl?!", "well, that's not... but um..."... suffice it to say, making him look bad during a pissing contest in front of his subordinates in the meeting room was not a good way to intorduce myself. He later quit after not feeling he "fit in" to the organization (that, and he physically assaulted me when a hacker broke in through a few of their misconfigured Windows and Sun servers, then got yelled at by the president of the organization... I think his name was Terry White)
I think the best thing to do is to subtlely play to Open Source software's strengths... I wish you well.
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
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.
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.
not just funny, but true. Hell, it's not a bad idea at all. Some companies don't realize (most companies in fact) that those people they hire to work on the computers are not just there to swap out faulty hard drives. I can't help it that companies are so sold on the concept of outside sources for support that they cannot understand that their linux tech can do that. perhaps they can't bear not having something external to blame in front of shareholders.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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.
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!
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.
To a geek, negotiating a contract with a vendor is an intimidating experience. You go into it knowing you're going to get screwed - and you do.
Our upper management thrives on this, though. It's what they do. Pitching a proposal to management that doesn't involve the opportunity to prove their manliness at the bargaining table is like pitching a box that has no tweakable knobs to a geek.Before you choose this tactic, be sure of your audience. It could actually be seen as a negative.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
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
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.
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!
No, what they see is the entire company infrastructure being built by and around one person. And if that one person quits or dies or something, they're up shits creek without a paddle.
They remember the early days of IT where some pear shaped geek would hold the entire business hostage while he demanded a quarter million dollars a year in salary. Because after all, he's the only one who knows how the system works.
Those days are dead and gone.
Outsourced support eliminates this risk, and yes, it's much easier to hold a corporation accountable, and shopping around for a new support contract is easier than hiring and training another pear shaped geek.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Labor costs are not the only cost covered in the TLA you so quickly dismiss. Time spent rebooting the server? That time while the server is down instead of making money for the company costs money. Who rebooted the server? You did, you are payed. That costs money. Did this server hardware cost money? Add that to your TCO. Does the electricity it uses everyday have a cost? Add that to the TCO. TCO must include ALL identifiable costs - one-time fixed costs, capital expenses, and recurring costs need to be factored in. Nothing is free.
My point - there are many more factors regarding Total Cost of Ownership and young support jockeys need to get with the program. This isn't some geekfest where we all trade D&D stories while chewing on the latest OSS install. It's called business and time costs money. You don't like that? Find another way to pay the rent.
Personally when I got into this industry I also swiped aside everything management spouted as just "BS". Then I grew up and realized that a lot is riding on things we take for granted. You might think it's easy to run a business but it's not. _Everything_ affects the bottom line and has associated risks and there is no way around that. Identifying and quantifying that risk is part of the process of making an informed decision. Would you rather they just shot from the hip and hope to hit the target?
You better learn these acronyms and use them to your advantage if you ever want to play with the big boys. OSS solutions CAN compete with proprietary solutions in the TCO arena. But who is going to get them into the arena? Learn the lingo and play hard ball, or go whine in the corner about how everyone else is a bitch like you do now.
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.
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"
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.
Except that it's not technically illegal: I'm not using the Product (Windows XP) to permit another Device to use/access/etc. the host computer, I'm using a different program. Similarly, their restriction on using other devices to use/access/etc. the operating system is so overly broad as to be completely unenforceable. Under the terms you quoted, technically you'd need another license for your monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Each. Additionally, do you really think they would get away with requiring separate licenses for each Smart Display they sell?
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
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.