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Stories of Open Source Failures?
ahodgkinson asks: "We often hear about companies, government agencies, schools and other organizations that migrate from Microsoft to open source based systems. We sometimes hear about organizations that evaluate Open Source and then elect to remain with their existing proprietary system. Both of these events represent represent a 'non-failure'
for the open source movement. I'm interested in knowing more about the Open Source 'failure' events, namely when organizations move away from open source to a proprietary solution. Does anyone know of organizations that have moved from an Open Source based IT solution (back) to a proprietary system? Or where such a move was contemplated but not made? I'm specifically interested in larger organizations that have 'undone' a strategic move to Open Source, and their reasons why. Given your examples, is there anything we can learn from them?"
those receiving (and believing) threats from SCO for using Linux....
- VA Software
- SCO
Oh, and one more thing Balmer: we're not fooled by your clever pseudonym, we know its you.Epic Games open sourced the UT engine in hopes of getting big sales on Linux and other non-Windows OSs. They eventually pulled back out of it. Basically it took too much time and resources with too little gain.
This one time I started writing a program. I built my makefile, put COPYING into the directory, and even made a test program that printed out hello world. Then I got tired of it. I lost the source code a couple years ago. I think it was on a disk that I mistakenly threw away.
It was an open source failure.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
...because I'd wager that in most cases, people choosing to deploy open source solutions are driven, and do not accept failure. There have been plenty of times where I could have allowed an open source solution to fail, but persevered and eventually made it work the way I wanted. So while I've had plenty of setbacks, I've had precious few actual failures, if any.
It's still rather early in the game for there to be many failures. Though the momentum is growing, there are still very few businesses that have made the jump to Open Source. With only few businesses trying it there are only few chances for failures.
I'm sure that there will be failures. There are always failures, even in proprietary software shops. There are many major IT projects that have been based on well known and respected proprietary applications like SAP or CA Unicenter an a slew of others that have failed miserably.
The failures will be due to many factors, poor planning, poor implementation, poor software or who knows what else. There will always be failures and as Open Source spreads into enterprises around the world there will be IT projects based on Open Source that will be abysmal failures.
But, the fact that there will be failures doesn't mean that the concept is a failure or even that the software is a failure. As I said there have been many multi-million dollar failures with the likes of SAP and CA but, I don't think that anyone would classify either of these companies or their products as failures.
One last note: If you are looking for failure, you will surely find it. Why are you looking for failure?
Well, there's Microsoft switching from FreeBSD to Windows. But does that really count as a failure of open source? After all, other than during the many failed attempts at transitioning to Windows, Hotmail ran extremely well. And the cost factor is rather skewed when you get as many copies of Windows as you need for free. And it was corporate pride/image, not technology, that drove the change. Still, they did finally change. ('course then they blew up their DNS and ended up outsourcing to someone running it on *nix so I guess there is balance in the universe.)
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
it clearly has nothing to do with open source.
Actaully, if you look at this, he's half right http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=goatse.c x
On one project, we used PostGreSQL's GIS extensions, PostGIS under SuSE for the prototype, as the prior GIS DP methodology was to do all the GIS processing by hand on a windows desktop--which read and wrote .shp files. Gross! After developing a prototype
DP stream in PostGIS, which is OGC compliant,
it was fairly simple to migrate the DP methods (all SQL with OGC-compliant GIS data formats
and stored procedures) to DB2 Spatial for the bulk processing, which could handle even
larger data volumes, and much, much faster. By about an order of magnitude.
Hours instead of days. Is it an "open source failure" to prototype a process using
an open source tool, then migrate it to a proprietary product that's actually better?
Both still ran under SuSE.
It demonstrated the utility of doing the GIS processing required with a spatial
database rather than a silly little pointy-clicky windows app. Without the OGC standard
that both PostGIS and DB2 Spatial adhered to,
however, it would have been a real nightmare.
What killed it was a combination of
Now, they're running their mail system using around 10 (!!) high-end servers running Exchange. It sounds like every week, at least one of the servers is brought down for "maintenance" to keep it running (read: rebooted). I'm positive that the only reason POP and IMAP were left enabled was because the bread-and-butter engineers would have likely either quit or ignored email completely if they'd been forced into using Outlook.
A failure? Yeah, probably. For whom? I can't really be sure...
Which were not failures of the FOSS per se, but represented usually the success of an incumbent with a strong preference for Windows winning a political victory, and in a few cases the FOSS exposing existing problems and being blamed for those problems.
For an example of the former, consider a client that owed me AUD$3000.00 when they went bankrupt from accumulated incompetence. They had a Linux system replacing a Novell box (and incidentally taking a load off several Windows boxes) at a site with a variety of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 95C, 98, NT4) with a 13GB x 2 RAID1 array and a UPS - and random networking issues which appeared to be in the wires since we replaced everything else and it still went funny every so often.
Aaaanyway, an incumbent manager had achieved "golden boy" status by signing up a contract on the other side of Australia which was a complete shoe-in (my cat could have done it, just tuck agreement and pen under collar, put in pet crate, address and ship) and really liked Windows.
He ran their time clock on his own Win98 machine and refused to acknowledge that this was an idiotic thing to do, even after many times losing most or all of a morning's time records because the machine had crashed before or during the arrival of their workers. He eventually would up shutting the machine down at night and having the BIOS wake it up at 4:30AM, thus cutting his data losses down to oince amonth or so... I'm sure you get the idea.
Mr Golden Boy had arranged to get me kicked out of the place, bills unpaid, on a Monday and that Thursday they had a power failure. Shortly afterwards, one of their staff walked past the server room and noticed a buzzer sounding and a light, so being the helpful little sod that they were, they switched off the offending device - the server's UPS.
When the power came back but not network services, somebody else figured out what had happened, and switched the UPS back on. After ten minutes, still no joy, so they called me in. Not Mr Golden Boy, not the uberManager, they got one of the few remaining staff with a clue, one of three in the place that I cared about, and got her to ring and plead for them. Scum!
I drove half an hour to get to the place, looked at the server and it was mid-fsck (13GB software RAID one, old machine, you get the picture). As I left the server room I met Mr uberManager, who asked what was going on. I told him that the machine had been repairing itself after being interrupted and that it was taking a long time because of the large hard disk capacity, probably twenty minutes to go and it would fix itself. Mr uberManager nodded, turned away, and I turned around - to find Mr Golden Boy looking like Zeus on a bad day, red-angry and fit to apoplexy because their company's server and all of its data were going to be OK! What chance did I or FOSS stand in the face of an attitude like that? Hint: it comes between "9/(" and "-/_" on your keyboard.
For an example of the latter, consider the first round of StarOffice Wars some years ago, where they lawyers in question had sucky/random document structure and had to pay the ferryman anyway when their old Kyocera printer died and the new one had slightly different layout.
In summary, you will get different answers depending on how people percieve your question. I predict that there will be many political failures, and a very few FOSS failures reported.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
if they're running all windows why is one of my old coworkers still working for them managing their solaris systems as they try and convert them to windows?
At work we were running a honeypot for about 6 months to collect some data for an upcoming security conference. It was a debian linux machine with ssh, httpd, bind, and nfs running on it. Unfortunately no new exploits were showing up on bugtraq at the time and all the scans we were logging with snort were for windows vulnerabilities. So we switched over to Win2K/SP3 and IIS and within 2 weeks the box was busted in half and we got the data we needed for our case study.
But I personally try Linux every few months. Haven't been able to stay without switching back yet.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evalua tion/casestudies/hotmail.asp
Slashcode?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I can't believe no one has mentioned Mozilla yet. Even Apple decided KHTML was better than Gecko.
*posting with Phoenix 0.5*
Search SourceForge for "IRC".
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
We were considering moving an application from HP/UX to Linux, but decided not to. The problem was not strictly an OSS one though - it turns out that Sybase running on Linux is kinda crappy, and the software we are running only works with Sybase.
"In a good cause, there are no failures"
I convinced a small office of around 10 computers to switch to Mozilla for mail and browsing. It was a disaster.
It ran slow on their machines (some 200mhz, some 1ghz+ which ran fine). Sometimes wierd behaviour would start to occur. My solution was to get them to change the theme from modern to classic, or classic to modern, and that would solve their problems 95% of the time. It didn't handle attachments well all the time. Sometimes dates on e-mails were wierd. Occasionally contact lists would disappear.
In short, no-one liked it. When they returned to Outlook (Express) they were happy again. Despite it's propensity towards viruses, etc, it looked nice, worked well and fast, and did the job. Really disheartening for me, being unable to find a suitable replacement.
On the upside, Firebird looks promising and I hope the new mozilla mail clients actually work properly. Though for this particular place it will probably be a while before they consider open source email clients again. Firebird should be easy to roll out though. A few of them, after realising IE wasn't the only browser, switched to Opera instead of Mozilla - so that's a positive sign.
We do, don't we? I'd actually like to hear some follow ups on these stories that are always promptly reported as a victory of sorts.
For example, how long it took to actually migrate x,000 of servers and workstations after the [government | company | school] decided to "give M$ the shaft". How much money for re-training users? How much lost (or gained) productivity? How much churn on the HR side because admins|programmers could not cope with the platform change? How much cost for replacing or rewriting business applications? Buying new ones? And so on.
I've always thought in looking at those "success stories" that they were rather long on hype and short on substance. I personally know of a few successful moves to things like OpenOffice or different mail servers and databases, but never a wholesale large scale Windows->Linux migration that in the end actually worked to everyone's satisfaction and ended up being cheaper than it was before.
I set up a network for a previous client, a large private middle school, based around FreeBSD/Apache/MySQL/BIND. It was a nice implementation; very secure, utterly reliable and as much open source as I could get in there (I was not able to move some servers because of Windows apps the previous guy had installed on a few boxes that they just *had* to have.
Our initial plan for this client was to move everything to Linux-based Xterminals (after all, what do they do? Edit some word docs, look at web pages, send mail) but management decided that the time wasted by some clueless idiot coming in after we'd left who didn't know what he was doing would outweigh the cost savings.
So, I snuck FreeBSD in as their monitoring, web, DNS, and firewall server, not to mention software repository, UPS controller, and groupware server, along with a host of other functions.
I still check up on their infrastructure occasoinally, and have noticed that the guy who took over their support after we'd left has been steadily moving everything back to Windows 2000 as fast as he can; he runs a small IT "consultancy" and just can't be bothered to learn how to use something that doesn't require point-and-click.
Regardless, I consider it a minor victory that some of the services I set up (firewall, monitoring, etc.) have withstood any attempts to downgrade them to M$ brokenware--if only because nobody could figure out a way to do it better and easier....
Sigh. Oh well, they paid their invoices on time.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
At my work we are currently running a Win2k network. A piece of software we have to run over the network is this thing called âoeThe Agency Managerâ which is a closed-source buggy-assed piece of software. We toyed around with the idea of switching to a Linux (my bossâ(TM) suggestion) or BSD (my suggestion) network, but our use of T.A.M. wouldnâ(TM)t allow us. We also fooled around with WINE for a bit, and another agency which uses the same software has already done that and found that it still provides performance benefits. Unfortunately we were informed by the makers of T.A.M. that they only offer support for Win2k or WinNT networks, not *nix nor Novell. Because the software was so buggy we had no choice but to continue with Win2k.
I know that at this point some of you are doubtlessly thinking âoeWhy the hell didnâ(TM)t you just find/make an Open Source alternative to T.A.M.â and I can tell you the answer is the other big failure in the Open Source model. T.A.M. is the paramount software piece for the insurance industry; however, it is not glamorous in the least. Iâ(TM)ve found that most Open Source developers would rather program a new web browser, or tool around with encryption, that make a bloated database front-end/accounting software and conversion tools from T.A.M.â(TM)s obscure data format (a db3 variant). As Open Source developers we would rather do something interesting then something needed because we are doing the work for free. This is probably (IMO) the biggest failure with the Open Source model.
It seems that this school-network-linux initiative in Mexico failed.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Late last year, they switched from mysql to db2.
I'm confused. Open source failures? That sounds like a contradictio in termina (or however you want to spell that)... Now excuse me, gotta go see my shrink.
-- Cheers!
As far as "why you'd implement them using open source", the answers include "one size doesn't fit all" and "so you're not stuck with the annoying limitations of Outlook" or "so you can customize behaviour or fix things". Those are all reasons for using standards-based applications instead of proprietary.
My experience with the MS Outlook calendar functions are that they're *much* more useful for people who only use always-connected desktop computers than for laptop users who might or might not be connected to a work or home network and might be carrying the machine around. Outlook is a lot more reliable than it was a couple of years ago, but it's still not totally happy with that environment. It's what I use at work, but otherwise I'd simply use my Palm's calendaring.
Shared Folders are mostly a hack to make groupware fit into an email-like environment. If I wanted a hack like that (:-) I'd use IMAP, and some open-source IMAP server to do that. Otherwise, I'd use Web-based discussion boards - there are a wide range of them, open-source and commercial. Or you could even use Usenet technology, and you'll find that Netscape and Mozilla are friendly clients that look much like their email interfaces, plus there are others that are more customized for usenetting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
nt