Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Stories of Open Source Failures?

Posted by Cliff on from the learning-from-the-mistakes dept.

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?"

7 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Epic Games by Joe+Tennies · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Epic Games by Ann+Coulter · · Score: 2, Informative

      They open sourced the game logic code, not the graphics rendering engine. Keep in mind that Epic is selling licenses to the Unreal engine for $350000.

  2. Re:Still rather early. by linuxwrangler · · Score: 4, Informative
    One last note: If you are looking for failure, you will surely find it. Why are you looking for failure?


    We learn from failure and ignore it at our peril. Read some books like "To Engineer is Human" and "Why Buildings Fall Down" to see how much more we learn from failure than from just keeping on doing things the old way.

    --

    ~~~~~~~
    "You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
  3. Re:Hotmail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    No. That rumor has been floating around forever and finally needs to be laid to rest.

    The inital transition attempt to NT4 failed for various reasons and required Microsoft to maintain the *nix backend while transitioning the web frontends to NT. I'm uncertain if it was FreeBSD on the backend though - I was under the impression that FreeBSD was used for the web server frontends and Solaris with some sort of custom data store was used for the backend. Technically, I don't know why they weren't able to transition the backend stuff to NT4. Perhaps it had something to do with the problem of replacing the uber boxen Sun hardware with less powerful clusters of Intel machines and the various issues that invariably arise when clustering/load balancing.

    Microsoft finally succeeded in transitioning Hotmail to an all Windows 2000 environment back in 2000 or 2001. I forget the exact date but Microsoft has a whitepaper on the subject if you really want to bother searching for it.

  4. Re:When is a failure not really a failure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    GIS = Geographical Information Systems, see www.gis.com for some details

    (guess where I work? :-)

  5. Re:Mozilla by imperator_mundi · · Score: 2, Informative

    AFAIK KHTML isn't a proprietary solution

  6. Sourceforge.net by Horny+Smurf · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sourceforge was originally GPL open source, but they did a proprietary fork and abandoned the GPL version (they had copyright on the code, and rewrite the parts they didn't).


    Late last year, they switched from mysql to db2.