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?"

Comments

Re:Hotmail

[zulux]

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.

Which goes to show that Windows doesen't scale, isen't robust and isen't easy to use.

If it took Microsoft themselved over 3 years to migrate off of FreeBSD to Windows - JUST FOR A SILLY WEBMAIL SYSTEM - imagine the pain of migrating somthing complex.

Windows is an ok server for new useres for small offices - it's GUI interface can make it easier for new computer users to deploy - but by just this example alone, you can clearly see that Microsoft isen't ready for the server room.

Based on that definition of "failure"...

[Anonymous Coward]

I could cite one example. A company I know of ([having worked] or [working] there), had their mailservers running on a dual processor linux box, using qmail and ezmlm. Due to the age of the machine, the scant resources thrown its way, and what appeared to be a general on-going cleansing of Unix-knowledgeable people from the IT staff, the machine started having problems. None of these were linux's or qmail's fault, considering how it was running mostly unattended and was holding up remarkably well under the swelling load as the staff kept growing.

What killed it was a combination of

1. managers thinking a 300 meg inbox, accessed over IMAP, was "too slow" (not to mention ate a lot of disk space)
   
2. expecting the machine to handle internal people mailing 10 meg+ attachments to 900 people at once and not buckle under the load
   
3. a rather apparent focus of the director-turned-VP of IT on only hiring people with MCSEs
   
4. refusal to invest any time in upgrading the machine to something that would even be considered a low-end *desktop* by the standards of the day
   
5. Microsoft's Exchange marketing spiel (shared folders! forms! scheduling!)
   

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...

Re:When is a failure not really a failure?

[Mr. Piddle]

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?

Absolutely not. You used an Open Source tool to minimize the costs associated with prototyping, learned a lot during the process, and deferred the tremendous cost of DB2 until absolutely necessary. Also, there was some chance that PostgreSQL would have been totally sufficient, and the prototype would have become the production system.

I say it was the most prudent path you could have taken.

Re:Still rather early.

[andy@petdance.com]

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.

"Every building code is written in blood."

Mozilla failure

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A Recent Failure...

[PapaSMURFFS]

I can think of one failure I had recently trying to get the evangelical work done for OSS.

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.

Re:Actually

[Phantasmo]

You have to look beyond the fact that "money is being spent". You have to look at where it's going.

If you stick with Windows, it's all going to Bill Gates' pocket. If you move to GNU/Linux or *BSD you spend the money that you save in licensing on training users and perhaps hiring support staff. The difference is that the money is going to many people in your community rather than one rich jerk on the other side of the continent who'll never let it go.

You'll never save money on a large-scale deployment of Free software, but you'll create employment and help real people.