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?"

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Based on that definition of "failure"... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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...
  2. Re:When is a failure not really a failure? by Mr.+Piddle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Vote in November. You won't regret it.
  3. Mozilla failure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.