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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?"

33 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. obligitory.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    those receiving (and believing) threats from SCO for using Linux....

  2. There are two by ArmorFiend · · Score: 3, Funny
    • VA Software
    • SCO
    Oh, and one more thing Balmer: we're not fooled by your clever pseudonym, we know its you.
  3. 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:Epic Games by TC+(WC) · · Score: 2, Funny

      but that was about selling games for Linux, which might in fact be tough thing to do for non-Windows OSs.

      It's probalby even harder to sell games for linux on the Windows OS!

      [RIMSHOT!]

  4. Here's mine by PD · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  5. This is a hard statistic to gather... by greck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...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.

    1. Re: This is a hard statistic to gather... by greck · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Good point... usually, I end up with tasks that sound like "hey, when you get a minute, I've got this Red Sea here that needs parting before the CoB". So I've been "lucky", in the sense that when people's toes are on fire, they aren't as focused on the way they USED to have the fire put out, as they are how fast I can do it this time.

      And you know, to further complicate things, sometime the status quo is the right solution, and the shiny new features (with small, breakable parts not suitable for toddlers or the sales department) just aren't necessary. Being asked to implement obviously broken software, or decent software in an obviously broken way, is one of the most frustrating parts of working in IT.

      I try to practice and preach technology agnosticism: define the problem, and then make an educated decision as to the tool to solve it. There are good reasons that the place I work has a harmonious hodgepodge of commercial and open source software running on a variety of platforms.

  6. Still rather early. by FreeLinux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. 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
    2. Re:Still rather early. by andy@petdance.com · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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."

  7. Hotmail by linuxwrangler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.)

    --

    ~~~~~~~
    "You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
    1. Re:Hotmail by zulux · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    2. Re:Hotmail by Mr.+Piddle · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'd say that points to deficiencies in NT4 - which was Microsoft's first attempt at building a scalable OS.

      Windows NT 3.X was the first attempt. NT 4 was just the one that failed so visibly that most people think it was the first.

      Since Microsoft did manage to finally get Hotmail transitioned as a whole.

      Maybe all that Hotmail spam is really Windows kernel source code mailing itself to the world...

      --
      Vote in November. You won't regret it.
    3. Re:Hotmail by The+Bungi · · Score: 2, Insightful
      why would I use it for anything important like, say, financial transations?

      Perhaps you're confused. Let me guess - you subscribe to that myth that goes "OMFG M$ IS RUNNING HOTMAIL ON BSD!!!"?

      Pair.com

      I don't quite see the relationship here. Do you know how many active users Hotmail has? "Several email addresses"? Is that a joke?

      Guess what Microsoft uses for their financial records

      So? Do you know what they run on those AS/400 boxes? I know companies that are all-Microsoft shops and still keep HP-UX and Minis around because they have applications they don't want to port. Sourceforge uses DB2. I'm sure there are many examples of that out in the real world.

      BTW, off the top of my head, the Phillips-Conoco data center in Houston serves 120,000 transactions a day on six clustered Windows 2000 AS boxes. So spare me the "nobody runs Windows for important stuff like financial transactions" party line, mmkay? In any case, real shit like the Amex worldwide processing center in Phoenix uses mainframes anyway. Nothing else, not even your beloved Linux can cut it in those scenarios. Just thought you'd want a reality check there.

  8. When is a failure not really a failure? by stanwirth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:When is a failure not really a failure? by duffbeer703 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I have no idea what you just said, but it sounds absolutely brilliant.

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
    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.
  9. 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...
    1. Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... by Mr.+Piddle · · Score: 3, Funny

      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 think this is pretty typical of Exchange. Remove the one or two UNIX servers doing temendous work for their size and replace them with two to five times as many Windows servers, which prove to be less reliable.

      These are the primary advantages of Windows and Exhange:

      1) Bigger budget requirements make the senior staff feel important.

      2) Constantly running around to attend to Windows makes the junior staff feel important.

      It's win-win ;)

      I feel sorry for those lone UNIX admins who manage whole server rooms. They must envy those MCSEs so hard it hurts.

      --
      Vote in November. You won't regret it.
    2. Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... by sql*kitten · · Score: 3, Insightful

      expecting the machine to handle internal people mailing 10 meg+ attachments to 900 people at once and not buckle under the load

      Incidentally, Exchange handles this easily - it'll store one copy of the attachment and just put a reference to it in 900 mailboxes.

      Microsoft's Exchange marketing spiel (shared folders! forms! scheduling!

      If you need these things, you'll need Exchange or Notes. Open source simply doesn't have those features. Sure, you could probably implement them using Open Source (i.e. writing Perl CGI scripts) but why would you?

  10. I have had several "Open Source failures"... by leonbrooks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  11. Honeypot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  12. Mod me down, self-inflicted troll by HotNeedleOfInquiry · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Slashcode?

    --
    "Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
  13. 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.

  14. Actually by The+Bungi · · Score: 2, Insightful
    We often hear about companies, government agencies, schools and other organizations that migrate from Microsoft to open source based systems

    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.

    1. Re:Actually by Phantasmo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --

      The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
  15. Client Moved Back To Win2k by fuzzybunny · · Score: 3, Insightful


    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
    1. Re:Client Moved Back To Win2k by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So, in other words, you completely ignored their needs, current infrastructure, and future usage requirements, installed something that they neither needed, wanted, nor could admin themselves, and they're now forced to move it all back?

      I'm not trying to be harsh or antagonistic here, but that's how it winds up reading to me; especially since it seems you knew that the actual maintenance/day to day running of the network would go to somebody else....

      --
      Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
    2. Re:Client Moved Back To Win2k by Nynaeve · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I didn't read it that way at all. Apparently they needed and wanted the function that the software provided, or they'd not have paid him so easily for his services. He left it to the company to hire an appropriate admin for the system, which they did not do. IMHO, it is the company's fault for not finding an approprate admin, as well as the admin's fault for not telling them he wasn't experienced enough (and didn't care to learn) to support their system! However, it's the company's money, so if they want to spend it fixing something that isn't broke, that's their perogative (as ridiculous as it may seem).

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

    AFAIK KHTML isn't a proprietary solution

  17. A Recent Failure... by PapaSMURFFS · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

  18. 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.