More on Massachusetts' Push for Open Source

pbaumgar writes "With more than $32 billion in sales last year, Microsoft Corp. doesn't usually worry about losing one customer. But this one may be different. In a memo sent last month, Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss instructed the state's chief technology officer to adopt a policy of 'open standards, open source' for all future spending on information technology." Follow-up to this story.

Comments

Open Source != Free

[tjstork]

1) It takes money to develop open source software. Even if it is not money from licensing, the money does come from somewhere. Most open source developers are developing on the dime of their companies. There is a cost to doing this.

2) Open source is genuinely not as polished as a commercial product, and products that do add that polish tend to drive up the cost of open source stuff. For example, Oracle on Linux is still more expensive than SQL Server on Windows Server, by about 5k per server.

3) Open source has yet to produce developmental tools as effective as .NET. Java is close and good in some ways, but that's a commercial product too. NO open source language initiative, with the possible exception of Perl 5, has the vision or the reach of .NET framework and the CLR.

4) The Language Wars are on again, and C# is the opening salvo. I hate to admit it, because I really do love C++, but the latest specs for the next major version of C# are absolutely wonderful. C# developers are getting really good generics to go with a surprisingly well thought out framework.

It's a tall, tall order for open source to match MS in the IDE development. When it was just an editor that was one thing, but an editor that now knows about your class hierarchy as you key it in, real two way tools ala Delphi (by the guy that invented Delphi), and MS is putting together one remarkably coherent and solid offering in .NET.

If the weight of the language wars continues to favor MS, then Linux application development will become more costly than the equivalent of MS, source code, or no source code.