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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.
Never trust something coming from Florida's government.
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During the darkest moments of my life, I often thought about killing members of my family to claim their possessions for myself.
When guilt rose up and stopped these thoughts, I turned instead to whims of killing myself to make life easier for them.
Microsoft costs more because they produce high quality software and this costs money. Where most Linux software is developed by people living in their moms basement, Microsoft software is developed by highly paid professionals. Microsoft software gives the regular users what he wants, while Linux software gives the regular nerd (0.001% of the population) what he wants. Microsoft provides rock solid support for their products and garuntees them to work. Most Linux software doesn't garuntee anything at all, and some even put stuff like "Not garunteed to be fit for any use or purpose. Absolutely No warranty. May cause your computer to explode so use at your own risk," in their license agreements. In the world of business this is unacceptable. This is why Microsoft costs more. Microsoft has higher standards. With Open Source you get what you pay for.
This flag doesn't even have 13 stripes. This must be corrected ASAP.
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
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
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.
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