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Six Barriers to Open Source Adoption
securitas writes "ZDNet/CNet's Dan Farber describes the six barriers to enterprise open source software adoption. Briefly, the reasons are 1) Lack of formal support, 2) Speed of change (not 'velocity'), 3) Lack of roadmap, 4) Functional gaps, 5) Licensing caveats and 6) ISV endorsements. The article makes an interesting counterpoint to Marc Andreessen's 12 reasons for open source adoption."
Good to see there's more reasons for than against open source use. There's always reasons for and against using anything. With open source becoming more popular there must be some major reasons against using Microsoft software that outway the advantages.
Being locked into using a software suite due to the secrecy of the file format and the costs are two of the major ones.
7) There's nobody to sue if it doesn't work.
Not that they ever sue Microsoft or Adobe or Lotus when their crap doesn't work, but I've heard that excuse more than once.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Example corporate environment: financial departments have to make it work with their various file transfer and encryption applications, your reports people need their database building and access tools to work better, help desks have to make Mozilla running on Linux work with SAP and PeopleSoft (and the little misc processes that they rely on), the graphic arts department starts lobbying Adobe to support it, scheduling and forecasting departments find quirks in it when running their custom workforce management apps, your business applications group wants their development tools to work like the ones in Windows, etc, etc.
1) Lack of formal support
Yes but there's plenty of free and friendly support on forums, newsgroups and IRC channels. Not to mention 1000s and 1000s of user created documentation.
2) Speed of change (not 'velocity')
At least Linux patches improve the product. You have the choice of not applying them, where as, not applying windows patchs means opening yourself to zillions of worms.
3) Lack of roadmap
Yes, so one is not constrained. This creates co-operative competition. I.e. I use your code to make a better product. If I don't agree with your roadmap, I start a new fork. This makes open source software development far more successful than the closed source monolithic alternative.
4) Functional gaps ;) ).
They are changes. Not gaps. You have the choice with OpenSource. Not with, say, Windows. (Not trying to bash Windows
5) Licensing caveats ;) ;) )
Read a typical Microsoft EULAs. See how many rights have you got. (Not trying to bash MS
6) ISV endorsements. Independent Software Vendors: Who listens to them anyway?
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"Open source application server maker JBoss offers 24-hour support and is certifying its software for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard, but the small company is going up against companies like BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Sun. Convincing a CIO that it can deliver better, , more cost effective support than its billion dollar competitors is a credibility and growth challenge for JBoss and its brethren."
Here is a model of hypocrisy. Roughly translated, it means: "we probably won't buy support from Open Source providers anyway, but we're not going to let that stop us from complaining if the support isn't there."
I was mildly surprised to see such a pro-Linux article coming from ZDNet. In the past they have been a solid Microsoft advocate. This seems to be another sign that Open Source is gaining its critical mass.
Ok, so I was running RH9 for a while now, doing the apt-get update/upgrade bit. Got restless and wanted KDE 3.2 so I went to the apt-kde sourceforge place and it worked for a while. Then a recent update/upgrade borked my system. No way out but reinstall. After a reinstall, I could've sworn I followed the well-meaning post on a message board about how to reinstall fonts. Locked up X until I undid all the changes from the command line and rm -rf'ed the font directory I created.
So with an operational system, I decide to go mandrake (don't like the idea of a network install with SUSE and wanted kde-friendly over fedora). Installed it, configured the network connection, rebooted...BOOM, suddenly network connection goes out. Another search on help boards suggests turning on ACPI from somewhere in drakconf. Hunted it down and am in the process of restoring files backed up from my old RH installation.
Just a few minutes ago, I got a segfault from kopete when I was trying it out just for fun. Thinking to install gaim to see if I can get THAT stable.
I love the Open Source, folks, don't get me wrong. However, I lose a bit of cred when I start talking about how tough it is to bork a Linux install. It ain't the viruses and worms -- it's the politics (lack of KDE support in RH), the scattered help sources, incompatible distros, and multiple package sources that end up borking other packages as part of a dependency hell.
Sorry, had to vent -- been mucking with this thing for two days now just trying to restore. On a good note, the 2.6.3 and KDE 3.2 seems pretty quick so far. Much quicker than RH9 was, anyway.
You want Linux adoption? We just may have to dumb it down so much that we take the fun right out of Linux. In short, most people won't jump through that many hoops just so they can run Linux.
Sorry, but OSS is NOT free (as in beer). People are paid for their time, and implementing anything takes time. This needs to be stressed to anyone that wants OSS as their instincts that nothing is truly priceless is true.
People get nervous about things being "free" because they think they're being sold the Brooklynn Bridge. People in general have a very good sense of what a friend of mine used to call "down-home cynicism". If you don't give them the catch, their imagination will run wild. If you're honest that the license is free, but the ultimate costs are not I think people will gladly accept this.
AccountKiller
I agree with the points as presented - I believe that they can be a barrier to entry.
On the other hand, not all open source products suffer from those "barriers", and many closed source products do.
Lack of formal support? Damn, most of the packages my company purcahsed don't have any formal support. I remember one commercial software package we bought for about $100,000: the sales guy sold us some support, charging us 10% of the initial purchase price annually. But that support was ineffective. When we found major bugs, they took many months to address them (if ever). And finally, when the vendor was bought up by a 3rd party, the product was abandoned and is now truly unsupported. Bummer for the CIO, who now has to go to the plate to fire up a $1 million replacement project.
...and use Citrix Metaframe XP. They have a Linux client that rocks (I use it here at work). Something tells me that MS won't be writing a Linux client for terminal services any time soon.
Bleh - Reverse engineering interfaces for the purpose of compatibility is perfectly legal. It is specifically addressed in the US DMCA for instance and also in the EU equivalent legislation.
"Rabid zealotry" is in the eye of the beholder. What looks like frothing to you may look like intelligent advocacy to someone who isn't fearful of the message being delivered.
Besides, when people dedicate so much time and energy to open source software, it's really not surprising that when faced with a corporate behemoth aiming to destroy everything they've worked so hard for, they might get a little emotional about it. It's easy to turn up your nose and write it off as fanaticism, but I'll take "built with pride" over "built for a paycheck" any day. It delivers better quality product.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
When people bitch about how long Debian takes to release a new version, now you know exactly why. It's hard to get software in really solid shape in and of itself, and then on top of that you have to get the packages working together nicely. This is hard work, and you've now seen why. Sure, you can always grab pre-release packages from outside sources, but these haven't gone through the Q&A that your distro provides. Packages coming from within the distro itself should play nicely together. That's the point of a distro, after all.
/usr/share/doc/packagename or the program's manpage (if a program doesn't have a manpage, that's considered a bug). It's very rare that I have to go outside those two sources to figure out how to do something on my system.
If you want to suggest these things to your bosses, be prepared to live with the tradeoffs. You can have stable software that's nice, but you'll pay the price in that it won't be shiny and new. Or you can have the new stuff, but be prepared to play "perpetual beta tester".
Any Linux install is easy to fuck up, if you try hard enough. You obviously tried very hard to fuck yours up, and did a good job of it. If you're suggesting Linux to a professional admin, hopefully they'll be a little more clue'd in about how their system works than you are, and will be able to deal with their system properly. As an example, I run Debian unstable on my desktop, a system which is known for having bugs pop up from time to time. But I know how to deal with them and it's never ever amounted to a reinstall, and only about twice in the last four years has it even interrupted my workflow. As another example, Gentoo allows you to completely fuck up your machine if you want very easily, and yet tons of people can't stop gushing about how easy it is to use. If you know how to deal with potential problems, Linux is an amazing choice, mainly because those problems are relatively transparent compared to something like Windows.
Oh, and I don't know how it is for Fedora or Mandrake, but in Debian, the majority of the docs that you'll ever want are located in
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Boss: "If Linux is $699, we'll take 20!"
You: "Yes, that's $699 per copy. Made out to Computers Association for Shell Hawking. Actually, just make it to the acronym: CASH"
I'll write to developers, and join the mail lists for some projects (even contribute answers from time-to-time), but I don't have time (or staffing money) to build the project I want.
People are interpreting my statement in odd ways...
What YOU say you do is pretty close to what I say that CIOs (or people they designate) should do... become a part of the project and let them know what their experiences and/or needs are and THAT will help set the direction of the project in itself.
I doubt many CIOs even care to contribute that...
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
I think Novell wadding into the pool is probably the best thing to happen to Linux in the corporate environment. If there's one thing Novell knows how to do its write a kick ass NOS. Netware changed the business computing world for many a small companies. I know, I was out there installing it. People don't forget. It lends a credibility, a white collar face to a blue collar OS.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
> Being powerless like that can be incredibly
> usefull in office politics.
Actually, if my team went over a deadline because we were 'powerless to fix something', we'd get fired and rightly so. Management isn't interested in problems, it's interested in solutions. At least it was everywhere I've *ever* be working at. If you encouter severe problems/bugs, you can usually convince the PHB to change the deadline.
Just my 0.02.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
There was an article from CIO Magazine earlier this month which dispells some of the myths surrounding open source from a CIO viewpoint. An interesting read.
On the other hand, off-the-shelf software has a well-defined cost (the sticker price), and has a phone number or web site that I can go to if there are problems, making it much easier and time-efficient to deal with these things.
There are two principles that I've experienced in my career about successful software that I see many OSS proponents ignoring or unaware of. The first principle is that the vast majority of computer users (and this includes people who make the decisions about what to use) don't care how their computer or software works, they just want it to work right now . The second principle is that, given the choice between a product that always works, and which costs $100/hr for support, or a product that breaks frequently, and costs $100/yr for support, 90% of people will choose the second product, because no one trusts the claims that the first product always works.
In my experience, the OSS that acheives success outside of the OSS community usually follows the first principle, by installing quickly and easily, and rarely requires editing config files or reading documentation to use. I can't think of any OSS that does a good job on the second principle (not that I'm claiming it doesn't exist).
Why do you need a roadmap? If you're a proprietary software company, your roadmap tells your customers where your product is going to be years from now. With open source, those same features could be available to you in weeks or even days from the time you express interest in such a feature. So having a "roadmap" is frequently pointless unless your project has specific long term subprojects that will take months or years.
What corporate executives need to realize is that if they find an open source solution that's "almost" right, but just lacks one or two things, it may be because no one's expressed interest, and a quick email to the developer's mailing list and they're likely to see a beta version of the requested features before the proprietary vendor has even had time to respond to the message.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
For example, what happens if Red Hat wants a specific modification in the Linux kernel but Linus Torvalds and the Open Source Development Labs don't agree?
uhh.. It happens all the time dan.
I really CAN'T belive that ignorant moderators are modding this shit up! It is complete flamebait, troll and is nearly as bad as goatse.cx!
First of all, he implies that open source is ugly, it is not! KDE has had deep theming aballities since KDE 2.0, which was lauched a year before XP! Look at the screenshots! Do they look ugly to you?.
Windows installers are NOT just double click, click next! Oh no! Get out your instruction manuals and jewl cases and get ready to enter that 50 digit serial number. Ooops you have to reboot. Ooops its installed something in your boot sector. Ooops you have a purple monkey laughing at you! Linux on the other hand lets you SINGLE click (thats easier), your root password (and some distros don't even make you do that) and your installed. With no reboot nesscessary.
Linux has a GUI for everything, stop trolling, or are you using Debian, Slackware or other old distro? Tell me how hard Yast or Drakconf is! Oh wait you can't!
Unified themes have been the standard since Redhat 8.0! most distros come with a unified theme, with Keramik being the most dominant!
So, It is obvious that this person (sic) hasn't tried Linux for at least 2 years! If he did, he would of not posted all of this flamebait!
He is also a member of the anti-slash group!
Now all of a sudden there is XP Rebloated or something shoved into this fantasy roadmap and longhorn has wandered of god knows where. Yup MS has roadmaps alright. It just doesn't follow them. But I suppose they are usefull you can read them and what is on them is EXACTLY what will NOT happen.
But why do they fall for it then? Because people are stupid short-sighted lazy and greedy. Roadmaps are nice things to show in powerpoint presentations to management when they are wondering why that huge IT budget still isn't delivering solutions that just fucking work.
"At the moment there are some problems wich we are working with but Look, a chart here says MS will fix it all no later then tomorrow". Kinda sad that grown men and women still don't get that one.
Most of the other arguments are bullshit ones. One not mentioned but still often used is "Opensource has no guarantees, no one I can sue" this is apparently used by companies without lawyers. Since any lawyer will tell you that sueing MS is pointless. Windows destroyed your data? Though. Of course this is true for all software for some reason. If I buy a truck and it explodes destroying my factory the truck manufacturer will have to pay for it but software seems to be a "you bought it, your risk" kinda product.
Oh well, off reading the rest of the comment. Kinda intrestting to keep track of them. Have you noticed people switched from the old "I don't use linux because I like my soundcard to work" to "I don't use linux bacause I like my digital camera to work"?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
this is the number 1 reason for windows to be adopted, as well.
do you know how many companies I contracted for in the last 3 months that are still running NT 4.0 domains?
27
between 15 and 3000 employees, these companies know they are up shit creek.
but they can't deal with the support, installation, deployment, documentation and updates of Win2k or 2k3.
so guess what, your list is accurate, but your theory that this is soley a problem for linux is not.
companies in general just can't cope with change...any change.
the fact is, I'd never tell any exec to wholesale sack all their windows systems and replace everything with linux.
that would be stupid.
smart moves like putting an smtp relay in front of your exchange server running slack/*bsd or setting up utility servers running redhat or suse file mirror servers etc...
but no.
most middle/upper management have their heads so far up their ass, that I can't even get them to make sensible moves to the next Microsoft version, like getting off of exchange 5.5.
no, buddy.
i think you got it all wrong. you actually sound like one of those execs, who is great at parroting what they read in business week.
If product ABC is MY open source project, then I'm VERY interested in what the CIO of Coca-Cola is looking for, because if he uses my product he's likely to come back to me for support, services, training, and give me lots of money for those.
I recommend every open source developer (in the U.S. this will vary in other countries) go get themselves an EIN and incorporate. Then ABC Development Inc. sells support and services for product ABC.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I see this kinda argument you have all the time. Oh MS is better since it has guarantees. Yet in practice it never seems to work. Make that call and all you get is a phone bill.
But quit frankly I don't really give a damn. Buy ASP and pay for every extra module you need. It is a free world. Zealots who say you should use X because of Y should be ignored.
Just remember. Your MS support is done by the lowest bidder. Have fun.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's that, too. Here's a great example. A few weeks ago someone working with $RADIO_STATION in $MAJOR_CITY contacted $OUR_OSS_PROJECT because the project was "almost" right (see my original comment above) for something they wanted to do.
The developers, including myself, worked over the course of the next few weeks to make changes, add features, and fix bugs relating to what they wanted, and right now we're in the final testing phase before it goes live (oh yes, it's quite user-visible).
We probably won't make any money off this unless they choose $A_COMPANY_ONE_OF_US_WORKS_FOR for dedicated hosting, but it will give us a massive amount of exposure, which will lead to people like the CIO of Coca-Cola contacting us.
Then again, we're eliminating any possibility that they'll ever choose any $MICROSOFT_PRODUCT[] ever again for anything, and that for some of us is payment enough.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
What do we end up with? A flavor of linux which the enterprise world is willing to accept - level-headed, release-engineered, supported.
And what happens to the grassroot linux? The lonely hacker coding for fun into the night. The reckless sysadmin replacing a windows group server with an old box runing samba. The enthusiastic team making up yet another distro. Who will take care of them? Will linus keep accepting their lowly patches? And even if he does, will IBM and Red Hat pay much attention to his kernel anymore?
I think that having Linux the kernel well-accepted and established is the worst thing that can happen to Linux the social movement.
Microsoft just got the EU to allow them to collect royalties on reverse-engineered APIs. And it only cost them $614 million.
The Windows servers are for the AD purpose only or as local servers in branches. So, yes, the workstation is a Windows XP station, but, it's not because it is well supported, standard or anything else, it's just because it's the de facto standard for this kind of usage.
Each Linux node is much more critical than any other Windows XP workstation. Would you pick it, if those 6 reasons were true? I mean, as a Bank?
Achille Talon
Hop!
solutions to specific problems (a person decides to solve a problem so he writes some code and makes it available; I find I need to solve the same problem),
portability (same app running on different boxes with different OSs), and
learning opportunities (I want to understand something better; open-source means Free Information).
I always recommend open-source solutions when making proposals. People may have to learn how to use the tools, but they will be better employees for gaining the knowledge. Any company that systemically refuses OSS doesn't want to empower anyone and (foolishly) feels somehow safer if their figurative balls are in the grasp of Microsoft (for example).
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I don't know about other large companies, but many tech companies are using some Solaris/Linux work stations with most of the web servers and databases running on UNIX or Linux.
It seems like many of the smaller companies that are using the domain controller for the database, web, ftp server etc.
But hey, someone must agree with something you said.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
"This app only runs on windows."
Really. Here's my example: As the systems admin, I've convinced the IT manager to let me migrate the entire company over to Linux on the desktop. Terrific, right? Well, there's one itsy-bitsy hurdle....
The expensive phone system in which they've invested a very large amount of money and time requires a client app on each workstation. And you guessed it... it only runs on windows.
I've even spoken to the company that produced the software, and offered to create and *give* them a Linux version. Nope, they can't be bothered - they're just too busy.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The number 1 reason why open source fails to be adopted in corporations is that open source fails the largest costs of using a software package:
1. support
2. installation
3. deployment
4. documentation
5. deploying updates
Well, if you are medium and large size company, you should hire software engineers to deploy free software and support it. The total savings from per seat deployment of free software gets spent in focused corporate improvements of the software. Winge on about support and die in this new climate for open source if you must like all dinosaurs. But don't blame the OSS movement - blame yourself.
One of my friends is in a sociology class involving creativity and ingenuity and one thing that they are currently reading about is how it's essential that companies reduce the penalties for failure if they want to encourage creativity. what you said is a prime example.
I have 2 options, I can take a risk w/ project A that has a 25% chance of failing but will be great if it works, or I can take no risk and use project B which will definitely work decently enough.
If companies would refrain from punishing failure so harshly (hindsight is 20/20) maybe IT staff might decide to take a risk and we'll get improvements in business efficiency/better products and everyone will benefit.