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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."
3) Lack of roadmap
That's okay, because REAL men don't need not stinkin directions.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
server room so as to protect their jobs when they have limited skill sets and no real interest
in learning
anything new.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
You might not believe it but that's a major reason. I don't know about you but arguments like "You get what you pay for", "There's no such thing as a free lunch" and "It's free if you consider your own time [setting up the system] worthless" tend to be rather convincing.
The owls are not what they seem
Newsfollow.com
The IT staff I work for like open source because vulnerabilities for the software we would like to use are found seldomly and when they are found they are fixed quickly, not to mention one program doesn't interfere with the others too much. But management listens to slick salespeople from crappy vendors and we end up with products that won't work with the latest security patches to Windows, and now we are left vulnerable on so many fronts because our proprietary software won't work with the updated and 'secure' versions of Windows. My coworkers could care less about how often the products need updating, as long as staying secure doesn't break our systems, Windows is failing for us in that arena.
Open source at my workplace is stifled by management who don't know the latest tech stuff and listen to vendors more than the folks in the trenches doing the work. Non-tech people are the key roadblock to FOSS adoption, the ever popular 'stupids'.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Open source development tools are a godsend for development work. Trying to figure out why a program won't run properly compiled in a closed source environment usually leads to wasting time working around the problem by re-engineering your sofware, rather than finding and fixing a simple bug in your development tools. Just because a development environment is supported by a big company doesn't mean that big company is going to fix the problems you discover in its software anytime soon.
IMO this is THE biggest barrier.
Open source software introduces more complexities in software maintenance, but also promotes more secure and reliable code through rapid bug and vulnerability fixes.
Bull, I use thttpd and haven't needed software maintenance ever. Same with xitami, same with perl version 5.whatever I pick. Its not every freakin package that needs to be updated with Open Source stuff, but I do get the latest pureFTP because they are security fixes, but how many of those are there compared to IIS patches?
Lack of Road Map
That's funny, I haven't seen a TODO file with any MS product ever, this is pure FUD, most FOSS projects have a much more clear and open "roadmap" than any commercial product except when a commercial product wants to derail sales of competing products, then they announce exciting new features just around the corner...
Functional gaps
He doesn't even make a case that this is a problem, which it is not. As repeated here and other places many times, innovation happens at small commercial software companies and through FOSS projects and then is bought/stolen by MS and released to the oblivious IT Management World as MS innovation and they are none the wiser.
Licensing caveats
Please, read groklaw, or take the opposite stand - IBM says GPL (like copyright) works and SCO doesn't own jack.
But, it's clear that software development and business models are changing as a result of open source code.
The only thing that is changing is that there is an Open Source OS and now F/OSS is cool, hip, trendy, buzzworthy, etc. I have to go RMS on him and say that these IT Management level idiots never had a clue about how much of their business ran on lowkey, "not cool cause its not linux" FOSS - bind, sendmail, qmail (we don't like that Dan doesn't have an explicit license that we can poke at, waah!), postfix, mailman, php, perl, *BSD, etc, etc, etc. Now their all "concerned" because there is no formal support - if they knew that their Oracle guys got answers from the Oracle newsgroups and mailing lists and never from the "support" that they are paying 10's of thousands of dollars for, maybe they would have a clue that paid software support is 99% bullshit.
Bottom Line:
Open Source has issues, blah, blah sell trade rag advertising, blah, blah, blah.
A large company often doesn't find the 'time' involved in setting up and working with open source solutions is worth the savings. So, by the time that company is huge and they start to care about how much each upgrade costs, the amount of time and energy required to retrain the entire workforce is insurmountable.
Open source software typically doesn't make any promises, so there are none to be broken. But where there is a roadmap, in my experience the open source projects do a better job of meeting it than proprietary software does. Still often behind schedule, but typically not by as much.
Although not as vile as the typical anti-open-source journalism, this is nevertheless just a FUD story.
Eric
Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads! -- Emmett "Doc" Brown, Back to the FutureBleh - 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.