Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open Source: Facts and Figures

Posted by Hemos on from the learning-more-about-it dept.

Eloquence writes "Much of the debate about GNU/Linux and open source is dominated by rhetoric rather than facts. David Wheeler has just released a new version of his "paper" (which, at 440,000 characters, is more of an e-book now) 'Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!'. According to David, this paper 'examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions.' May come in handy when talking to your boss about Linux."

1 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Open source is great and all... by Yaztromo · · Score: 5, Informative

    You had to post this just as I got mod points, and was going to start using them in this forum...:).

    I find what you have to say very topical, because I was in talks earlier today with an MD who holds a chair at a west-coast University who is interested in contracting me out to write Open Source code based on my Open Source, pure-Java jSyncManager Project.

    Oh the parallels :). This project is receiving some public funding, so the doctors and developers currently involved are striving to use as much OSS as possible, and to release their custom code pieces as Open Source software. They want to contract my services to help them integrate handheld systems into their groupware/messaging applications they're building.

    As such, it looks like I'm about to start getting paid to write Open Source Java code for the medical field. Yay for me!

    Yaz.