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Open Source: Facts and Figures
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."
this seems like something that needs the "validation" of print. It would make for a very informative read, clear up a lot of misconceptions, and not suffer from the "I read it on the internet" stigma. People are more likely to believe something if it doesn't glow when they read it.
I dont need 440,000 words, and neither do most others. I use Linux because it makes me feel happy. And I feel like I'm in control.
That said, kudos to the wordy crowd too.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Cant help but notice that usability and features aren't listed. There's a reason I still use Photoshop. Its features and ease of use make it worth the price.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I work in a small medical device company writing java, and I could not imagine them using my software for free -- I need to eat too.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
You'll have rhetoric as long as you allow people to make sense out of facts... For example, the same fact (let's say, "source code available to the world") can be interpreted two ways: "More secure because it has been scrutinized by all sorts of people" and "Less secure because it can be scrutinized by every possible hacker."
What follows is the rhetoric...
So, try each on that 300 MHz 128 MB and see what is best.
Most software I've seen on Windows severely underestimates "recommended", and I'm assuming Windows itself does the same.
I've developed both.
I'm not a disciple of either.
They both have their place.
As a wise man once said, can't we all just get along?
I can't even imagine where the web would be today without Perl, PHP and Python. Perl and Python are excellent CGI languages and PHP 5.0/5.1 is a great substitute for commercial products like ASP.NET in many cases. Small businesses and home users simply don't need all of the wiz bang features of something like ASP/JSP. OSS has definitely stepped in to provide a lot of power to the little guys who want it. Now Mono is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft's .NET and Tomcat has been for a long time a very solid basis for J2EE web projects.
But perhaps the best thing about OSS is that it has helped to return a bit of an "ownership society" to software development. The GPL despite its problems says that it doesn't apply to you if you are just a regular user who isn't going to modify the code and redistribute the changed binaries. For all intents and purposes, you "own" that code until you do something public with it that takes commercial advantage of it without meeting the GPL's requirements. That's a hell of a lot more property rights-centered than a typical industry EULA.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This is true. If it doesn't come in an overpriced management tome or as a summary in some slick corporate rag, not only will the PHBs not believe it, they probably will not even read it.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The thing that gets me is how open-source vs closed-source debate is always OS-centric. True, you have Microsoft on one end and Linux OS family is one of the most succcessful open source products, but what's wrong with promoting open-source product on top of Windows platform?
OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox and many other products off the SourceForge.net have a Windows binary available for download. Windows itself provides great hardware support with almost anything imaginable out there, and has nice OS-level features like fast GUIs and built-in support for burning CDs and what not.
If you look at a Linux box and a Windows box, the price difference from the vendor is generally $50-60. If you use the computer for 5 years, the cost of Windows is $10-12 a year. What's the incentive to go "free" and deal with ugly fonts, hardware issues and other problems related to Linux nowadays?
Moreover, promoting open source on Windows nowadays would set the ground for switch to Linux in the future. Guess what - the aforementioned OO, Mozilla and other apps work exactly the same way either with Linux or Windows. Thus a switch to Linux later on would not require such huge re-education costs, since the user lives in app world, not in OS world, and doesn't care whether it's kernel32.dll or kernel.org latest version, that's running on his machine.
Numbers exchanged among people are also rhetoric, though clever. Quantative selections and qualitative exaggerations are equally misleading. Debate, as opposed to argument (or mere contradiction, or being hit on the head), requires consensus on facts, or at least values and rationale in evaluating statements. Marketers don't care about consensus, and most purchasers/consumers have a catch-22 with consensus before decision. What really counts is results. Especially because the cost of the switch itself, between any platforms, is so high, only when the benefit of one over the other is easily demonstrable will enough people be convinced to matter.
--
make install -not war
I work for a company whose business is not software. We need a webserver, operating system, database, etc.
Sometimes, what comes in an open source package doesn't meet our needs, so I fix it. Sometimes I think others might want the same changes, so I submit them (like when I changed the behaviour of a device driver to be more configurable). Sometimes I don't think others would want the same changes, so I don't submit them (like when I made dbmmanage able to be called from a shell script).
I get paid to solve my boss' technology problems. OSS is the most flexible way to do that.
compare ie to firefox (tho ff is much better), outlook to evolution, ms office to openoffice, the open source ones all take quite a bit longer to start
let FF sit as close to the OS as IE and then compare. But wait, we don't want our apps that close to the OS because it's a bad idea.
I'll trade good ideas for a 2 second startup cost.
I recently upgraded my cell phone to a Nokia 6620. This rather amazing phone has several hundred dollars of commercial software "bundled" with it. Each one has a trial one time use, then a need to pay a license fee, which can be $15 to 20 dollars or more. This market [micro applications on mobile and wireless devices] is growing very rapidly. For example, many companies now are discovering that almost 1/2 of their *entire* data communications, networking, and telephone budget is going into mobile and wireless. My question is what is the status of open software development for these new platforms? There surely is a great deal of money to be saved.
Precisely. You're using a hardcore, ultra-tweakable knowledge-essential distro with a tiny, ultra bare-bones window manager. It's bound to be faster.
The issue is that to run a friendly desktop Linux distro with a flexible and powerful UI, you need more than Windows. Otherwise it'll be a lot slower.
And the Linux community REALLY needs to start considering this fact.
Read the original post to understand why. It was complaining that Linux distros listed higher system requirements than Windows XP, which listed 300Mhz as it's requirement. Your parent post said "try it in a 300Mhz.", knowing full well that Linux distros are more honest about their requirements than Microsoft. I have personally run Red Hat Linux just fine on a 486SX-25Mhz, so I can attest to this.
And anyway, I have three 500Mhz machines sitting around. They would all make a perfectly usable desktop under Linux. Why? That's 350 dollars I don't have to chuck in the dumpster for something I don't need. 350 dollars is still a lot of money where I come from.
If true, you need to get better lawyers. The fact that party A has filed a suit against party B does not automatically mean that you are at risk, even if you use the product in question. Do your lawyers tell you to turn off all your lights when someone sues the a utility company somewhere? Do they tell you to stop eating fast food any time someone sues McDonalds?
More to the point, do they tell you to stop using MS Windows everytime someone sues Microsoft?
I didn't think so.
*laugh* That's right out of the astro-turfer's handbook.First of all, there's no "we" here--unless you happen to be an editor or a king of something.
Secondly, my argument about the implausibilty of SCO's case holding water had nothing to do with what "we" want or don't want. They have been ordered by a federal judge to produce evidence to back up their claims (evidence that they stated publicly that they had over a year ago). They have failed to produce even one single example of their copyrights being violated by linux, dispite the fact that they have had several years and many millions of dollars to search for one. It isn't a matter of what "we want to be true" it is a matter of drawing reasonable conclusions from facts that are part of the public record.
Nice dodge. Let me say it more plainly: if you are going to worry about nebulous hypothetical infringements of IP in using linux, why aren't you worried about the same in MS Windows? Espeially since Microsoft has a track record (again, publicly available information) of misappropriating other people's IP?Conversly, if you aren't worried about it with MS Windows, why should you worry about it with linux?
Again with the astroturfing.- It isn't about the cost of the OS; go buy Red Hat Enterprise retail for each system for all I care
- If you are really getting on the order of $200,000 per PC, even with custom software (sorry "wrapper code"), your margins are quite a bit better than the industry average.
- Closed source vendors (e.g. Microsoft) do not offer indemnification in any case (read the EULA some time).
- If your legal department has decided that it's better to get locked in to a pig-in-the-poke operating system from a company that is routinely convicted of criminal misconduct rather than use one of the many alternatives because evidently groundless claims have been made against them by a company that is funded by the vendor of the pig-in-the-poke, for the reasons you have given, they are idiots.
- I note that it is hard for an idiot to get through law school, let alone get and hold a position of responsibility in a multi-billion dollar corporation.
My conclusion:You're an astroturfer, and not a particularly clever one at that.
-- MarkusQ