Slashdot Mirror
Key Advantage of Open Source is Not Cost Savings
cmcsonar writes "Computer Economics recently conducted a survey of visitors to its website regarding the perceived advantages in the use of open source software. Although not a scientific sample, the results are nevertheless startling."
In other news, 11% of Slashdotters were found to use Diatium as their regular source of portable power, more at 11.
Yes, but saving money is one HUGE advantage...
I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.
Of course, with the way vendors rape their customers with outragous rates for changes, and removing "features" so that the system works the way they asked it to work in the first place; it's no surprise at all that the first thought is about vendor dependence...
YFIYFIYFIYFI
Reduced dependence on vendors will result in the greatest costs savings...
I don't know about others, but my main reason for using open source is that I'm free to do as I wish with it.
Copy it, distribute it, change it
Using OSS in vegetable oil will not only save money, but also dramatically reduce cooling costs...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
What the...off topic and probably a troll.
If we really wanted a non scientific survey with a large sample base we could make a slashdot poll.
I use linux the same reason everyone else does, to make me 1337 8-|
Since it wasn't mentioned in the summary, I'll post it here. The key advantage they found was less dependence on vendors. <flamebait> Something Linus recently found out :) </flamebait>
Myself, I use KDE on Linux because it gives me the best environment to code in. I used to use Windows, and have a Mac OS X laptop, and find them both awkward compared with KDE. I really don't get why they are considered miles better for the desktop than Linux. Linux was okay for me on the desktop eight or nine years ago, and it's come on leaps and bounds since then. I'd happily pay for Linux, but I wouldn't pay for Windows.
When selling Open Source, I like to tout the advantage of an exit strategy. Unlike vendor tie-in, they can take their business and data elsewhere if they aren't happy or if I decide I'm too lazy to keep up with their demands.
Customers hate making technology decisions with little to no technology background. Make them feel safe by telling them they can make a bad decision and not get screwed.
It's the balance of improved cost structures and improved revenue making opportunities (faster time to market, etc) that make Windows solutions suck compared to Linux.
I am not a troll. This information should be shared
They often tend to be better applications that are no-nonsense, focused on the essentials, and nicely usable since the users are the developers. Even on windows, examples are firefox/thunderbird/nvu being One-of-the-Best browser/email/html, gaim being OotB instant messenger, 7-zip being OotB compression, Azureus OotB bittorent clinets, Shareaza/kceasy OotB, Syn/jedit OotB text editors, and so on.
With all commercial software, I spend huge amounts of time just looking at if things are compliant or now.
Can I move an install to another PC and not break the license?
Can more then one user use the software on a PC without problems?
Will license structure XYZ or ZYX suit a particular company better in the long run?
do i get the lite version or premium version?
will it's copy protection/activation become a problem?
All this is totally gone with GPL licensing, the answer is basically I can do whatever bar sell it (In my case I dont modify and code, so that doesnt come into play).
I also find the quality of open source products much higher then that of commercial software, irfanview I reccomend to anyone wanting to make minor changes to digital pics, and in batches, works well and is free.
It's another non-story story. The results of poll on a web site are more than less than scientific, they're pretty much meaningless. Lots of visitors participate in those polls because they hope to see a specific result, or to prevent one, or to annoy someone in the room with them, or because they're bored, or any of a number of other reasons that will see them not answering honestly, or thoughtfully, or accurately. Attempting to draw a number of conclusions from said polls is downright silly.
Making the world a better place, one psychotic episode at a time.
I think it is most important that the ROI be measured in an effective method. Such as, not only look at the obvious costs, but look at the hidden savings from changing to Open Source. Such as, we are running Pentium II computers for a year longer since we are running Linux, which extends the life beyond the cycle of expected depreciation. We can cycle in upgrades to hardware in cycles to prevent a one time expense on the balance sheet.
Then cover things like the amount of power saved with the older machines using less watts. For some companies, this could be $100,000+. EnergyStar has statics on this information.
I would also mention the recent losing of the source code for Windows along with the ability to break free of recurring charges with virus software.
In the grand scheme of security, it would probably be beneficial to note that spyware and corporate theft is less likely in a system that is unfriendly to script based theft schemes.
Mention that you don't have to worry about paying for MCSE for employees. You have no fears of employees stealing licenses.
No more formatting when a new employee inherits a machine.
The ability to disable Cd Drives remotely at will.
I guess that covers the basic things. I would give them all copies of Linux LiveCDs that they can take home and use on their home machines. LindowsLive is a good one to use. Let them see for themselves that it is not going to be a foreign OS, but just a slightly different OS.
To confirm you're not a script, please piss in my ear.
so it would appear that you are pimping the domains you're squatting on... fuck off...
If you want the information to be shared, take out an advertisement. Otherwise STFU and get a life.
Mod article +5 Insightful.
One of the biggest drains on any IT department has to be keeping track of licenses - how many people are using what (the whole "license pool" idea is a waste of otherwise useful time and resources), having to ask Bill every time you need to add a new server to a cluster, having a piece of software in a state of suspended animation because the vendor hasn't returned any of your calls... The financial cost does enter into this, but the real issue is just that you can't do what you want when you want to.
(It's not karma whoring when you're mister AC)
As nearly everyone knows, open source software is a low cost alternative to proprietary software. For example, the open source Linux operating system is commonly seen as a low cost alternative to Microsoft's Server 2003 operating system, or Sun's version of Unix. The popularity of open source is seen in the fact that today the largest market share for web servers is held by the open source Apache system.
One might think, therefore, that the key advantage of open source software is its low cost of ownership. But visitors to our website didn't think so.
Open Source Does Have Advantages
Our survey offered respondents a choice of five advantages for open source.
Before we discuss at the topmost advantage of open source, let's look at what respondents are not saying.
Even though advocates of open source products such as Linux tout its security, only 3% of repondants ranked "higher level of security" as the key advantage of open source in general. In addition, although open source software is by definition open to user modification, only 17% of respondents ranked "easier to customize" as the key advantage.
Furthermore, only 14% of respondents thought that open source had no significant advantages over proprietary software.
Free is not free
So, what is the top advantage of open source? The leading vote-getter was "reduced dependence on software vendors" at 44%, followed by "lower total cost of ownership" at 22%. Although these were the top two vote-getters, it is enlightening that respondents valued reduced dependence on software vendors by a two-to-one margin over lower cost.
The second place ranking for "lower cost" indicates that IT decision makers recognize that open source software is not really free. With most types of software, administration and support costs overshadow initial software license cost and annual maintenance feesthe costs that are minimized by open source. Therefore, software buyers do not see the low or zero initial cost of open source as its most important advantage.
Whether open source software is less costly to administer than proprietary software depends largely on a ready pool of resources trained on the system, the availability of administration tools that allow system administrators to manage a greater number of systems, and the number of version upgrades and patches that are issued by the developer. In this regard, open source software may have little if any advantage over proprietary software, although the situation varies from application to application. Therefore, low cost, although important, is not the key advantage of open source.
Valuing independence
The survey indicates that IT decision makers value "reduced dependence on software vendors" as the most important advantage of open source. This indicates that software buyers must feel some level of dependence on proprietary software vendors, from which they desire freedom. Such dependence includes reliance on the vendor for maintenance and support and the necessity for the buyer to accept version upgrades that the buyer may not need or want.
For example, when Microsoft announces a new version of its Windows Server operating system, it invariably phases out support for older versions of the system. Users that are satisfied with older versions of Windows will be eventually forced to upgrade if they want to continue receiving vendor support. In contrast, there is no forced upgrade cycle with open source. Older versions of open source products continue to be supported through the open source community and third party support providers as long as there is demand in the marketplace for such support.
Our survey indicates that vendors of proprietary software are missing the mark when they argue that open source software has a higher total cost of ownership, is less secure, or higher risk in terms of ongoing support. These factors, although important, are not the key concern of software buyer
Compared to Dreamweaver or even GoLive Nvu is a dog. And I'm just speaking of basic HTML layout with CSS, ignoring any scripting whatsoever.
It has been at least three times in last 4 years that I have seen our company to struggle with dependence on a software vendor and there has been huge efforts and significant resources (10+ developers working on internal product) just to reduce dependency on unresponsive vendors. Its pain to ask for new features or just simple bug fixes in timely manner. We even offered to do them ourselves, but since there is no access to the code... no luck. Its very frustrating and if its some software that is critical for your company, this can prove to be a major pain.
Why is everything always about money? Maybe people use Free Software because they believe in freedom. The users' election of "Reduced dependence on software vendors" seems to indicate this. I know the reason I do not pay for software is not because I want to save money. I do not pay because I do not want to support monopolies. Using Free Software, at least in the short term, protects me from things like DRM. I like my freedom.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
When I worked for the Air Force, I never worried about how much something would cost. I put in a few proposals and put in costs, wrote up a report on the various options, and submitted it to my superiors. It was rare the cheapest option was chosen. Cost was immaterial to me.
On the other hand, having to deal with vendor $*#@ all day long was a real hassle. One thing that bugs the hell out of me with proprietary software is the lack of user input - some of the tools we used were klunky and broken, but they were the only tools that would work with a particular vendor. New features were useless, while good features were left out. Upgrades were often painful.
If I were considering a purchase for a large business or government, I'd be more worried about the vendor lock in than cost too.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
That was a close one, I almost clicked the link to RTFA.
I'm sorry, but you'll have to use a better adjective than "startling" to get past my click-filter...
Dependence on vendors ultimately translates into high costs; they simply are hidden.
With most proprietary software, there is a high cost of switching to a different vendor, and software vendors use that "pain threshold" to charge more than they would in a competitive market.
Another cost resulting from vendor dependencies are the costs and risks associated with forced upgrades by the vendor, or, worse, the vendor going out of business altogether.
So, the survey is right: less vendor dependence is a big advantage of FOSS, in addition to lower TCO. One just shouldn't forget that less vendor dependence isn't just a convenience, it, too, translates into dollars and cents.
Whoever modded the parent post as a "troll" exemplefies the worst slashdot behaviour - "mod down those I disagree with", even though the parent poster made a very legitimate, albeit contentious point.
Reduced dependence on software venders directly correlates with Lower total cost of ownership. To rely less on venders means you will save money on overpriced equipment and support costs as einhverfr pointed out.
I'm not anti-microsoft. I'm anti-bullshit. Which means I'm anti-microsoft.
Lies, damned lies.
Don't we read in every story involving RMS that he is living in a fantasy world, that nobody cares about freedom, that freedom doesn't count in the "real world"?
And now corporations choose free software because of less vendor lock-in, aka. more freedom.
There has to be a mistake here somewhere.
So the marketing driods from MS did their work on getting businessess of of the idea that Open Source has a lower TCO. By doing that, they made the one thing they can't do a bloody thing about (less dependence on 1 vendor (like MS)) the biggest advantage of open source !!
Thanx MS !!
Um, Duh.
Well, that's okay. Often data is altered, padded, or just plain made up to make researchers sound smart -- I mean, 74.2% of all people know that.
It finally makes sense. I'm paying the communists without even knowing it! God damnit Stalin, you never go away. Its all pretend that I downloaded my copy of linux and installed it while I had to go to the store to buy commercial software and pull money from my account. Somehow the first part costed me more! This world just keeps making more and more sense. Anyways on a serious less sarcastic note, these studies are getting very old very fast. Cause they keep claiming it costs more without ANY proof that I have been able to see or locate. At the same time I'm hearing studies that say government and businesses are switching to it because it is cheaper. Someone is lying! My guess is its the people saying Open Source is more expensive cause for some reason when you have the money to lie and it benefits you, you create the lies that the people will see. While all this jibber jabber and hocus pocus junk continues to confuse people. I will flip off corporate idiots who make useless studies and continue to use the software which I never spent a dime on.
I don't know about the experience from other slashdotters out there, but my boss used to be very suspicious about open software. After we convinced to let us try Tomcat for production use and realizing that it was at least as good as commercial alternatives, he know even asks for a free open source solution for any software solution that we might need. So when it comes to my boss it's the cost saving that is the deciding factor in most cases.
-- I wanted to put a SIG here but my boss said that it would cost too much...
I've been saying this to everyone for years! The reason I use open source is always because it is BETTER than the other options.
Here's some examples:
CDex > Real, etc.
Firefox > IE, etc.
Gaim > Trillian, aim, msn mess, etc.
thunderbird > outlook, etc.
pj64, 1964 > real n64
shareaza > kazaa, etc.
VLC & MPC > wmp
phpbb > vbulletin
etc. etc.!!
The only commercial products I still use are:
Winamp. It's the best!
Nero. It's the best!
Dreamweaver. (N|vu is getting closer! Fix the table selection code already!)
bsplayer. It's really good for video!
Civ 2. Freeciv is still ugly and clunky!
And that's pretty much the whole list of what I use.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Unfortunately, the presumption of that lock-in period is what justifies a company's initial startup costs. Without it, it's nearly impossible to get VC funding.
/. readers make in their economic pundrity is thinking that everything ends when a company becomes profitable. But realistically, you're not successful until you've made back all the money from the initial investment plus 10% ROI to cover the opportunity cost. Plus, if the majority of companies will fail then the successful ones need to make twice as money in order to still give the investors a 10% average rate of return.
The biggest mistake that
Let's face it: lock in is just smart business. Ignore it at your peril. If you're not always fighting to keep the customers that you have, then you're going to have a lot more time & money to spend on the ones you don't. If you found a company based on some idealistic notion that lock-in is bad, then you are going to fail just like any other two-bit company with no business sense.
-a
IT budgets aren't really that flexible. Most companies have to spend the money in order to get their budgets back the next hear. So there is no such thing as TCO savings with any software.
Furthermore, cost savings isn't really an advantage from the IT department's viewpoint.
OTOH, reduced dependence on a vendore, more inhouse work, etc. These are in the intrests of the IT departments, and these are major advantages. Furthermore, I suspect that you get a *much* better ROI with FOSS simply because so much more of the expense is aimed at making the software fit your business processes rather than the other way arount.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
is that I find that I get even better support with open source. There have only been a few times that I could not go to Google, bust out a simple query, and find a whole forum of people who would help me through a problem within a couple of hours.
.conf files, man pages, and other documentation, while Microsoft "support" has a script that they are seemingly not allowed to deviate from.
Sure beats the shit out of sitting on hold with Microsoft for 2 hours, only to get grilled and having to convince them that you are not trying to steal product, only to get charged for support that ultimately ends up with fdisk/format.
Granted that not all of those problems are Microsoft's fault, but in my experience, they could have done some freakin troubleshooting before telling me to backup, reinstall, and restore. At least the F/OSS community will have an extensive reference to
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the advantage is that F/OSS tends to me more modularized, and thus you are more likely to rescue an installation by fixing one component... Thoughts anyone?
bash: rtfm: command not found
A CFO. And it was diverted to executive compensation, spending so much money indicates a lot of responsibility, which in turn isn't cheap.
Ah. With age comes wisdom. :)
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
Interesting that the primary advantage seen in this study was freedom from vendor lock in.
This isn't from the Eric Raymond "Open Source is a better development model" school of software, this is "My freedom matters", even if that freedom is as much a strong economic advantage as much as anything else.
with the Moodle LMS, as opposed to commercial Learning Management Systems's.
With Moodle, the free support has been very much better than the support that comes with a paid Blackboard or WebCT license.
And another nice thing is if you need it you can get paid support from a variety of partners, so if you don't like the paid support from one partner, you can choose another without having to switch LMSs--with the closed source systems there is only one source of support--the license provider. If they cut support to boost quarterly profits, you're SOL.
Since switching LMSs is a huge deal for a school, being able to choose from a range of support services is a pretty nice feature.
But you have to choose the right product--look for one with a vibrant, open, active community where the core developers participate often. With some open source products, the support is no better than Microsoft--they tend to be the ones where the developers don't participate in open discussion, where the community is asking alot more questions than are getting answered, etc.
Other great features are scaling clusters without added license costs, being able to test new versions extensively before putting into production, being able to run multiple versions without having to pay multiple fees, and of course bugs are fixed much more rapidly and generally just by changing the code directly without having to apply a 'patch' or shut down the system.
Richard Stallman has been right all these years!
The clients that I have that use OSS tend to do so not because it saves money, for most of them it's of little matter if software costs $0 or $1000 it's a write off anyways.
They use it because they don't want vendor lock in and they like being able to hire people to customize it when they need to.
Their happy, I'm happy, we're all happy. OSS all around!
Although I must say some of my more financialy concerned clients avoid OSS like the black death for some reason. I still haven't figured that one out.
"The programmer who works exclusively on proprietary code is limited by artifical restrictions. The value of their time - the capacity of their work to generate money - is limited by the company, the licensing, etc. "
And yet, Visicalc wasn't an OSS project. Also OSS has just a artificial restrictions as proprietary. As you pointed out "potentially" it can be shared and improved. But as Sourceforge and another "orphan project" awhile back showed. There are no guarentees of that happening. And apathy can be a far more effective barrier than anything proprietary can build.
the results are nevertheless startling
Probably, but only for people who don't have a clue about FOSS development, the FOSS community nor the minds, the motivation, the goal of FOSS users and developers. It's not about the money, it has never been about the money. It's freedom in usage, modification, customization, distribution, and last but not least, freedom for freedom's sake.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
It would be interesting to know the user base that took the survey. If it really is majorly "IT Decision Makers" then this really amazing result because then it means that these guys really do appreciate the real power of Linux.
Also the number of participants is also not mentioned. That too will affect the validity of the results
At least to a client of ours, who makes industrial machines and lasers, the biggest advantage of open source is that you know its future since you can control it yourself, if you must. After all you have the source at hand ! And if a feature is missing or misbehaving you can fix it yourself instead of waiting for months for a vendor to fix it.
For pointing out the quality of OSS I would have picked something that was actually OSS.
Thats just me though.
Tell that to my wife I just bought. She takes load and store any way you want; and is superscalar.
" When selling Open Source, I like to tout the advantage of an exit strategy. Unlike vendor tie-in, they can take their business and data elsewhere if they aren't happy or if I decide I'm too lazy to keep up with their demands."
C omputers
Making one's own [bread]* means freedom from all the other [bread]*makers.
*Substitute:
Candles
Food
Clothes
Shelter
Music
Software
The writers of this survey, though interesting, couldn't resist it, "The second place ranking for "lower cost" indicates that IT decision makers recognize that open source software is not really free.".
Really? All the survey proves is that they think less dependance on a vendor is more important than the fact the software itself may be free. It doesn't mean that it isn't free. Where did they get that conclusion from?
Some businesses may insist on having their software supported to the hilt and paying for it whereas others will get by without paying for support, the way businesses may sometimes get by using pirate software without support. They may not care as long as it works for them most of the time. If something breaks they just re-install it. Where I work we still use Win95 for some things. Is that supported? It's just never connected to the internet.
People here seem to be missing the point that freedom and money are linked. A consumer without choice to shop around will invariable get screwed over.
Freedom from vendor lock-in = Freedom to negotiate
benajamin
"Interesting that the primary advantage seen in this study was freedom from vendor lock in."
Help! I'm locked into Pepsi! Isn't there some OSS soft drink to help me?
nor startled.
I thought that obvious... or is it only obvious to RMS?
Anyone around for more than 5 years have had vendors go out of business or be bought by competitors and killed off... it's like being a carpenter and finding out there won't be any more hammers.
-pyrrho
"I don't see how they can assume that visitors [...] must believe that FOSS isn't really free, unless they're rabid Adam Smith fans."
You know, there used to be a saying about Linux at one point: Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. This isn't a bash against Linux or OSS: _nothing_ is really free, not even a pirated copy of Windows.
Can a "free" (as in beer) solution be actually more expensive than a proprietary expensive one? Yes, quite easily in fact: if it costs enough extra hours to use/admin/whatever, it _is_ actually more expensive.
Extreme example: consider (A) using an expensive CAD package like AutoCAD for some 5,000 Euro or so, versus (B) using a pencil and ruler for some $5 (assuming more than one pencil used). Which is cheaper? Well, once you factor in the cost of labour, actually the AutoCAD way may actually be cheaper.
Less extreme example: MS Office vs Open Office. If you're in a position where you must accept MS Office documents (e.g., your main customer is a big corporation and your choices are accept the Excel documents it sends you or go bankrupt), Open Office might actually not be cheaper. The effort to convert those documents and deal with conversion problems, can actually cost you more in wages than you saved by not buying MS Office.
Basically anyone who can claim with a straight face that _any_ solution, OSS or otherwise, is free as in 0$ doesn't have a fucking clue what he/she/it is talking about. It's not about being a "rabid Adam Smith fan", it's just about having the most bare minimum clue of economics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
AutoHotkey (for Windows) is excellent FOSS software. It does both text and program macros. It's the best of its kind, I think.
Corporate use involves long-term deployment-costs for initial license, whether free, fixed sum, or subscription costs, for all software are compared along with the maintenance costs associated with the software in that long-term when deciding the best course for policy that must also appease accounting. It does not matter if support contracts were offered or purchased, the actual operational support costs are in the long-term immensely more important than those initial costs of deployment.
Ironically, the best way for software vendors to preserve and gain market share today is by giving buyers the freedom to abandon the vendor's own product. Don't lock-in buyers and buyers won't be as likely to leave.
...but when they get too attached and clingy and you can't get rid of them, THAT creates a whole bunch of other problems.
And ironically the best way to keep girlfriends around is by giving them the freedom to abandon you completely. As long as you don't lock up your women (or stop them seeing other people), they won't be as likely to leave.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I watched a reverse sales-pitch from the CIO of Massachussets (Peter Quinn -- nice guy, sharper than most engineers I know in industry) basically pleading for there to be more OSS available for e-government. Their #1 worry with MS was lock-in, that they'd save formats in .doc in 2005 and then be stuck buying upgrades to Office 2025 twenty years later just to be able to read their own archives (with constant "improvements" on the closed standards necessitating the upgrade chain). The guy was smart as a whip.
You want to sell software to Mr. Quinn, who literally has a couple million for budget in that department? Be best in your class. Now, a little secret about that: after he installs OpenOffice on his boxen, he's every bit as locked into it as he would be if he installed MS Office. Those transition costs are basically capital and when you move to new software that capital depreciates to 0 almost instantaneously. Training, for example. ./ readers might laugh their heads off, but the vast majority of the government workforce does NOT rate an A+ at their wordprocessing abilities -- they know what they use every day, and that means they know Office. And if you have them use OpenOffice for 5 years instead, they'd know how to do common tasks in openOffice. But switch to a different OSS wordprocessor or back to Office or to a third vendor and all of that knowledges vanishes like dew in the morning sun. When you're talking about large organizations, the disruption in operations retraining causes runs into the millions. Its annoying even for smaller shops -- I've in R&D in a mid-sized government office in Japan and when we switched IMEs (input method editor: the thing which lets you type Japanese characters on a Western keyboard, essentially) half of our secretaries suffered major freakout and lost 2/3 of their typing speed despite the fact that the interface is *identical* (and this results in them calling up R&D confused about WTF happened, because we're not a large enough organization to have a dedicated support staff -- which leads to 6 people with PhDs spending about 30 man hours teaching 20/30-somethings to touchtype).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
To some extent I agree with the opening line of the article.
The company that employs me was founded almost entirely, way back in the day, on OSS. It has used BSD and Linux as it's bread and butter every since. Sure, we may have the Win2k exchange server for the bean counter's calendars, but if it makes us money it's platformed on an OSS OS.
Recently, we've come to realize the functionality that we desire in our applications and platforms aren't currently available in Linux, MySQL, Apache, etc. If we were MS based, we would be SOL, and we would have to work inside the box MS build for us. If we were locked into specific vendors, say Win 2003/IIS/Oracle, we would be at the mercy of those companies to provide us, just one of their millions of customers, with the features we need to stay competetive and up to code in the business we do. Since our main business deals with online credit card, check and phone transactions we are under very, very strict security guidelines imposed by various banks, Visa, MasterCard, etc. Without a very significant invenstment in third party software and rude in-house hacks, we would never make the grade on those platforms. Instead we have hired a few C programmers and made some serious contributions to OSS projects like GRSEC. Yes projects such as these are quicker to implent features for companies that sponser them and they are also very quick in support, and if they decide to stop coding one day we still have the source and a few programmers to get the job done. On top of that we are looking at proprietary solutions that stack on top of our OSS platforms such as Emic and PeerFS.
The point is: OSS isn't free, and the TOC of OSS Vs. Proprietary is depndant upon situation. However, when we made platform decisions 10 years ago or so, we didn't know the requirements we would be facing today. Had we chosen the vendor/proprietary platform we would not have had the capabability of not only competing, but remaining ahead of the pack given today's requirements. The flexibility OSS gives to business could be it's biggest selling point. Anyone who is familiar with the HIPAA regulations imposed on health information tech will know that vendors are just too damned slow to keep up with the pace of policy makers. The hospital I was working with the at the time had to spend, quite literally, millions of dollars to migrate it's insurance billing system away from Digital (VMS)* and Microsoft/Citrix just to conform. In the end it's now stuck with HP/UX and AS/400. Another vendor lock-in.
* This always struck me as odd since HP had just bought out Compaq who had bought out Digital at the time.....try getting support for that!
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
More often than not the root of these TCO estimations favoring proprietary OS are attributing the cost of switching and / or re-training. But I believe this is blaming the chicken for getting caught by the fox.
Has anybody analyzed the TCO of hiring skilled vs. non-skilled people for the IT department?
In Korea, saving money by using opensource software is for old people.
Is this the start of a new Slashdot meme?
In Korea, is for old people.
Remember, you read about it here first.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
I'm not surprised at all - I know our main push for open source comes from being vendor independent, and conforming to open standards to support the first requirement.
If an open source application were more expensive to implement, but conformed to proper standards and supported all of our needs moreso than a proprietry solution, why wouldn't we go with it?
...proprietary software.
What if the author doesn't give a fuck about profitability because they're not doing for the sole purpose of making money or impressing investors as most proprietary code shops will do?
Or, better yet, how about all the other non-coding companies that will be *more* successful because they're not having to shell out an incredible sum of money for their software when they can use FOSS alternatives?
You must have read the wrong post. The grandparent post just made a small, baseless and very objectionable claim and the rest of the post was filled to overgeneralized, condescending comments. So, it isn't a matter of disagreeing with legitimate claims. It is a matter of shutting down trolls.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Best Advantage of Open Source.. Cowboy Neal
Modern Linux distros (and other similar) operating systems are easier to install, configure and maintain that the MS variants I've observed.
However, the point of the survey was not that they don't value a good deal, they do. The point was that people give independence from vendors more weight. That leads to a similar topic which is not open source but open protocols and data formats.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I don't feel comfortable referencing this report in any research, primarily because it doesn't state how many respondents there were. This is a big flaw in statistical analysis (I also assume the target group was self-selecting).
Bad, bad, bad.
asking for help through online forums regarding microsoft products. I've personally never contacted microsoft helpdesk regaring any of their products. as you said, a simple query on google will return an abudant amount of support for most problems. i can't see how you only found these online support communities to exist only for OSS while you weren't able to do the same with microsoft products given that so many people use it.
the more people that use a software, the more and the bigger the online support communities there will be. that's why when people ask me if they should switch to apple, i tell them it's got tons of nice features, realibity, and even a unix backend to it, but one thing it really lacks is support (compared to windows). i don't know about you, but if i needed to troubleshoot windows, it's a lot easier to find someone with the knowledge than finding someone to help you troubleshoot a mac. i know i may receive bad karma for saying something like that. however, as i stated before, more users = more support. and if more people use OSS, that just means that the online support community will increase.
HD Trailers
Come on, you should know better than that.
/.
Everything is biased in favor of Open Source on
A slightly more scientific survey (slightly) run by IDC (as reported in Techworld) also indicated that price was not the main factor driving businesses to open source. This survey focused on Western Europe, and had a few interesting points, such as: only 25% of the companies surveyed used Linux, but 33% use OSS database products.
One thing I found curious: "industries that treated software as a commodity were less likely to have open-source deployments." Again, a bit backwards from what one might expect. There were also, reportedly, a surprising number of respondents who said that the ability to customize the software was important. This may be related.
... as non-scientific sample results often are.
Begining of the second sentance, first paragraph... "Although not a scientific sample,...". They FA does not claim to be anything but a "startling" anecdote.
From my own anecdotes I think thier survey shows that 44% of the respondents are sophisticated enough to pick out what I would consider the main advantage FOSS offers to a serious IT buyer. This is particularly true if the buyer outsources support and maintenance, ie: with FOSS you can replace the vendor with fewer hassles. From an IT buyers perspective this significantly reduces risk and means they can haggle to get the functionality they want at the best possible price.
Trust==Risk: With FOSS the buyer can get any vendor to change the functionality and have it double checked by another independent vendor. With MS you need some serious $$$ and a standing army before they let your geeks even see thier code.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Rather than thinking about how wrong these idiot people are and spouting off about how super wonderful your Linux experience has been, let's consider why these answers were presented.
As a Linux User, I would have selected a different list of priorities in the survey:
- Security
- Customization
- Cost of Ownership
- Vendor independence
NOTE: Vendor independence goes on the bottom because you are still hooked into some variation of vendor dependency based on RPM/DEB packaging and configuration approaches. Minor at best.What I find really shocking about this is the idea of Security. Apparently an undertanding of Security is rather lacking with the survey group. It's so contradictory to my experiences that I'm not even sure how they could have gotten there. But it needs a little more noise from the Open Source advocates.
What? No one else gets the 1Mb/s discount on their software?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This article ignores the gorrilla in the roorm. Dependence on vendors is the number one problem largely because there is essentially only one commercial operating system left, Windows. The success of open source and "free" software is intimately tied to this fact of life. If there were several viable competing commercial operating systems then dependence on vendors would be less of an issue and so would cost of ownership, the use of open standards and the slow pace of real innovation. Competition would make it so. As things stand Microsoft with its monoply is in a position to force upgrades through incompatibility with previous proprietary versions of interfaces and formats. Ironically their monoply came into being largely because they successfully marketed the emotional security blankets of "compatibility" and "standards".
Although not a scientific sample, the results are nevertheless startling
The results of non-scientific samples are always startling. Systematic bias looks amazing when you don't realize it's there.
Reading TFA, it seems people voted for 'less dependence on vendors' because MS et al release version 5 and stop supporting versions 1-3.
Which is all very well, and no doubt it matters when your version 3 software causes you a problem and the tech support smiles at you and says 'we don't do that anymore'.
But if I run the Linux 1.0 kernel, am I going to find anyone who can be bothered to remember how to sort out my problem? No. Everyone's moved on, I will get no support.
Difference: I have a simple solution, namely download the up to date kernel, sorted in six hours and for free. Whereas the guy with version 3 proprietary software has to open his wallet and wait for a few days for the CD.
I'm very happy with the results of this survey, it shows people are "getting it". All of you guys thinking this is wrong and cost savings is the key advantage of open source really need to think again. To say so is short-sighted, just like saying "free-as-in-beer is higher priority than free-as-in-speech".
Independence from vendors means you can make your own fork of whatever project you are working on and maintain it without someone else making the decisions for you, that's the closest thing to free speech you can get in software development.
Keep in mind that OSS is not necessarily cheaper: A closed source company can choose to squash bugs and integrate new features into an application without asking for more money (other than the licensing, of course), or charge you to fix/develop a specific feature if you happen to be the only customer with such a special request. With OSS, if there's no interest in the community to fix/implement that feature for free, then you have to pay someone to do it as well.
In both cases you end up paying for the custom code, and the only real difference is the cost of the license. But hey! With licenses like the GPL, not only you pay less, you can actually own the pieces you pay for! Maybe even repackage and sell the whole thing! Again, independence is far more important than anything else.
I'm not saying cost savings are not important, but let's face it, OSS doesn't necessarily guarantee free/cheaper support, maintenance or development. Hell, you don't have to charge less money per hour when working on projects related to OSS, you know? =)
What OSS guarantees, however, is a BETTER development model, which usually brings greater cost savings along with it.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Of course, if there are redundant projects for a certain task, developers will concentrate on the most attractive one. Thus, redundant projects will lead to some projects being abandoned.
But in each area, there is usually at least one thriving project.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"Although not a scientific sample, the results are [good enough to appear on Slashdot's index page]."
As a student, and as a professinal, to me the best thing about FOSS is that almost every information you need is there, also for free.
That way, I don't have to spend all my money on books (they're really expensive here at Brasil) and trainning. I can sit down, and read the free online documentation... I've learnd almost everything I know about linux this way, and how to program Java and Python.
If I wanted to learn anything from M$, I would have to buy their OS, their certified books, their certified trainng, and subscribe to their devellopment network... too much money for me!! The average middleclass can't afford all of this around here, I can't.
I own my knowledge to the FOSS... All this free software would be useless to me if the documentation, foruns, newsgroups and chat rooms doesn't exist, or if they cost money! To me, this is the single best feature to the IT professional, it plays a even bigger role here on Brasil, because Linux, and Unix culture, is almost unknow on the academic circle! Microsoft domminated the academic circle far too long, and most of the professors fear and don't understant Linux and FOSS.
The community, that's the "real good thing" about Open Source.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
But you already knew that.
Support. No, seriously. I've seen both proprietary software and open source software crash on me.
With proprietary software, most home users will not be able to do much more than call a paid support phone number and hope their problem goes away in the next version. Those helpdeskers are usually helpdeskers for a reason- if they could develop, they would.
Compare this with the level of support you often get with open source software. To open source developers, their project is often their baby. Not only do the developers not mind you reporting bugs, they actually seem grateful for it. I've seen "help it crashes!" being responded to by "ok let's fire up the debugger", resulting in a solution the same day. Now that's a kind of support I have yet to see in closed-source.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The ordered results where:
I don't know about you, but I don't find these startling at all. Vendor lock-in generally sucks and can be a huge headache. It also supports the idea that Free (as in speech) is more important than free (as in beer).
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
The fact is that people (and particularly Corporate America) still do not get it : Free is Free, like Free is Freedom. Free is not necessarily gratis.
Gee, when people are going to acknowledge that what's more important than money is FREEDOM.
Well, in fact, what these statistics say is that pepole are actually starting to value FREEDOM more than money.
Congrats to all 44% of voters !
and to everybody for answering questions... of course !
Cheers
Filippo
I think you make some really good points about "cost" here.
So, basically we can say that when determining the relative "costs" of products we should consider the following:
- necessary for conducting business
- actual price of the product
- cost of labor for the user (productivity)
- labor costs of supporting the product (updates/security fixes)
Some things can supercede all others. If your business requires that you deal with a particular type of document, then its a bad business decision to not use the correct tool, regardless of cost.
Basically, people should look at their needs first, then find the product that best fits them, open source, closed source, public domain, whatever. Different people have different needs. Trying to apply a one size fits all solution, whether open or closed source is probably not the best way to go.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
It's absolutely not true that open source has no "vendor" lock in.
Once you commit to a certain distro, switching to another is time consuming, and incompatibilities like package management have to be dealt with at the cost of your admin staff.
Worst if there is any form of integration then that too most likely needs to be re-written at programmer/$ costs.
Any software, which stores data, has a lock in if there is no free utility to convert the data to a new software package. It has nothing to do with being open source or proprietary it's just to do with the way software works and the other costs, sys admins and programmer being usually much greater then the software itself.
People should stop saying that open source has no vendor lock in, its just plain untrue.
Like how they san't seem to maintain compatibility between minor realeases. How they fix bugs, then reintroduce the same bugs in the next release. Support that reeks when you call them. IBM actually supports Oracle better than Oracle. I know, I've used them both.
I think the only thing Oracle really has going for them is a great sales team. And getting customers locked in because they write all their stuff in plsql.
And what do we get for using this, I think the last report said its 5% faster than PostgreSQL or DB2. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for 5%? WTF?
For the cost of an Oracle 9i/10g license, you can install DB2 or PostgreSQL, buy a box, and hire a new dba.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
More accurately, cmcsonor cuts and pastes that from the original article, then adds a single link.
C'mon, guys. Writing up a story sub for something like this isn't hard. The least you could do is actually type a sentence or two of your own.
That has everything to do with it (until we're civilized enough to achieve universality of hegemony.)
On about $300k I'm out about 50%. (Looking at the deduction lines on my cheque statements leaves me with a real mixed feeling.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
> The last time I installed Windows, it took me roughly a day and a half to have everything ready to roll so I could get some work done. The Linux installation took maybe a couple of hours to achieve the same goal.
I am a programmer, but my son is a systems administrator (6 years on Windows, 2 years on Linux), who has spent the last year doing contract PC support work.
My son's experience matches your own.
Whenever he does a Windows install, it takes at least a day, and sometime two, by the time he has managed to download the missing drivers, overcome any hardware quirks, make the system secure, and configure the system and its applications. The whole time, he complains about what a pain it is.
A Linux install, on the other hand, usually takes him an hour or two.
But what amazes me most is how easily he can modify a Linux system after the original install.
For example, he converted my home PC to Linux almost 2 years ago. Since that time, I have added a new CD burner, a DVD burner, a new video card, a second harddrive, a new printer, and a second-hand SCSI scanner. In every case, but one, he had the new hardware installed and working under Linux in less than an hour (the exception was the SCSI scanner, which took longer).
And with all these changes to my Linux PC, not once has it become unstable in any way. It just keeps truckin -- no crashes, no viruses, no unexplained slowdowns, and no flaky behaviour.
No one that I know personally, who runs Windows, is able to make a similar claim.
I've even gotten into the game a little myself. A while back, I bought an LCD monitor, and I figured I could install it without my son's help. I knew I would need to change the XFree86 settings (my system runs Debian Testing -- there's no autodetect), so I found the necessary configuration file, and changed the appropriate settings for scan-rate and whatever (I forget). Everything worked fine, except it was too dark, so I searched around and found out how to adjust the Gamma setting, and, voila, everything was working perfectly.
I have no idea what I could have done for that last step if I had the problem under Windows. With Windows, if something doesn't work on its own, I generally give up. With all the auto-magic, the hidden settings, and being limited to what the wizards will let you do, it is very hard to trouble-shoot and fix a Windows problem. That's why most Windows support people jump straight to re-install.
Anyway, given my experience with Linux as a user, and my son's as an administrator, there is no way I would go back to Windows. With Linux, the configuration is both straightforward and flexible, and, once it is configured, everything just works.
From the article
open source software is a low cost alternative to proprietary software
How about from now on, proprietary software is a higher cost, less customizable alternative to open source software.
> You must realize that the moment Windows includes every single "extra" you point out, there will be an outcry of "monopoly!" heard round the world. Last time I installed windows, it came with a browser, email, and IM btw...
Microsoft was't accused of being a monopoly because they bundle their own applications.
They were accused of being a monopoly because their contracts do not allow PC manufacturers and retailers to bundle _other people's_ application.
In other words, they're not a monopoly because of what they _include_. They're a monopoly because of what they _exclude_.
And that's not even counting Microsoft's various other illegal acts, including sabotage ("polluting" Java), fraud (FUDing DR-DOS), contract interference (cutting off Netscape's air supply), and so on.
Now the courts may have reacted by telling Microsoft to unbundle some of their own applications, but they did that in order to remedy the damage done by Microsoft's exclusionary contracts and other illegal behavior.
Maybe you've forgotten, but most of the businesses you speak of are in the United States. You can't be blamed for not knowing if you're foreign, but in this country the bottom line is what I like to refer to as "Instant Dollar Amount"; that is, the initial cost required to make money is not as good as instant gratification with less money. Coupled with the fact that most of the citizens know little, if anything, about computers and you have IDA companies that use the same software until someone convinces them they need to "upgrade" to a new version of...the same software.
Why would we pretend at all when they're pretty much the same now. OO Writer is better than Word at this point, as it has all the functionality of word and runs faster too (It was actually better a few versions ago, when it didn't have all the annoying autoformatting enabled by default and actually did outlinesa how the user WANTED). The OO Spreadsheet is about the same as Excel. A new Database app is going into the next version that will probably emulate Access. The presentation software, I will concede MS has done pretty well on. Powerpoint is better than Impress by a fair bit (then again, if you need a slideshow, you're only trying to obscure the fact that you don't know fully what you're talking about IMO). Add the fact that OO is compatible with MS formats, but MS Office can't open the XML documents that OO uses as standard and I'd say that it has more polish, not less. After all, what's under the hood is more important than what it looks like (riced out vs. sleeper cars)
I have used Photoshop. I have used the GIMP. What's the difference? Not a whole lot actually. GIMP includes all the same standard set of basic filters as well as layering functionality and tools. Most of the good graphic designers don't use all the fancy third party plugins: They don't need them, so that's a nonfactor. Functionality is the same and price is a difference of about $700, making Photoshop and investment and GIMP a bit of bandwidth.
RTFM
Yes, but saving money is one HUGE advantage...
Obviously, in the end all business decisions are about either making more money or spending less money. Since customers by in large don't care whether you use F/OSS or proprietary software, it's pretty much all about reducing costs.
Acquisition costs (license fees) may be a dominating factor for an individual whose time is effectively free. For that reason, you're not going to buy websphere when you can download eclipse, becuase the bells and whistles that help the developer get to some modicum of success a tad earlier are hardly worth shelling out the dough.
But businesses think differently, because we're paying for the engineer to get things working. It's a real, hard, quantifiable expense. Two weeks of engineer time is way more expensive than almost software I can imagine buying for him. Let's face it, there are tons of great F/OSS that are wonderful, but generally poorly documented and tricky to get running. Although keeping them running is generally a snap, which does help TCO. Projects like the Apache HTTP server, which is very well documented and (relatively) easy to set up and run are rare.
But -- experienced decision makers, ones who've been around for fifteen or twenty years or more, have all had the experience of choosing a proprietary horse to ride, and then have the owners of that horse decide to shoot it, or turn it into a camel to reposition it for the desert caravan market. You could be looking at years of effort down the toilet, and in general once a vendor decides your market segment isn't making money for them, they are usually extremely callous with respect to the impact on the customers who supported and believed in them.
Risk is a cost, and has to be factored into TCO.
So, I'll gladly pay an engineer to figure out how to use some open source web framework, even though it actually costs me thousands of dollars more than licensing a well documented proprietary framework. Once they're up to speed, there won't be a great deal of difference in productivity once they're up to speed -- let's be realistic. But once I've sunk a couple of hundred thousand dollars into a project, I don't want the rug unceremoniously pulled out from under me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
- Reduced dependence on software vendors. Somewhat true. I'm still locked in to the product- switching will be an enormous pain, with lots of conversion costs no matter if we're proprietary or Open Source. Switching would actually be easier with a commercial product- conduits exist for Blackboard to WebCT and back. Nothing of the sort exists for Dokeos and Sakai, the project we'd most likely move to. Plus, I've also had to deal with a fork where the lead developer took his ball and went home. That was a little tense.
- Lower total cost of ownership. Almost certainly untrue. Yes, Blackboard would rape us on fees. But you can hire Blackboard training and support people cheap. Dokeos realistically requires a programmer to support. Luckily I like to program, but my job description when I was hired never mentioned that. (I'm rewriting it this week)
- Easier to customize Very dependent on product. The user interface of Dokeos is vastly less configurable than Blackboard. On the flip side, since I can tweak code I have it firmly embedded into half a dozen systems here.
- Higher level of security Very, very doubtful, again with a few exceptions. Back in the days I installed Claroline (Dokeos' parent) it required register_globals=on. There have been other places where the developers have found SQL and code injection points.
I'm a big advocate for Open Source, but those people checking "reduced dependence on software vendors" probably haven't had a serious fork in a project a year after rolling it out to 1000 users."Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
For run of the mill support this is marginally OK, but when faced with serious issues, it sometimes takes a week before someone with a clue will even look at the problem. If it's in a production environment you can mitigate this by a Severity 1 TAR, but then you're 24-7 available to the team, and you're passed around the world from Australia to India to California, repeating what's been said and done to the new technician that inherits the TAR.
If you're in a project development environment (e.g. implementing a new Application) - good luck. I've had TARs open through a project go-live, with support coming back 48 hours prior to the official go-live stating that I must close a TAR and resubmit it with the "new problem" (which has not changed from the "old" problem, simply their understanding of the issue has changed) and has led me to normally troubleshooting these issues on my own by (possibly) breaking the law, decompiling the code on the applications tier to determine the problem and solution myself.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
This just doesn't seem that earth-shattering to me. Aren't "less dependence on vendors" and "easier to customize" just rephrasing "lower cost"? A vendor will do just about anything if the price is right (envisioning jokes to follow). With FOSS, you're just not held hostage to the developers' price point to customize your product or stay in business.
Indeed, those _are_ a part of the Windows TCO. Paying for example the salaries of the IT people to deal with those, is indeed a part of what a company really pays for a license of Windows.
Of course, it also shows another thing: if Windows really was that unstable and virused every 5 minutes, like Linux zealots like to claim, your average corporation would have one IT guy for every 5 to 10 employees just for that. Seems to me like they don't.
But that's another thing for another discussion. In the meantime what remains is that, yes, I see you understand TCO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This must be one of the stupidest articles I've read in a long time. The advantage of Open Source Software isn't this or that like the article states. The questions aren't mutually exclusive. You can value better security as much as lower cost and not being tied to a vendor. All of these are benefits and there are certainly more than 5 reasons to go with OSS. I've seen middle school students do a better study on advantages of a specific item. BTW where are the economic indicators?
I will agree with you on the exact same day that we see the gratuitous microsoft bashing and linux rah-rahing likewise modded down. until then, my point is valid.
The pool really did not go into details, but I think that some IT users are smart enough to understand that if a vendor drops a product line they are hosed. They are stuck with technology with no way, either through the vendor or by themselves, to support it.
If you look at technology as an industry, it is very volatile. IBM is the only one around for a substantial amount of time (100+ years).
Sperry/Burroghs - gone
GE computers - gone
CP/M - gone.
Apollo computer - gone.
AT&T computers - gone.
Sun is shaky.
HP is shaky.
SGI is shaky and becoming a Wintel box shifter.
DEC absorbed by HP absorbed by HP, the Alpha is being sunset.
Apple almost died.
A host of competitors bought out or killed by MS.
Not to mention the constant upgrade treadmill you can find yourself on, which can be expensive.
The best way to insure that you are not left with an orphaned technology or forced into an expensive upgrade cycle is to go OSS with an open license (GPL, Berkley, Artistic etc.)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
For me personally what it comes down to is trust.. I trust that my data won't get corrupted in Oracle.. in 8 years i've never seen an Oracle bug which caused data corruption.
I have no faith in mysql.... I would not trust it as far as I could throw the printed source code. There are too many gotchas (I think everyone has seen that link by now..) I personally believe anyone who uses mysql for mission critical databases is not thinking straight. Sure, if your a startup and you can't afford anything else I might forgive you.
I have faith in postgresql... I don't have enough experience with it to trust it like I do Oracle but from everything I have read it seems like a very solid database in which 90% of the applications out there could easily run on.
Unfortunately we have to use oracle for our mission critical databases because we support financial systems and the software is only available for Oracle. As new projects crop up tho, I do encourage adoption of postgresql.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
As other have noted, the lack of licensing hassles the biggest advantage of open source software. I work in a government research lab. Our computer requirements change rapidly as our projects evolve. We contantly reconfigure our computers to do different tasks. Open source licensing allows the computer infrastructure to change to best serve the project.
You make some good points. I think one thing that might be affecting people's perceptions is the different way people perceive and are calculating costs.
For example, a lot of people here have talked about the ease of installation and configuration and the learning curve on support people.
But here's a thought: if I have outsourced my support, it is irrelevant to ME what the actual difficulty is; it's a matter of 'what will I be charged?' Just because MySql is cheaper than SQL Server or Oracle, I may not see a significant difference in the support costs that the available local support firms charge for support; and you can't gloss over the key words 'available' and 'local'.
I know a number of firms that lease the PCs, with software. The question for them is not 'what is the cost of the software' but what is the cost of the PACKAGE the vendor leases. If Dell does not discount for Linux with Open Office, then I don't realize any benefit, regardless of the relative costs of Linux vs. Windows and Open Office vs. MS Office.
And the choice of going with [New vendor] versus Dell is not always an easy sell. The uncertainty overrules any cost benefit. I have seen many people absolutely stunned that I can get a PC locally for $300 that has the same approximate specs as a Dell costing more than twice the price. But that doesn't change the way they purchase or lease PCs; too much uncertainty on their part, similar to the old adage 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'.
If the decision to spend is made by someone not aware of the technical issues (which is a common occurrence), they look at other issues. I think people may be glossing over some factors in the middle economic layers of the transactions.
For example, one reason a lot of companies designed applications in Visual Basic is -not- because of technical reasons. A lot of times the decision was made because the HR department was confident they could hire or contract VB programmers. HR had the perception that there was a smaller pool of local talent in other, more technically efficient languages, and I can't honestly say that HR was wrong.
It's very difficult and time consuming the address all the issues like this that come up, especially for technicans who tend to be unaware of the non-technical business issues.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. As soon as a Linux distro takes 80+ percent of the market, AND uses that to unfair advantage, then we can talk. Until then, your argument is pretty weak.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Thrill as our trained analysts jump to conclusions without any facts to back them up whatsoever. No safety net here, folks! Watch as we assume that just because twice as many people find vendor dependance more important than cost, that means that Linux doesn't cost any less. Remember, kids, our analysts are trained professionals, don't try this at home!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Rather than calling MS' customers incompetent, how about being more accurate, the are gullible. MS has been making -- and failing to deliver -- pretty much the same claims going back to Win95. People have been falling for it, but maybe it's time for them to consider a class action lawsuit.
Seriously, if they want something that works out of the box, then a Mac will do nicely. Or, some of the newer linux distros have become far easier to install than an "upgrade" to MS-Windows.
Until then, choose one and only one of the two:
a) bleating that MS-Windows is easy to use, or
b) bleating that one must be an initiate to esoteric knowledge to keep MS-Windows up and running.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
How big was their survey? The articles has no figures whatsoever that can convince me about the relevance of these figures. If you ask 20 people, there will be a much bigger chance to have those "unexpected" results than when you ask 20000 people.
If they don't mention the size of the survey, the only thing I can say is that this is just statistical bullshit.
--Use ant to make
It was brought to painful light a few months ago when Pat V's health took a turn for bad. He's recovering now, and so's the entire Slackware community, but we're all 100% aware of what vendor dependance means.
For those that don't know, and what rock have you been hiding under?, Pat Volkerding is the only developper for Slackware. A few months ago, he had a sudden health problem, a lung infection that threatened his life. Since he was the only developper for the distro, there was much fear that the project would die, or would splinter unrecoverably should the unthinkable happen. We're all grateful that Pat's health is improving, not only because he's a really nice guy, but because of how much we owe him. With Pat still around, there was/is a unifying vision (tm) behind the project that has allowed it to remain viable as, IIRC, the oldest Linux distro around.
Most of us already know this. And at least in the Slackware community, Pat's illness brought to the forefront the dangers of vendor dependance. I don't like vendor dependance, but Slack is the only distro I've seen that actually lives up to Microsoft's new mantra: It just works. On every oddball configuration I've thrown at it (7 computers, 3 of them laptop), it has "just worked" right out of the box. Or off the ISO as the case is. And it has "just worked" for me for quite a while. I could still install from source (and in fact, I do for some things), but we need more binary distros that "just work" to really compete with commercial systems: joe user isn't going to want to have to compile his own software.
I'm not trying to evangelise. The great thing about Linux is that there's so many flavours out there, and there's so much choice. You may prefer Debian or Yoper or RH or Vector or Tomsrtbt for all I care. The point I'm trying to get across is that even in OSS, vendor dependance is bad, mmkay?
Oh, and as for all of the other reasons, they're there too. It is free if you choose (though I, like many others, feel that at least some of it is worth paying for), and the support from the community is phenomenal. If you're having trouble getting support from OSS, you're on the wrong forum. The one that I frequent (as much to answer questions as to ask them) is a great example of the community pulling together and making the switch really easy. But the real fear, and the only one that matters with any solution, is the danger of becoming dependant.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I don't think most people would have a problem if Microsoft decided to bundled Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP, and a number of other apps with the base OS, or even commercial apps like PaintShop Pro and StarOffice or the Lotus SmartSuite.
I also suspect the outcry about bundling Office would be a lot less if the file formats it used was released to the public (and didn't cause the type of proprietary vendor lock-in that they do now).
*We* can have our cake and eat it, too. It's Microsoft that can't, legally, mainly due to its already-established monopoly position on the desktop.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Where I work, we paid for a software package (proprietary) that did what we wanted. We incorporated it into our product, and all was good. Then a year or so later we decided to expand on the functionality that the software offered, and found a critical bug. We couldn't get it to do what we wanted, and we really needed it. So we tried to contact the company, and it was gone. (sound of crickets)
Up until that point, the software had functioned very well for us. But now we were screwed because we couldn't get past this bug, and it would be major work to replace this stuff with something else - if we could even find a suitable replacement. There was much scrambling and chaos. We eventually worked it all out, but it wasn't fun at all.
I believe that this is one reason that people go with Open Source, and ironically the same reason people go with large companies that produce proprietary software.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
One can grab the full SP4 from the Microsoft site beforehand, put it on a secondary partition on the target box, and then install Win2k, apply SP4, and enable networking on the new installation in that order.
I'd say Windows 2000 and mandrake 8.2 are roughly comparable in terms of installation difficulty, though of course Windows tends to make all kinds of stupid assumptions w.r.t. partitions and doesn't provide as many options (either during the install or in terms of the software one can include in the installation).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Google is a perfect example of the point TFA is trying to make--flexibility, not cost, is the greatest advantage of OS software.
Google's core competency and competitive advantage is their software, down to the OS level. Running it on open source software gives them maximum flexibility to innovate and refine--to develop IP, basically. Running on closed-source proprietary software would limit their innovation and therefore their ability to set themselves apart in the market.
Would Google's business model fail if they were running MSSQL or Oracle? I would guess yes, but NOT because of cost. Plenty of big companies run Oracle or MSSQL and handle the costs just fine. They can do so because their core business differentiation depends on some layer other than the OS or DB. Ford, for example, must differentiate its cars from other cars on the market. The OS and DB used in various operations involved with doing so are simply commodities.
Google's core business operations are completely dependent on OS and DB performance. It is the basis of their differentiation. Maximum flexibility and customizability are the most important things to them. THAT is why they run open source.
And indicate to me that some people are necessarily thinking of OSS realistically. The open source community is essentially a vendor of software and those people/companies will be as dependent on that community as they would on any vendor. It sounds to me like the people who responded were mostly likely individuals that were happy to not have to use Microsoft products.
"Perceived advantages"?
"Not a scientific sample"?
Ummm, so this is worth reading why?
"...the results are nevertheless startling."
Well, fiction can also be startling, since it has no obligation to stick to facts. I'm sure you could find a non-scientific sample of folks who worship snails because they perceive them to be wise and god-like.
On to the next story!
The fact that both OS/2 and BeOS are still seeing a certain amount of new software on a regular basis is almost exclusively due to the fact that open source software is available that can be ported to those platforms.
Projects like Mozilla, OpenOffice, slrn, cdrecord, gcc, and others have been critical in keeping those older platforms viable. It isn't just Linux and other free *nix flavors that benefit from them!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
From the "About Us" page at computereconomics.com:
Computer Economics is an independent research organization that specializes in providing economic and strategic analysis and data to IT and business executives.
The intended audience here isn't folks installing Debian or ricing out Gentoo, it's people who buy hardware with support contracts and often expect their software to have the same. It's interesting to see that these people are starting to realize the power that vendor lock-in has, and the value in avoiding it.
Stallman has been saying this for years -- with Free software, nobody has control over what you're doing with the software, and everyone has equal access to making improvements and modifications. Anyone can become an expert, and anyone can support it given enough time investment to become familiar with the product. You can shop around for support, and it'll only get better.
In fact, the "Valuing independence" reads quite a bit like an RMS essay, except that it insists on the label "open source" while talking about freedom. Stallman insists on the distinction because while the definitions of "open source software" and "Free software" include many of the same ideas, the term Free software is intended to emphasize the freedom that the user has from operate their machines without being artificially dependent upon others. "Open source" generally has a larger focus on the technical benefits of access to the source code as described in the writings of ESR and Bruce Perens -- "open source" refers to technically better software, while Free refers to software which does not enslave or limit the user.
A few choice quotes from the article:
With most types of software, administration and support costs overshadow initial software license cost and annual maintenance fees--the costs that are minimized by open source.... Therefore, low cost, although important, is not the key advantage of open source....
[S]oftware buyers must feel some level of dependence on proprietary software vendors, from which they desire freedom.
Older versions of open source products continue to be supported through [...] third party support providers as long as there is demand in the marketplace for such support. The key appeal of open source software is that it avoids vendor lock-in and gives buyers the freedom to choose what to do and when to do it.
Don't lock-in buyers and buyers won't be as likely to leave.... For software buyers, the best strategy is to consider mature and established open source products as well as proprietary software products that adhere to open standards. In this way, buyers can choose the best software product... without locking the organization in to a single vendor solution.
Emphasis mine. I think I like the approach of this article overall -- they recommend that IT decision makers consider long-term freedom in their purchasing decisions in a forum whose recommendationd they're more likely to respect.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
We build an image and load it at the factory - I can't even buy some Indian guys to install linux faster than that.
Windows install should be slipstreamed now anyways.
Learn to use ghost.
Its really all about 3rd party products. Contrary to what you might think - I dont care at all about the OS outside of security. I need to install a business app (say like ERP/Salesforce) and give a hoot about the plumbing underneath it. They all suck and all have design or security issues. MANY packages still dont use a webinterface (thick clients r suk) and those are what we need - all of the run on windows with no effort...try to get a 3rd part thick client to run on Linux...too much effort.
The browser is all that is truely flawed from MS. Load firefox kkthx.
twi
You're doing it wrong. That's a 10 minute job.
Other than that, I agree with you.
If they wanted to pay for every little function, they'd be running Windows. That's (partially) the point behind F/OSS.
'Therefore, software buyers do not see the low or zero initial cost of open source as its most important advantage.' The conclusions drawn from the results of the survey are inaccurate. The 44% of people who considered the impact of OSS on the reduced dependence on vendors, by no means indicates that the less cost is not an important factor. Those 44% should be asked whether they consider software cost and important factor or not for a more reasonable view. Lets be realistic here, software cost is a huge factor for any system. The attractiveness of OSS is largely due to its lesser cost. The article goes on to suggest that if the after sales services and support for products of software vendors are improved, the use of open source software would be challenged. The impact of the software costs would still be of great importance before any such conclusions can be made.
For me one of the biggest pains in the ass is the license mechanics. I'm cool with buying things, and my job allows me to even expense big expensive things, but most thigns have painful license installs. Some require a license server. Most are nice and can integrate with FLex, but some write their own (badly) driving up support time. One vendor was hitting their license server so bad it made it shut down, stopping all licenses. One server needs to be on a lower port, meaning we have to run some crap as root. One client needs to be installed on every machine, and a a key generated by running some software on the localhost, that talks to the vendor's machines and generates a machine specific key. If you're on a machine behind a restrictive firewall, you need to generate the hsot token, send a request on their webserver, and wait for an email with an attachment (and hope your MTA doesn't scrub the attachment or call the message spam). Luckily hardware dongles are a thing of the past, or at least are not in my world anymore.
I've always thought that having a commercial where someone is installing Word on a few machines, having to contact MS license servers, and have them go through all their frustration, compared to jsut installing OpenOffice, no license hassles. Maybe is a good Linspire ad.
I'll make a trade with the software industry:
I'll support whatever DRM/jail time software licensing laws they want, BUT they have to certify the merchantability, fitness and suitability of the products they are selling.
In other words, if they say it does X, it has to do X, or they have to make it do X. If not, I get my money back or can sue them when it fails to do X and breaks other stuff, too.
All kidding aside, My typical windows install takes me over a day. I do not have to sit there during all that but I do have to check in periodically. That includes installing a basic applications stack after I finish installing the operating system (which takes 2-3 hours). Perhaps you are using a restore CD rather than a real install? Or your hardware is totally current so you don't have to go download drivers for everything?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you don't recognize what this is saying, it's about freedom. From a business crowd saying translates into a perception of risk from lack of freedom in using Microsoft products. A 90% market-share and a few bad experiences is probably enough to trigger that.
And you completely ignore the whole point. good windows slave.
...
Pot, kettle, black. You are hardly one to be accusing someone else of being biased.
The whole conversations is on installations
No, it is on overhead. And setting up things is part of the Linux overhead, but it is a red herring for Windows. When you order your box from Dell it already has Windows, service packs, Office, etc. The small business owner unpacks the box, plugs it in, spends a fews minutes letting it download the post-SP2 patches and is ready to go. Hell the latter part might be automatic since Windows Update seems to be scheduled to run automatically every so often, I don't recall if that includes right after the first boot.
If you would like to advocate Linux dump this installation red herring, it only reduces your credibility. The only meaningful cost saving for a small business is the day-to-day improved efficience, OS license fees and setup times are largely irrelevant.
I can't install XP on my P4 Dell It won't work
As if a P4 shipped by Dell in the last few years didn't ship with WinXP on it. An aberration, possibly user error like not using the OS CD you got from Dell on a laptop. Also, this is not a road you want to go down. Linux issues are far more common, for example I had various flat panels being supported out-of-the-box far earlier on Windows than on Linux. When a "user" has to search the web to get the necessary info to configure X properly you really don't want to bring up the topic.
in a while, but isn't there a point where the incremental cost of additional licensed goes to zero, typically? That is, once you get to some large number, like hundreds or thousands of licenses, isn't it typical that the vendor sells a "site license" for a fixed cost and you can then install as many copies as you need anywhere in your organization?
If you don't mind Free-as-in-Beer, try izArc. It's free, it has a comparable interface to WinZip/Rar/Ace, and it supports almost every format under the sun including 7zip, bzip2, and iso.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I provide part time support to a non-profit organization. The cost of the time is truly free. Why? Because I *give* it to them.
So, their software is free - and their support costs are zero.
Oh wait! All their hardware was donated too.
I suppose you'll bellyache about the electricity used by the computer.
Oh wait! That's covered by donations.
Any one who claims that a business can't have a TCO of zero is a moron.
He does this regularly. His poll question this week is "Is your organization outsourcing any IT functions to offshore providers?" You can answer it here.
This is probably less meaningful than Slashdot polls. No CowboyNeil option, either.
It didn't come with a straw. I didn't want to have to keep lifting it too my face to drink it. That Open Beer Foundation is just too much work.
Considering that half of the discussion has turned to a bundled/not bundled war, I thought I comment on the article itself.
I work at a software company and vendor-dependencies are a major problem, which is why we are running more an more OS-software now. Sticking with open standards is really important too. For instace at the moment we are very dependent on Lotus Notes, which is not good. Luckily, Notes supports standards as IMAP, LDAP, SMTP and has a java-interface, which means that we can start moving our services slowly to those standards while still running Lotus and soon we will not be dependend on Lotus but only on open standards. This gives a great advantage in the future, since you can choose and pick whatever server that supports those standards. Actually we get benefits right away - our office in Finland would rather use OpenLDAP and cyrus instead of Lotus and if we design our services based on LDAP and IMAP we can run them both here and in Finland without changing anything.
Buying proprietary software is not really a problem. The problem is when that software doesn't conform to open standards and you get locked in. Switching later will mean spending toooons of money. Unfortunately, many get seduced by bells and whistles of proprietary formats and later find themselves paying up a considerable amount to the vendor, without any possibility to switch.
Every google data center has several entry level techs who spend all their time troubleshooting and fixing broken machines. And there is no work involved in finding the broken machine, the racks are organized, its very simple.
That's a great example of Cringly talking out of his ass though.
The proper comparison to a linux distro would be a boxed set you could buy from MS, perhaps spread over a couple of DVD's, that would install Windows, Internet Exploder, MS Orifice, MS Outhouse, and Visual Studio .NET. And MS doesn't offer that.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Speaking of Civ2 and FreeCiv, try C-Evo. It is a very refined and interesting alternative to the two. The gameplay is superior in several ways, though you have to get used to a few of the changes such as custom unit design.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I find it funny yet a little disturbing that there is some amount of surprise in these findings. I suppose a large percentage of OSS advocates that don't realize that software being Free doesn't necessarily mean it is free. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Say my company is considering some sort of solution to let all of the employees in various offices instant message each other. There's two solutions available which will meet the company's needs. There's Closed Source Messenger (CSM) and Open Source Messenger (OSM). CSM is priced based on the number of users and as such will cost my company a few thousand dollars up front. OSM is a project attracting some attention of Codeforge.net but is licensed under the GPL so we can pick it up for the cost of a download.
The benefit of CSM is that it runs on our current workgroup server and is managed through the same interface as all of the other services. Our small IT staff can easily deploy it and manage the whole setup without too much extra effort. They also get a phone number to add to the tech support reference sheet if they do run into trouble. CSM however costs a bit up front and is not quite as configurable as we might really like.
OSM is nice because there's no licensing issues no matter how many users we add to the system and have a lot of flexibility in its configuration. We can also get it up and running on whatever server system we might have available which gives us some choices down the road. On the downside the configuration is a handful of text files with confusing commennts and the documentation is a semi-useful Wiki.
Which system is cheaper? Well the OSM doesn't really have an obvious price tag so most will claim it is cheaper by default. However one of its drawbacks is the lack of consistant help and a configuration that is less than simple. This leads to the possibility that it might be misconfigured or simply that our IT folks have to waste a bunch of time (money) figuring out how to properly set up and manage the whole thing. The CSM costs us for every user we have using the system which puts a hamper on deploying it throughout other offices. We also have less direct contact with the developer if we're not a huge customer so if there's an obscure feature we'd like to see its less likely to ever be added.
In this hypothetical situation there's not necessarily a financial advantage going open source. We're looking for the best tool for the job, not to follow some particular ideology. One thing we gain from the open source solution is flexibility and mobility. If the CSM only runs on Windows we're going to be stuck with Windows for a very long time. If the OSM works on Windows, Linux, and OSX we have a lot of options down the road. It is also more likely for the open source solution to attempt to act in a more open fashion. Instead of using some proprietary communication system it might simply be an extension of Jabber or IRC or some such. In such a case we might have more choices in our end-user client so employees wouldn't be forced to use a particular platform on their desks.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That is a remarkably insightful observation. People like to be in control, but even more than that, they hate to rely on someone out of their control, especially for something critical. If OSS can help push vendors ( and customers ) towards standards-based, interoperable, cross-platform solutions, we'll all benefit.
It'd be nice to see a larger survey.
I just reinstalled XP on my girlfriend's machine, and MS Office took less than 10 minutes to install.
What DID take forever was Windows overall:
1)Say, 1/2 hour to install Windows.
2)Another 5-10 minutes to install Zone Alarm and enable Windows firewall.
3)About an hour to d/l and install all updates, including Service Pack 2.
The *OS* took more like 2 hours for me, while MS Office was done in a jiffy.
I'm the OSS promoter at work, and it has always been my nr.1 argument. OSS gives power to the customer, instead of to the (software) companies.
At this time we are using RedHat, but they better keep pleasing us, or we'll take our money somewhere else while staying on the _same_ platform.
Ofcourse, cost is important as well, and i never leave it out of the picture because that is a factor some types are most interested in in seeing.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I think "less dependence on vendors" translates into "usability." I know the reason I started using Apache was because it just works with reasonable defaults. But the reason I still use it is because it is easier to customise.
Why use Open Source? What's the big win? Sounds like the survey respondents think the answer is "it's free-as-in-freedom", not "it's free-as-in-beer".
Another reason is the difficulty of remote support for GUI environments. It is far easier to just post a configuration file than explaining the clickety steps in a GUI.
I nevertheless agree with you on the quality of Mac support on the net, which may be explained by the sheer ignorance of the Unix environment displayed by many Mac users. Maybe it's that GUI culture thing, I don't know.
I feel so sig.
"For software buyers, the best strategy is to consider mature and established open source products as well as proprietary software products that adhere to open standards. In this way, buyers can choose the best software product for the job, knowing that the value of their investment will be preserved without locking the organization in to a single vendor solution."
Amen - I have been saying this for years since I have been out of college - I was taught in college to adhere to open standards so all systems can communicate. This is the best part of linux it forces open standards.
I see this broken everyday by so called web developers.
Huh?! Sorry, but as a regular user of both, I can't even relate to that statement. OpenOffice Writer has a list of usability flaws a mile long, and is at least five years behind Word on this count (and I don't mean it hasn't grown the annoying paperclip yet). Its formatting tools are error-prone, its mail merge inflexible and buggy, its stylesheet support flaky, its import/export of Word DOC files unreliable, and those are just the things that I hit today. I've found it considerably more likely to crash and/or lose data than recent versions of MS Word as well.
Don't get me wrong. I like OpenOffice, including Writer. It's a good effort with a lot of potential, and I'm grateful to those who give it away so I can have a reasonable WP on my home PC legally and free. The new version, when it's ready, looks to be another big step forward. But really, it's still several years behind Word for anything beyond typing a simple letter.
Except for the numerous bugs in the graphing tools, and "help" that took me 30 minutes just to work out how to perform simple look-up operations I identified in 30 seconds using Excel, for example?
Again, for basic photo retouching and such, the GIMP seems to be reasonably usable (though I've always found the Windows version to have hideous stability problems, which has kept me away for serious projects even though they seem to have fixed that God-awful interface in the more recent incarnations). However, for the sort of serious work a professional graphic designer/electronic artist will be doing, well... If you can find me anyone in that business who uses the GIMP in preference, I'll be impressed. That pretty much says it all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
One of the key points he makes in I believe it was the Magic Cauldron (but it may have been the Cathedral and the Bazaar) is that software is fundamentally a service and not a product. If buy software as a product, it is in the interest of the person who makes the product to make a crappy product so you will need to buy the upgrades/extensions. If you buy software as a service, whenever you are unhappy with the service, you can move to a new service provider. Open source software fits the service model. Propriatary software fits the product model.
They obviously didn't get the facts. Hmm, let's direct Microsoft over to them. Then they can have the fair and balanced view!
Last I heard, Oracle was $25K per cpu for internet, you can only handle so many users per cpu.
Plato seems wrong to me today
Yeah, if anybody wants to read more about Friendster and what they've done with MySQL, etc., InfoWorld recently ran a feature package about the subject. Check it out if you have the time.
Breakfast served all day!
In July of 2003 I found out about an engine that did NOT USE GASOLINE. It was first made to run in a Ford Pinto around 1980. The inventor is a world-renowned scientist Dr. Harold Boese. You can find out about him in any encyclopedia. Yes, he was JUST THAT SMART. Scientist Number 2 -who built a similar engine to Boese'- was an aerospace/aeronautical engineer and later professor at the University of Washington: Dr. Abraham Hertzberg helped construct the Space Shuttle program. To my knowledge, both of these geniuses presented their discoveries freely long before anyone came up with such a new phrase as "Open Source". The reason we aren't using their compressed air engines right now in America, and the reason our illness rates from the combustion engine continue, and global warming, and destruction of species who can't breathe and procreate in this poison soup, is because they made a mistake. Compressed air ALONE cannot generate enough power by itself to challenge and dethrone gasoline or diesel. Alone it can't even compete with battery power! These world respected scientists made a MISTAKE. Compressed air is slow. Oh, it has gobs of power but the power releases to slowly, resulting in a MASSIVE POWER LOSS. The compressed air, therefor, needed a CATALYST... something that would quicker the releasing power. Dr. Hertzberg passed away several months before I found his engine online. So I don't have his voice to back me up on the solution I discovered, that injecting a shot of steam prior to a shot of cold compressed air or nitrogen is the catalyst that was needed. THE CHEAP, EASILY-PRODUCED CATALYST: water; makes the heretofire castrated engine into a powerhouse, a dynamo, that can develop clean power for our vehicles... and LOTS OF IT. I've written the explanations online and I made some rudimentary drawings that can't compete with Ford's VIDEOS, but I've noticed recently that Ford seems to be going bankrupt toward their employee's pension funds. The automakers aren't blind to my web links page: http://www.newpath4.com/NNINDEX/nnindex.htm . In fact, if I didn't know better, I would almost suspect their impending shutdown is being purposely staged to allow them to legally get out of all their old contracts so they can build this "new" engine... a new engine that has been OPEN SOURCE FOR 25 YEARS. Some people want to say this engine will require lots of factories to separate nitrogen from outt of our atmosphere, creating a new source of air pollution. That is not true. Later in 2003 I figured out to where new cars could swap out their shock absorbers & springs for compressors that re-compress the air "on-the-fly". That's right, JUST PLAIN OLD AIR, not nitrogen. It does NOT HAVE TO BE SEPARATED, AND IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE SERVED UP VIA A HOSE AT A SERVICE STATION. Sorry for all the Caps but some people seem to be hard of hearing on this matter. This new engine with the system I have shown is the replacement we need to stop using gasoline, batteries, radiators (it cools itself, temperature-balanced"), diesel fuel. The car doesn't need a heavy cooling system, heavy batteries, and the darn thing should just about run circles around present engines. WHY?! Well, think about it. The reason present combustion engines go bad is from the damn excessive HEAT, which this engine does not have. As I have stated on my website and in many posts like this one, since I was the one to figure out this system, I have open sourced it. I have given it to anyone or any company who wishes to build and market. In doing that I may have killed the prospects of the BEST ENGINE MANKIND HAS EVER HAD, an engine that quite literally runs on water & air... the 2 most abundant fluids this planet has. This engine doesn't burn it, so we essentially NEVER RUN OUT OF FUEL. And very importantly, we do start running out of airborne carcinogenic by-products from crude oil fossil engines. When this engine finally gets built, our healthcare costs will drop like a rock. Our downtimes at work from illness dro
In the case of Google, they're doing something very big. Bigger than anyone else. Going with Microsoft, is flat out a poor choice because they don't really know how to do it.
And going with Microsoft would have been even a poorer choice because if Microsoft didn't know how to do it now, they sure would have after helping Google build it!
Google gained about a two to three year tech lead on Microsoft simply by not using them in any capacity for the core business.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The other hidden cost is simply the cost of evaluating software - to really evaluate commercial software you have to do the Evaluation Dance and go around and around about what exactly you plan to look at during the evaluation, how many people will work on it, so on and so forth. I can no longer keep track of how many times I've went into evaluating sets of vendors for something and then we never even go to a trial phase with anyone because it's too much work.
With an OSS package, a technical guy or two can just pick it up and try it out at thier own pace. Far less effort, far less people signing things, far fewer meetings. The cost to actually buy software before you ever write the check is just too high now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.