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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."
I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's totally skewed out of perspective. 22% of visitors to the site (not necessarily IT decision makers) believe that FOSS has a lower cost, and this is the most important advantage.
The 44% of visitors who viewed lower dependence on vendors as the most important may also believe that FOSS is free, or they may. We don't know. We just know that for them, reduced dependence on vendors is more important than lower cost. The same can go for any other choice.
In fact, 100% of visitors may believe that FOSS costs less. But only 22% of them see it as their first priority. I don't see how they can assume that visitors who don't see cost as the key advantage must believe that FOSS isn't really free, unless they're rabid Adam Smith fans.
In a similar vein, the old saying "time = money" applies here in an interesting way. The conversion of time->money and vice versa is not a fixed calculation. OSS offers an attractive conduit for the time side of the equation.
For example, a programmer's time is only worth so much money. Let's say that time goes into a mediocre piece of proprietary software. The world turns and either the code is maintained to its late death or it is forgotten. Either way, the value of that programmer's time, expressed in the code, is very much limited by their ability, the platform, etc. This applies not only to the actual code expressions, but the design, algorithms, and general ideas in the that project. The programmer's time is locked into the IP owner's evaluation of the project's value. Essentially, this one buyer assumes the value of the programmer's time and fixes it.
Take the same scenario, but have the programmer work on an OSS project. With the OSS codebase, the programmer's time is now placed into a repository that can - *potentially* - be shared. The code can be incrementally modified by those who have need/desire to extend or fix it. The maintenance cost can (*potentially*) be lower, as the work can be distributed. The design and algorithms can be reused and spread. Ideas are portable, and OSS ports ideas across intellectual property formats. Now the programmer's time is not fixed by the intial buyer. It is left to the market - everywhere that code is accessed.
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. With OSS, the possibility exists for their work to generate money beyond these limits. Firms, individual users, and other programmers can potentially find value in that programmer's work. The value of a programmer's time can be valued according to the full merit of the work (not just licensing binaries, for example) at a more realistic market price (i.e. a price met with better knowledge of the product and lower transaction costs).
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
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.
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
"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.
Actually you are free to use OpenOffice.Org under Windows too. And Firefox and Opera. And Thunderbird, and Pine. Application choice has nothing to do with the OS.
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
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."