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Key Advantage of Open Source is Not Cost Savings

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-do-you-think dept.

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."

7 of 580 comments (clear)

  1. How much would google have spent by team99parody · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If each of the 100,000+ machines in their cluster were running SQLServer Enterprise Edition (needed for clustering) and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise edition?

    I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.

    1. Re:How much would google have spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      The truth is that after the facility, maintainence, and staff for a massive investment in technology like that, the cost of the actual software it just one small part of the overall package.

      Not true. As you scale a system like Google, administrative costs are one of the fastest things to scale.

      Cringly may have described this scaling of administrative costs best when he wrote:

      As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.

      We have reached the point where we are totally dependent on computers, yet the marginal cost of a computer -- at least for Google -- is nothing.

      "Yes, because we all know that anyone who buys in bulk pays retail."

      With a $25000/CPU list price on SQLServer Enterprise, even if they gave a 90% volume discount it'd still exceed the hardware costs. I guess >90% discounts are possible from Microsoft for some of the government contracts they're afraid to lose, but I'd guess they're pretty rare in the US at least.

  2. Not freedom? by BrainInAJar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Not freedom? by KiloByte · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If there is a small but annoying bug in a piece of proprietary software, there is absolutely nothing you can do. Send them a bug report? As if anyone will look at it... With OSS, you can just fix it yourself, and in 99.9% cases someone else would already be annoyed by the bug in question enough to deal with it.

      Have you ever programmed in Delphi? How many of the bugs you encounter are just trivial, and you would easily fix them on the spot? Delphi is just ridden by those.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  3. Exit Strategy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Mod article up by Shishberg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:But... by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.