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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."
Yes, but saving money is one HUGE advantage...
I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.
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
If you could see what my customers have been through with vertically targeted vendors, this would be obvious.
I have one customer who paid $30k for a point of sale system (5 terminals), was paying probably $5000/year in reseller support costs, etc. And it isn't that great of a system! Furthermore the vendor will only support the reseller who originally sold the unit, so he is married to them for support.
Not so with FOSS.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not quite. I don't want to do say too much ahead of release, but I am working on a rich POS environment for SQL-Ledger. One customer of mine has already largely sponsored $1k worth of development so far, and I have several other leads.
I will be releasing a rich POS package for SQL-Ledger in the near future. We are just working out a few bugs at the moment.
In general, you are right that most of the OS POS applications are inadequate, but we chose SQL-Ledger because the general application framework was good and solid,and its feature set was good on the accounting end. This meant a fair bit of work (how do you control your serial port from a web application?) but these turned out to be trivial to solve (A: use a TCP socket and create a simple network client).
In fact, SQL-Ledger's POS application is completely immature, but the rest of the program is solid enough and it is basiclly bootstrapped onto a much more robust invoicing application, so making the necessary modifications turned out to be trivial.
Now I have leads to add modules for vertical businesses such as bookstores, restaurants, and movie rental shops. Again, these should not be too difficult.
The trick is not to make one client pay for too much of the application. Spread the development around. Let others pay for part of it. This is how we will eventually add all the necessary features.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
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
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.
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.
1. Integrates with back office financials, such as Quickbooks?
:-)
Why would it need to? SQL-Ledger is more than capable of doing the accounting. Take a look at it: here
2. Handles integrated credit card processing... through with merchant services?
Forthcoming. Have a customer who just agreed to pay me to develop this feature.
3. Handles all standard POS hardware, such as card swipes, receipt printers, pin pads, cash drawers, pole displays, and touchscreens?
Touchscreen (keyboardless) support forthcoming (assuming my current lead pans out for sponsorship of this feature). Card readers, barcode readers, pole displays, receipt printers, cash drawers, etc. are currently supported.
Honestly, most of this is *really easy.* Barcode readers are currently only supported as decoded signals via keyboard wedge interfaces. Same with mag card readers. We support the Logic Controls PD3000 pole display, but others could be added with minimal work.
Printer redirection is also supported btw. So if you want all your restaurant orders to print to a printer in the kitchen, this is relatively easy to impliment.
For example, one of my customers is using a computer with insufficient RAM as a terminal to the main server. The printer and pole display redirection allows them to redirect it to the terminal even though the application is run via firefox on the main server!
4. Can be easily taught in less than 5 minutes?
Yep
Well, the online cash till countout report might take another 5 minutes... But that is currently being worked on.
We are currently working on resolving the last three critical bugs before release.
Honestly, the currently supported features so far cost approx $2000 in development time. This is nowhere even near the high 5 digits you speak of because SQL-Ledger, while its architecture (CGI) may seem at odds with the environment is really solid, and can be easily extended to provide for all this.
Forthcoming features (ones that people have agreed to pay for at the moment) include:
1) Portable data terminal support for receiving and inventory adjustment
2) Cashier-based roaming till.
3) Integrated credit card processing
4) Movie rental application
5) Coffee card discount app (as in every 10th espresso is free of charge)
6) Credit card processing with a DBI/DBD-like model (allowing for easy expansion for additional gateways).
Likely features within the next year:
1) Keyboardless operation
2) Restaurant module
3) Bookstore module (online ordering, books in print, etc)
4) Online shopping card module.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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!!!
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
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
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
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
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.
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!"
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?
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."
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.