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."
Yes, but saving money is one HUGE advantage...
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
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
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.
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.
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 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
I don't know about you, but I voted CowboyNeal!
Oh, wait...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"You know, screw it, time for a change of pace -- lets switch vendors on our database/customer tracking/data mining/image recognition/OCR/whatever solution. I want to spend a couple hundred thousand in transition costs and cause disruptions in our main business to no purpose whatsoever"
Let me tell you what it's like in the real world, using two real world situations I've had to cope with a number of times in my career:
Here's the deal. You've got a ticketing/dispatch system that isn't cutting the mustard, and what's worse, the fine print of the license says that to be in compliance, you need to cut even more functionality, or pay an extra three mill a year. Not even the database schema is available for examination, so you can't jump ship to another vendor, or more reasonably in this day and age, hire a couple of Java geeks and roll your own web app.
Here's the deal II. You've got a mission critical messaging application that can't keep up with demand, pounding the little windows box it's on so hard it keeps falling over. You'd like to put it on one of the big mama-jama Sun Enterprise clusters you've got sitting around with spare capacity. Too bad, the tiny company who licensed it to you had to auction off the sofas in the break room on ebay to meet payroll, and can't really afford to develop a Sun version. Or the megaconglomerate you licensed it from couldn't be bothered to recompile and test on Sun for a single customer.
If it's open source, it's likely someone's already compiled, tested and put it out as a tarball for Solaris10. It's even more likely it's written in a portable language like Java, PHP or Python, using your choice of OSS RDBMS and web server software, making the platform it's deployed upon irrelevant.
Massive changes to infrastructure happen, happen often, and happen for sound business reasons. Closed source applications get in the way of an agile and profit-making IT environment.
SoupIsGood Food
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
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
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.
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."
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
Yes, there are better conversion utilities for BB and WebCT. We don't care- we didn't move from either and have no plans to go there. Sakai migration might be a problem if we do move there, but I'm sure I can whip something up. Retraining will suck though.
I'm a sunk cost-it was part of my unofficial job description to get *something* up and running. I like to program, so I was able to do it. I'm more expensive than a Blackboard support tech anyway for a variety of reasons.
Dokeos has fewer user configuration options. On the other hand, I've integrated it with our uPortal, SCT Powercampus student information system, library e-reserve system and others. Most of these would have been high-cost options for Blackboard, some wouldn't have even been possible. (I get rid of BB and WebCT salespeople by asking about Powercampus integration details. They go away and never come back.)
Security in BB is very questionable, and they sue people who report security flaws to prevent them talking about them. The Dokeos folks are quite open when they find problems.
The basic reasons we went with Dokeos? We needed something, we had a budget crunch and BB and WebCT had just announced huge price increases. Faculty were ambivalent at best and hostile at worst to a CMS. Most of the high end features of BB and WebCT were just not needed, but integration into an unusual campus configuration was.
Dokeos did enough and did it for close to $0 up front cost. I sold this as a 3-year project. We just finished year two. I got the poll results from the faculty yesterday- 82% of faculty rate the system as excellent or good, just 4% as poor.
For us, this was an optimal solution-it's an Open Source success story. If I'd been at Penn State, I would have been (rightfully) fired, but I'm not and my job is quite secure.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
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.