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Key Advantage of Open Source is Not Cost Savings

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

cmcsonar writes "Computer Economics recently conducted a survey of visitors to its website regarding the perceived advantages in the use of open source software. Although not a scientific sample, the results are nevertheless startling."

15 of 580 comments (clear)

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

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

    1. Re:How much would google have spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
      I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.

      Indeed, Microsoft may be find for small systems and hobby use, but when you scale up proprietary software becomes a worse and worse choice. I had an interesting experience in a startup company when Yahoo was considering to buy our company. They sent a bunch of people over to review our technology; and when we mentioned our databases ran Oracle, one of the guys looked to our CFO and told him "you shouldn't have let them do that". "Why not", our CFO asked - since he was one of the guys orginally insisting that to be taken seriously we'd neet to have top-tier components everywhere. The Yahoo guy's response: "Well, Oracle may scale well technologically, but it doesn't scale financially".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    3. Re:How much would google have spent by philovivero · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I can back up this story with a similarish one, but I don't need to post AC, because we're proud of what we've done.

      I work at Friendster, and we have... ah... a really big database cluster. It runs MySQL. Not that Oracle didn't try. They sent out sales people to convince us to convert over. After we looked at the dollar signs, we laughed them out of the office.

      I was interviewing a candidate for one of our sysadmin positions. He said something along the lines of: "Well, now you're running MySQL. Once you start making money, do you think you'll start using Oracle or something else that scales better?"

      I laughed and said exactly what parent AC said: "Oracle scales in theory. But in practice, 99% of businesses can't afford to scale with Oracle. I can build another couple terabytes of DB storage in a redundant replicated cluster tomorrow for $10k with MySQL. With Oracle it'd be 10x that much, if I were so lucky." That's not to mention the overhead of calling their sales guys, licensing hassle, and other crap. With MySQL, you install and go.

      There are other huge advantages MySQL has over Oracle and their ilk. Take this for example... Right now MySQL AB tech support is stellar. Front line support knows when to escalate to the proper engineer (InnoDB problems? Two hours later, Heikki Tuuri is emailing you!). I remember talking to a PHB a year or two ago, and he said: "Well, MySQL support may be good now, but that'll change. It'll get bad."

      My response? So what? Then I'll find a MySQL support shop that has good support and use them. They can support MySQL just as well as MySQL AB can.

      Try that with Oracle. "No, Oracle, I hate your tech support. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to have Sybase support our Oracle installation." Oracle will laugh at you, then double your support costs for your insolence.

      --
      fifth sigma, inc.
  2. Not freedom? by BrainInAJar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know about others, but my main reason for using open source is that I'm free to do as I wish with it.

    Copy it, distribute it, change it

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

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

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

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

    When selling Open Source, I like to tout the advantage of an exit strategy. Unlike vendor tie-in, they can take their business and data elsewhere if they aren't happy or if I decide I'm too lazy to keep up with their demands.

    Customers hate making technology decisions with little to no technology background. Make them feel safe by telling them they can make a bad decision and not get screwed.

  4. Main saving is Ease by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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

    Mod article +5 Insightful.

    One of the biggest drains on any IT department has to be keeping track of licenses - how many people are using what (the whole "license pool" idea is a waste of otherwise useful time and resources), having to ask Bill every time you need to add a new server to a cluster, having a piece of software in a state of suspended animation because the vendor hasn't returned any of your calls... The financial cost does enter into this, but the real issue is just that you can't do what you want when you want to.

  6. Evident to anyone in large corporation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Almost tricked me... by Infinityis · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

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

    That's totally skewed out of perspective. 22% of visitors to the site (not necessarily IT decision makers) believe that FOSS has a lower cost, and this is the most important advantage.

    The 44% of visitors who viewed lower dependence on vendors as the most important may also believe that FOSS is free, or they may. We don't know. We just know that for them, reduced dependence on vendors is more important than lower cost. The same can go for any other choice.

    In fact, 100% of visitors may believe that FOSS costs less. But only 22% of them see it as their first priority. I don't see how they can assume that visitors who don't see cost as the key advantage must believe that FOSS isn't really free, unless they're rabid Adam Smith fans.

  9. Not a scientific survey? by The+Jabberwock · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. The real advantage by ErichTheWebGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 .conf files, man pages, and other documentation, while Microsoft "support" has a script that they are seemingly not allowed to deviate from.

    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
  11. Re:But... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > If you're talking about, say, a small business
    > that needs basic desktop machines, the overhead
    > in say, going with an OS OS will far exceed any
    > price savings.

    And what sort of "overhead" might that be? A modern Linux distro practically installs and configures itself, comes with boatloads of software, and does not require an advanced degree to sit down and start using for everyday (non-development) purposes.

    My last Linux installation took about 1/3 the time of my last Windows installation (on the exact same, very recent hardware) and the Linux installation included setting up hardware, networking, and installing many common personal/small biz apps such as office suite, browser, email, IM, etc. The Windows install did not include any of these "extras", all of which must be done *in addition to* the OS install for a Windows box.

    The last time I installed Windows, it took me roughly a day and a half to have everything ready to roll so I could get some work done. The Linux installation took maybe a couple of hours to achieve the same goal. In spite of the fact that I have about 8-10 times more experience using Windows than I do using Linux.

    Sure some of the apps are a little different, but most of them have a little "Help" clicky-widget in the program menu just like any Windows app does.

    My experience is that the myth that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux is just that, a myth. *Particularly* in the SOHO space.

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.