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The Death of Licensed Enterprise Software?
tfsm writes "Andy Singleton wrote a short, interesting article about the looming death of traditionally licensed, proprietary, enterprise software over at The IT Manager's Journal. In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel. There are several causes, but one, he suggests, is erosion from Open Source offerings."
This is probably very true. I mean, recently I was looking into partition/harddrive/virtual drive encryption programs. There are a number of identical looking commercial apps available. However, TrueCrypt(sourceforge) offers the same or better features really. Honestly, if you have to choose between the free solution, which is a mature stable choice, and one that will cost your company hundreds of dollars per license.... well, it's not much of a choice, is it?
Great articles. No sales numbers. No real explination given. Just lots of guesses and assumptions my some guy. I'm impressed. About all I've learned is that Siebel's licensing revenue is down. That, and it's written by a guy whose job is to sell software to big companies. Wow.
I don't respond to AC's.
.. if it isn't "Roll Your Own"?
..
A company which purchases the infrastructure it requires to operate and expand, isn't an enterprise. It's, at best, half of the solution.
If you have a business scenario which is driven by software processes, confronting the software creation, and being fully responsible for the continued evolution of that software, is the only way to guarantee continued survival as an enterprising solution to your customers. Buy something from someone else, and you put the majority of the True Value of your company in someone elses' hands..
Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success.
If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
is this like someone giving away free tv's to put other tv makers out of buisness, or not?
i hope people start giving away free playstations when you buy a new hdtv.
Rather than a product. The problem with software (any information) as a product is that there is no scarcity, it's easy to copy and make more.
Markets require a supply and a demand, to make any information a product rather than a service you have to find a way to limit supply of something which isn't naturally scarce, licenses, keys, dongles etc. Without these, limitations the supply increases to infinity and the price therefore tends towards zero.
You may not like him, but Richard Stallman is a bloody clever bloke. The GPL and similar basically eliminate the artificial scarcity limitations imposed by most commercial software vendors.
Deleted
Open source is taking a dent, but the biggest threat to enterprise level and vertical markets is the products themselves.
Typically they are low quality with bad quirks. So the company finally get's sick of it and has the replacement software written in house to replace them instead.
Now the company OWNS the app they rely on and pay's less in "annual licensing fees" for the maintaince of the software and codebase by having on-staff programmers that are NOT dedicated programmer positions.
I.E. the IT/Programmer is very common today. you change printer toner, install a new PC and add a feature to that Billing application, or squash a bug in the shipping application.
Corperations are now demanding IT and IS people that are capable of all aspects and are expected to perform all aspects. That "programmer" is expected to be at the office at 3AM to deal with a crashed database server.
It's silly to pay $60-100K for a programmer that you have to try to keep busy when you can hire someone that has good programming skills, good IT skills and actually understands Electronics at the board level for the $50-$90K. and usually get an employee that will happily work his butt off because of the diversity of the job.
This is my observation from work here. All new hires in the IT department MUST have some programming skills in C, Java, python and PHP. We intentionally do not hire anyone that has been a "programmer" or "developer" except those that have experience in OSS as a developer. But they also must show a proficiency at IT skills and prefer that they have some EE background.
this has lead to over 15 enterprise apps being replaced with in-house versions that work better and are far FAR cheaper in the long run even when ignoring the fact that it is an asset now because the company owns it instead of a liability when you "lease" or "rent"(buy) software.
The great part is that versioning systems like Subversion integrate so well with linux,OSX and windows that it takes less than 2 hours to teach a new recruit how to use our system and get them up to speed in checking in and out code.
Enterprise apps are starting to become in-house customized projects, and THAT is the biggest threat to that "business model"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This trend is definitely true in smaller companies. Why spend thousands of dollars on proprietary software when you can get an open source project for free that you can modify to your heart's content? Granted, you're going to spend time and money to make those modifications, but it can be worth it when you get exactly what you want/need.
Compared to 5 to 10 years ago, the number of open source software apps available now is mind-blowing. So much so that whenever we are researching and deploying a new application, we immediately go looking for the open source one. The proprietary version is a last resort.
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
TFA is thin on alternatives to selling licenses, but at my company, we've gone to more of a "rental" type model of licensing, a monthly payment which bundles in support and upgrades. This is a win-win for everybody, as the customers are able to pay for it out of their discretionary budget, where a big-ticket license requires approval from the board, god and everybody.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
My skepticism grows with each time I see this topic posted somewhere. The deathknell of the proprietary has been hailed as a Roman general marching onward to victory, but let us remember this: despite the rosy forecast, proprietary enterprise software packages remain.
While OSS has inherent advantages, the non-savvy end-users of business systems prefer lack of change to robustness of operation. If they didn't, OSS would be more prominent on the enterprise level. We tried to implement various builds of *nix and X window system on workstations at my place of work, and there was REVOLT IN THE AISLES.
The business world is not yet ready for the intellectual (not to mention monetary) cost of full transition to OSS. As much as I love it, the end-user isn't ready. It should remain the goal of all OSS developers to give these people more and more reason to change their minds.
Let us keep in mind: there are other reasons for the drop in revenues for these proprietary software vendors as well.
The Crimson Dragon
Why spend thousands of dollars on proprietary software when you can get an open source project for free that you can modify to your heart's content?
This small company has been waiting for a working open source accounting package for a loooong time. I mean, there's not even a Quickbooks alternative, and you can buy that in Wal-Mart. Open source for businesses still has a long way to go.
I don't respond to AC's.
It just costs too much. At some level, people are comfortable running a database software just because it is Oracle or DB2. This is not terribly different than the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mantra back in the day. However, if you get just one enterprising geek in your outfit this *can* start to fall apart. Surely, there are applications where the support that a company like Oracle can provide can be the difference between life and death but, just as often, one of the open source DB's can fill the role.
At my old company, we were using Siebel on Oracle that ran on a big fat Sun system. We were still in "startup" mode and spent over $300k on that bullshit. The CEO had a grand "vision" for taking the company to a new level and we had to build our IT infrastructure aggressively to support it. Well, a year later we had a E350 with 4 procs that spent most of its time idle and 20 people working in the call center. I had argued that what we needed to "plan" aggressively instead of "spending" aggresively and had been laughed outta the room for being "short-sighted".
A year later it was satisfying to go to their bankruptcy auction....
Now they have millions of dollars freed up to give CEO bonuses, right where it should be ! Remember this the next time you see your boss driving his new Ferrari, "Should I really be encouraging the use of open source software, is that such a wise decision?" There are many children suffering right now that depend on the survival propreitory software.
The commoditisation of software that open source represents is a rising tide. There are two ways to handle a rising tide: float or sink.
Siebel, like many big software firms, are unable to float. They don't use open source for their processes, so don't benefit from it. They are stuck in a niche, so are basically anchored to the sea floor while the water rises around them. Their customers have the choice of remaining anchored with them, and drowing as well, or cutting free and floating.
It's a bit sad if you're in the position of the drowing man. But it's been the same in Big Auto, Big Steel, Big Textile, Big Science, Big Pharma, Big Business... competition is a tough game.
The smart money is on those firms that learn to float. IBM, CA, Novell, Apple. Maybe Sun and SAP. Apparently not Siebel, definitely not Microsoft.
My blog
These are some of the most annoying things ever invented, having to mass deploy software and then worry about ... we have 26 students and 25 lics.. Cuz it only comes in 5,10,25.... OMG time to run to the store and buy another one..
Really, software should be lic'ed to an individual company based on the total number of deployments that they have used the past year. That way its fair to the developer, and fair to the end user. Flexable lics would be a very nice thing indeed, getting rid of them all together would be a boon of even bigger proportions!
If you're talking about boxed software then support is limited to a "knowledge base" database and rudimentary and usually dire scripted phone support.
Out of the box commercial software pretty much like this. However, if you're talking enterprise solutions from Oracle, SAP, IBM, EMC, NetAPP, and even Sun (unfortunately, whose support quality has declined recently IMO) then it's a different game. Pay for a contract and you will get highly knowlegable engineers to solve whatever problem that crops up within the confines of the contract. I've been very impressed by IBM in the past. DEC used to have pheonominal support. So, while your copy of TurboTax may not get you the support you feel you deserve, it's not the same with big iron hardware and enterprise software. At least, not in my experience. --M
Both Open Source and inexpensive web services will erode this market.
On the Open Source side: systems like SugarCRM are free to implement and very high quality. On the inexpensive web services side: systems like Basecamp provide a great service at a price point that looks almost free.
Anyway, SugarCRM and 37signals (Basecamp) are two companies that I am watching as examples of a new business model that works.
Isn't going to happen, at least not in the next 20-30 years. Here's the deal: OSS has been around quite a while now, and all it's provided competitive options for are either tools that pretty much everyone uses, like text editors, or stuff that's of interest to programmers, like computer operating systems and associated tools.
There are lots of areas that are more specialized where it's just hard to imagine that there will be sufficient motivation to produce and maintain OSS. I work for a software company that produces a complete package for a manufacturing sector. I guarantee you that we aren't going to see competition from OSS in my lifetime.
And why the replicator in Star Trek is the truly disruptive technology. Something similar in our society would devastate world markets.
You could look up stuff on 3D printing and nanobots.
Deleted
incompetent management. From the article:
"The Siebel board fired Lawrie and installed George Shaheen as CEO. Shaheen was formerly the president of Accenture, and he has never run a business that depended on selling licenses."
After leaving Accenture, Shaheen was CEO of Webvan, a short-lived dot.bomb that burned through a couple hundred million dollars before going out of business.
Yep, that's just the guy I would as my new CEO.
There's no free ride anymore, it's time to innovate or die.
Depends on which side of the coin you are on. If you are on the consumer side, choose F/OSS and it can be a free ride. Unfortunately, shrink wrap software companies probably are going to have a hard time paying salaries of programmers so if you program, you'd better start liking jobs where all you do is tweek F/OSS for "customization" for your site.
So let's see you hire some high IQ people and start thinking up new ideas and industrial progress will be off and running again after a short stall!
And if you're a shrink wrap house, you'll pay these high IQ salaries with... what exactly? If you *do* come up with something great, you'll have 100 SourceForge copycats within a month and they will erode your market.
F/OSS is the great poison pill of software. If anyone comes out with something that is good (and it isn't you), then just put some effort into a F/OSS "alternative" and poison the whole market... basically make it where if *I* can't make any money in that market, then no one will.
So just about anybody can be a programmer, and get payed only if his software will be usefull and people will use it. Wouldn't you like to live in that future?
Not really. I've seen plenty of code written by that "almost anyone who can be a programmer" person you speak of. 99 times out of 100 it is complete crap and I wish I had the time I spent dorking with their crap back.
For example, when one clicks on a drop menu, there is a noticeable delay (up to 2 seconds) before the dropmenu is populated. The only reason for this that I can think of is that the app runs a DB query each and every time a dropmenu is clicked, even though the contents change very rarely. This is quite possibly the worst possible way to fill a drop menu, ever.
To add insult to injury, the thing is a "web app", but it makes such excessive use of ActiveX and other Windows-specific tools, it eliminates one of the primary advantages of web applications: Cross-platform compatibility.
To their credit, a rep from Siebel did say that this particular product was once a locally-run binary program, but Siebel was losing sales to competitors simply because their tool was not a web application. That is the only reason! Apparently, it didn't include a sufficient number of buzzwords, so they rewrote it to do just that.
How much do you want to bet they'll switch its data storage medium from a proper relational database (even if it is MS SQL) to a purely XML-based system? I am sure that will be plenty fast.
The irony is that this system was used to replace two systems that actually worked well--a OpenVMS-based control system and a Tandem-based logging system. Whomever implemented the old systems clearly valued uptime (neither OpenVMS nor Tandem/HP-Nonstop systems crash; at least, I have never seen it happen, and I've worked on such systems that have uptimes of decades), though admittedly both are rather proprietary and dated.
I've only used 2 or 3 Siebel products, so my experience with them is somewhat limited. Perhaps some of their stuff is non-crap.
Just goes to show--never let PHB's dominate your design decisions, at least if quality is a concern.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
As I said, *software is a service*. Once it's created you can make as many as you like.
Deleted
An interesting article, but an even more interesting thing would be ascertain if there is any correlation between software liscensing revenues going soft(er), and the OS in use to run said software.
Another intriguing question would be if this may have an impact on the decision to switch, even partially, to another OS in order to realise savings accrueing from use of software with less restrictive liscensing.
For every present, there is a past
I though they already discontiued that show! It may be a lame joke, but its as informative as any ridiculous blanket statements about "the death of (insert terms) enterprise software" I'm not dead. The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead. Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is. The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not. The Dead Collector: He isn't. Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill. The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better. Large Man with Dead Body: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Simply, the enterprise software vendors themselves. At this point, they'd all have to be wheelchair bound given how much they shoot themselves in the foot.
Over the years their prices have risen out of sync with target client business revenue, activity, and need not to mention the changing economic scene.
Their software often seems written explicitly to confound the most experienced users and administrators and effectively prevent any ease in enterprise-wide roll-out, installation, upgrading, and administration.
Their licensing models bear no relationship whatsoever to the realities of the usage of the target businesses, and frequently are outright hostile to newer technology usage such as multiprocessor workstations and thin clients.
For instance, I have yet to have a single installation of any Computer Associates offering go smoothly, or anything that might be mistaken for semi-smoothly. A demo copy of Unicenter once hosed a workstation I tried it on. Given the models, methods, and practices currently standard in the world of Windows programming, and the prodigious resources of CA, that takes Herculean effort to do.
Remedy ARS anyone? I'm sure this can't be the only software with an interface that would make a sadomasochistic OS/2 2.1 adherent's blood curdle.
Siebel? I worked for a company that tried their code. We lost 500% productivity almost overnight. Everyone rebelled by continuing to use Remedy ARS. You have to write some horrendously bad stuff to make people prefer RARS to your offering.
Open Source is of course, NOT a solution. Any corporation that isn't run by some weird eccentrics is going to avoid paying a code cowboy team to customize apps of all kinds, in all places in the business, and then pay their legal people overtime to make sure they are in compliance with three or six different open source-ish licensing models. As it is, there are major corporations shovelling massive greenbacks into Redmond to get Windows source access to get custom builds for their desktops. Or were when 95 was the standard. Now they might just put up with the comparatively less quirky WinXP Pro and pay a few junior desktop nerds a whole lot less.
Many companies today, trying to cut costs everywhere, are removing a lot of very useful software that their people got very comfortable with and were very proficient with, further eroding productivity. How sad is it that the vendor of the gui has overpriced it to the point that their client would rather do without and simply make use of the command prompt interface of the routers and switches instead?
All in all, things are not in the same way they used to be seven years ago. That does not mean however that Open Source is going to be the magic solution. OS still costs money. Programmers and support personnel and trainers do not work for free. I think neglect of taking that into account is the single biggest blindspot of the OSS boosters and if they don't stop acting as though the fruits of others' labors should be free on a silver platter and come with no cost, they will blow a golden opportunity to expand the usage of software in big business and simply hand it back to Microsoft, Siebel, etc.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Sorry, but that sounds completly like communism. It ain't going to work IMO. Open source works right now because people have a passion to do things right. If there's a "tax" to split between developers, then it becomes a matter of money, of who can get the largest slice. Your idea sounds really nice, but I'd say it sounds too nice to work effectively. An to which goverment would you pay? What if the project is being done over in India ? Would the US transfer the money over?
please excuse my apathy
Most of the enterprise software has to reflect the fact that laws and accounting rules are constantly changing. Someone has to be doing the updates. Open source systems are not very good at the mundane tasks. There will likely always be some company paying people to study new laws and implement changes to enterprise software. Most of revenues from enterprise software come from support contracts. Enough said.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I would have put operating systems in the class of stuff that pretty much everyone uses. How many computer users do you know who don't use an operating system?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You put into words what I'm thinking.
I have a love hate relationship with F/OSS.
I worked for a company with a proprietary software that had problems competing with *free*.
I love fiddling with F/OSS as a hobby and I smile smugly when Linux makes Microsoft squirm.
What hypocrasy on my part.
The one advantage that I can think of is that F/OSS counteracts outsourcing to India.
The work that moves to India is large proprietary software projects.
Customization of free software packages stays in the West.
The bill to the customer is probably comparable in many cases. The software may be free, but the customization costs more.
Please feel free to visit the open source project that I have in my sig.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Two of your examples have been big disapointments for me, and are one of the main reasons why my company is moving away from commercial software.
We had a customer database in Oracle, with some engineering applications, developed by our engineers in Fortran. We had to upgrade to Oracle 8 because the hardware was replaced. Then we found that Oracle had dropped support for Fortran. Worse, we had a support contract with Oracle, and it took them several months to discover this. We kept calling them again and again, while our new server stood unused and the old one barely kept working. Oracle sent us from one "expert" to another, and they all assured us that Fortran was still supported under Oracle 8. About six months later, they threw the towel and admitted that "Oracle pro*fortran" had been "deprecated" and wasn't available in version 8.
With DEC I opened a bug report in 1993, because a program I had, which worked in VAX-C stopped working in the new version, called DEC-C. I sent them a short program, about 50 lines, showing what was the problem. It took them two months and four "experts" to understand the problem. The first three, apparently, couldn't program in C, they didn't understand the small program I wrote. Twelve years later, and two company acquisitions, from DEC to Compaq to HP, that bug report is still open. Seeing that no support would come from DEC, I had to rewrite some of my programs so they would compile correctly under DEC-C.
What you claim doesn't add up. If multi-talented computer engineers have "to be at the office at 3AM to deal with a crashed database server" I guarantee your in-house apps will suck, no matter how great the versioning systems are. Perhaps your company finds software development cheap now, but they're dependent on having trained employees, even if it only takes "two hours" to train them. Someday you'll face cutbacks, and the liabilities of in-house development may haunt them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
That isn't quite correct. If someone comes up with a nifty utility to base their business on, then yeah, the OSS community will duplicate it in no time, but then, so will commercial vendors.
It seems most of these complaints come from companies who charge money for the most trivial of crap, such as this password generator. Nevermind that it has one of the worst user interfaces ever designed (look at that screenshot), it's a freaking PASSWORD GENERATOR! Trivial software is trivial to reimplement. It's offensive that someone would even charge money for this.
Now if a company develops something non-trivial, for which there aren't already a thousand similar products, this shouldn't be a problem. For example, just try finding an F/OSS product that can compete with 3D Studio Max or Maya. Blender isn't even in the same league. Photoshop? The Gimp is neat for web logos or hobbiest graphics, but doesn't even fully support the most fundamental Photoshop features such as native CMYK color.
Siebel Systems makes non-trivial software, but it is only non-trivial in that it is large. It isn't innovative; it's just a lot of work. I don't know of any OSS products that compete with, for example, their customer management software, but if there are, I would not doubt that it is because Siebel's stuff sucks (I've used it), and some smart developer got fed up and decided to show Siebel how it's done. If they do a better job, should we feel sorry for poor Siebel for losing revenue to the F/OSS guy, or should we root for the OSS project because any multi-billion dollar company which can't make a better project than a handful of F/OSS programmers needs to die?
Another example is the game market. There are neat OSS technologies such as the Irrlicht engine, but Itari and Blizzard aren't exactly concerned about F/OSS games taking over their market. When's the last time you played an open-source game which was even comparable to Farcry, Starcraft, or Alpha Centauri in terms of refinement, scale, and fun factor?
With all that said, I don't see how F/OSS is any different than another commercial competitor. An intelligently run business targets their product to account for competitors' weaknesses and tries to downplay its strengths. Seems to be working for Microsoft, and every single one of their core products have powerful and mature F/OSS competitors, yet their revenue has grown every year.
Specifically, the F/OSS community may be great at making low-level technical stuff, such as libraries, web servers, and DBMS software, but it isn't very good at polishing user interfaces (compare Visual C++ to KDevelop or Anjuta, though this being Slashdot will probably prefer the latter two regardless), at making high-end enterprise software (MySQL is neat but it can't even touch Teradata), or making the absolute highest-performance software (Apache is sort of fast, but Zeus and even recent versions of IIS can blow it away, especially in static page serving [That said, most corporations are even worse at making performance software, using bloatware tools such as MFC to make bloatware apps such as Norton Utilities]).
In short, the reasons given sound like the kind of reasons given by the kind of companies that make password generators or horribly poor quality customer management software and then complain that the F/OSS community is stealing your marketshare. Hell,
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
You know, with every software / hardware house there are those customers who experience "bad" support. Maybe it's a confused engineer, or an intractable problem that can't be solved without a major software rewrite - regardless, not not every problem has a reasonable solution. That's what contract negotiations - and ultimately lawyers - are for. But whatever problems you've experienced with enterprise level support, you have to admit the experience is nothing like calling an uneducated support rep for out of the box software.
:) --M
And to agree, I've had my support nightmare experiences too - the worst one several years back with HP on a new HP-9000 K class server bought to run an in house written warehouse management system (that was amazing for the time, BTW). But on delivery the hardware was flakey at first. It took a several weeks and numerous on site support calls to not find the problem before we just demanded a new machine. *sigh* So you hate Oracle and DEC; I hate HP.
UPS builds their own trucks, or rather has trucks designed to their specs built by Morgan Olson. The original Checker cab company used to build their own cars. Anyone who ever rode a Checker cab knows how comfortable they were.
If software plays a big role in your business, then rolling your own may give you an extra competitive advantage. And building software is several orders of magnitude cheaper than the multi-billion dollar investment you need to build trucks or cars.
Actually, no. The market will tell you different things, depending upon what you're looking at. For small businesses, yes, you are right. They usually buy COTS stuff and can't affort to write things from scratch.
As the business grows and gets more complex, then they DO start writing things from scratch. Things like custom spreadsheets and what not. They do this because they need to tune the COTS stuff to their business needs.
As the business gets even bigger, they DO start writing their own software from scratch. You do realize that most programmers don't work for software companies, don't you? I've heard that only 15% of programmers develop commercial software packages; the rest are working for companies whose main business isn't selling software.
So the point is, there is NO One True Solution for all businesses. Indeed, your IT infrastructure can be a serious competitive advantage if you do things right, or a disadvantage if you don't. Most places fall right inbetween.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Now, I'm not a Open Source freak at all, but I know that by looking at the trends in Open Source software. Aside from really powerful speciality stuff, the Open Source movement is very quickly catching up on all fronts.
Mostly due to two factors.
1. Last programmer base. Lots and lots of people are coding open source software, and it seems the more people who code it, the more people who want to code it. So slowly, the curve grows more and more vertical with development. As well, more and more companies are actively supporting Open Source and adding a lot of umph to the movement.
2. Open Source code that is being used never goes stagnant. If people are using it, it's getting updated and modified and cleaned up. Unlike Windows XP, which has not significantly changed since it's release, there have been many significant good and useful improvements to a variety of good Open Source projects, and if the project does the job you need for free already, you may as well use it. Case in point: CuteFTP Filezilla. I used to use CuteFTP until Filezilla became significantly more stable and had better features.
You cannot beat Open Source using any corporate strategy, unless you are willing to put as much money as they have people. The best strategy right now, from what I can tell, is to do something similar to Net Integration, or other companies like that. Take an existing open source project, and make the saleable feature something truly new and revolutionary. Competing against open source is truly an uphill battle. Especially when you can just use the open sourced code, and make it work well for yourself.
Just my thoughts.
~ kjrose
Um, yeah, and that would get mismanaged into oblivion.
And, why on earth should the government be responsible for creating software? I do not see free software being used for the defense of a country or for public safety.
Why don't you start a company that charges a yearly flat fee, and gives access to the software that your company produces?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Seems to me there is a link between F/OSS and popularity of the problem space, especially among programmers. I've never seen it discussed before, so I thought I'd bring it up.
To create a solution for somebody for nothing, I would guess you would need a bunch of qualified people to write and test the code. Since these people are not getting paid, then it would have to be something that these people are interested in solving.
Since these people by definition are programmers, they're going to be interested in stuff that programmers are interested in. So the evolution of F/OSS will continue along the lines of stuff programmers like -- encryption, database, file sharing, photo editing tools, etc.
It's going to be awful hard to get groundswell support for some new system to categorize ear wax, for instance. You can make the argument that so much of software is just the guts and not the business logic, but that's the whole point of software abstraction to begin with, so it's a non-starter.
So to me the question is: who's going to care enough about mundane, boring, business-rules based code to keep it up to date? Certainly not me -- not for free. And therein lies the limits of F/OSS.
What makes this argument less true with every day is that, for any business sufficiently worth doing, the software IS your business. Of course, if you are content to simply run a little mom-and-pop thing, go right on ahead and buy the software off the shelf. But if you want to make big money off big ideas, regardless of industry, your software is your competitive advantage.
... but I digress ...
The same cannot be said for trucks and whatnot; in addition, those things cost much, much more to do on your own than software. FedEx and UPS have their own custom systems; if it were cheap enough, dont you think both would be developing/operating their own supersonic cargo planes? If it's cheap enough, and can give you an advantage over a competitor, than you MUST do it. Hell, in the retail example, we can say this is a large part of why Wal-Mart has been so sucessful
I mean, there's not even a Quickbooks alternative
sql-ledger? The interface could use some work, but Quickbooks' interface doesn't look all that great either.
Read the author's bio:
Andy Singleton is president of Needham, Mass.-based Assembla, which brings "inspired by open source" applications and development processes to enterprise software.
His business is implementing enterprise open source software. Of course he's going to say that that's the future.
Well, all of those open source enterprise software are distributed under some kind of open source license (GPL, LGPL, MPL, BSD, etc) so technically speaking, they're still licensed software.
Take-off every
sql-ledger?
Nope. It doesn't do payroll.
I don't respond to AC's.
When can we see the death of "death" proclamations?
After numerous dealings with "Enterprise" software (read: $$$) 90% of the time I end up dealing wtih a reseller/parter/consultant/whatever who is just a $140/hr guy with a certificate who's just going to call support and/or lookup my problem on the website. And usually these guys fly in and start loading software on any server they happen to spot 'cause that's the way they did it in the class. And they have no knowledge of the difference between an app server, SQL server, or anything else. Nor do they know what thick or thin clients are nor can they tell me wheether I'm going to run into bandwidth, CPU, RAM, or disk limitations first. Recently, I had these problems with a well-recommended "parter" selling us SAP Business One.
Sadly, this poster has been listening to too
... and what they cost you in
... solutions are hell
many marketeers, and IT Consultants who sing the
praises of COTS solutions.
The truth is, if you dont know what you need, and
could not, in principle, build it, then you cannot
contract it either; and the notion of moving the
whole problem out of house usually fails as well;
see most government IT projects.
The problem is that you need to understand what
your business needs, and you need to have, or retain a
small number of _very_ good IT professionals to protect
your interest, Architect,
manager, developers
fees will save you hugely -v- service groups who
are managed by PHBs from finance or procurement.
It is no accident that all the major accounting,
materials management, CRM
to configure, and that interfaces and middleware
are the dragon infested land of sofware deployment
this centuary.
The notion that the enterprise can contract out
everything is shown to be increasingly stupid.
Shareholder awareness of this is rising rapidly
and will grow further with strict standards of
compliance that go, directly, to management.
You can still make plenty of money writing software.
What's becoming harder and harder to do is to make money as what you so accurately called 'a shrink wrap house.'
So what's the problem? There isn't much of a market for horse-drawn carriages anymore either.
Either your company will adapt to the market or it will die. Either way, there's still plenty of demand for programmers. Just under the umbrella of different business models.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I think there's something your forgetting about television. They are supposed to pander to the lowerst common denominator. You know why? The viewers are not the customer. The advertisers are the customer. The viewer is, get this, the actual product.
Picture the TV networks as a fisherman. The advertiser is the customer who buys the fish. The viewer is the fish, and the television shows are the net that he casts. The thing is, most diners want tasty fish, so you use the kind of net that usually gets the tastiest fish around. In the case of advertisers, tasty fish are gullible viewers, stupid people who's purchases are strongly affected by the commercials they watch. So, the television networks cast the type of net that will draw in these tasty fish, and that's why the news is so dull and trite, why sitcoms just aren't funny, and why reality TV is the king of television. Because the viewers are the product, not the customer.
I'd imagine that the story is pretty much the same with cable TV, even though the product has to pay a premium to be sold to the advertiser. Commercials are supposed to be appealing to gullible people, not intelligent and rational people. Movies are starting to head in the same direction with previews getting longer and longer, product placement, etc. As a larger portion of the studio's income is earned through advertising then the viewer becomes more and more product and less and less customer.
Radio stations, same thing. That's why any free thinking, truly rocking station quickly gets replaced with cookie cutter ClearChannel programming. Because the advertisers want tasty fish. The sort of fish who are amused by "two annoying guys with wacky sounds and their bemused female sidekick with an occasional bitter tongue in the morning."
RIAA, they're making plenty of money. And buying enough laws to make sure that the money keeps rolling in. The DIY or die indie scene has been rallying to take down the establishment ever since punk rock in the seventies, and guess what. RIAA just keeps getting more and more power by producing shittier and shittier music (but at least they are giving the consumer less choices. Seriously, most major labels are cutting back on the number of artists they are officially promoting.) Every now and then the major labels will come out with a new "artist" that looks to be a rebel, and so conforming to the teenage ideal of what a musician should be. That veneer is usually gone after a couple of albums and people start to see the strings that are really moving the puppet.
Wow... that was a really nice rant. Gotta keep that one in my archives.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
What kind of acceptance testing was implemented that allowed this kind of UI bug to slip through? And, considering the fact that you are paying them to deliver a reasonably competent product, why wasn't this fixed?
And I wonder if that's where it will be heading towards. From now on, instead of purchasing a license to your software, you'll be purchasing a license to use the software, run though a net, accessed from a vendor's server. You never receive an actual copy of the software, only access to it on a secured computer that the vendor controls. I'm sure there are already models set up like this although I can't think of any right off the top of my head. Many services we use today already work this way (web email, creating PDFs directly from Adobe's website, etc...), I only wonder how much longer it will take until the majority of commercial software is run this way.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
If anyone comes out with something that is good (and it isn't you), then just put some effort into a F/OSS "alternative" and poison the whole market... basically make it where if *I* can't make any money in that market, then no one will.
Microsoft hasn't filed for bankruptcy in the last 30 minutes has it?
F/OSS is a great alternative to commercial software. For true innovators, F/OSS is just another brand of competition. People who otherwise had no choice might have bought your product, but if you were competing with another commercial developer who had a lower price point, those same people could opt to use that vendor instead of you. While the Gimp provides a LOT of functionality, Photoshop isn't going anywhere any time soon.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If people are willing to do things for free maybe you should try developing some real skills. I couldn't care less about dumbasses making little crappy download managers complaining about teenagers writting replacements for free. Maybe restraunts should try to force grocery stores out of business, just because people can cook their own food for themselves dosen't mean people should be allowed to.
Opera still makes money even though their just about the only web browser you need to pay money for, just goes to show that if you actually have a better product people will stay pay for it.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
torpor: What is True Enterprise... if it isn't "Roll Your Own"? A company which purchases the infrastructure it requires to operate and expand, isn't an enterprise. It's, at best, half of the solution. If you have a business scenario which is driven by software processes, confronting the software creation, and being fully responsible for the continued evolution of that software, is the only way to guarantee continued survival as an enterprising solution to your customers. Buy something from someone else, and you put the majority of the True Value of your company in someone elses' hands.. Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success. If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house
A lot of people are responding by saying things like, "What do you want me to do? Write my own Point Of Sale system from the ground up?"
If I can speak for "torpor" - and note that his /. GUID is in the low triple digits - I don't think he would argue that you should not purchase generic software [operating systems, database backends, POS systems] from vendors.
But those generic software packages are increasingly just commodities - as a businessman, it makes little difference whether your OS is Windows or OSX, whether your database is Oracle or DB2, and whether your POS system is IBM or NCR.
Indeed, companies such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, and the like, are increasingly coming to realize that there's no money to be made [or, at least, no major long-term growth in revenue] in selling generic software. Witness e.g. Oracle's furious, frenzied takeover of Peoplesoft*. Why did Oracle want PeopleSoft so desperately? Because Oracle has realized that there's little to distinguish their generic backend from other generic backends, such as DB2, SQLServer, or even PostgreSQL, and that, increasingly, the big profits are to be made in selling [or leasing] proprietary schema [and/or business logic] as customized to specific business endeavors.
I.e. the generic database backend market is completely mature, and is going nowhere as far as growth is concerned, so it's the sale [or lease] of the schema [and/or the business logic] where the new profits will come.
Now I think that torpor's point would be that if you purchase a tailor-made schema/business logic package from one of these "enterprise" vendors, and if you plan your entire business around their solution, then you have become little more than a franchisee of theirs, in almost exactly the same way that a small businessman becomes a franchisee of McDonald's, or Burger King, or Pizza Hut. Which is perfectly fine for most folks, especially if all they aspire to be are glorified middlemen, who spend the remainder of their lives in vicious rat races against armies of other glorified middlemen, each subsisting on paper-thin profit margins.
Again, though, I think torpor would argue that if you're doing anything even remotely sophisticated, and if you want to be the master of your own destiny [i.e. if the idea of being some corporation's bitch for the rest of your life doesn't appeal to you], and if you want to add any value whatsoever to the widget you're peddling [value that would somehow distinguish you in your widget's marketplace, and allow you to earn greater profits than your fellow widget peddlers] - then you want your underlying business logic and database schema to be your own property and of your own insight and creation.
*Oracle has taken a real gamble here, at least as far as their traditional revenue streams are concerned: By purchasing PeopleSoft, they're now in direct competition with their old channel [SAP, Siebel, BEA, etc], and it's entirely possible that their channel will reply with a collective, "Screw you, we'll just port to DB2."
Microsoft once took a very timid step in the direction of challenging its channel, with the purchase of Great Plains [and the attempted pur
Thats easy for you to say, you still have a job and some coffee!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
... with their voting systems. The leaked documents saying how they were gonna screw the customers by over pricing a print capability, having back doors where elections officials could manipulate the results, and other stuff put some fear into their customers.
Would you want to do business with a company like siebel?
I didn't think so.
It really feels like reading Freud.
The Raven
From now on, instead of purchasing a license to your software, you'll be purchasing a license to use the software, run though a net, accessed from a vendor's server.
That's exactly where it's heading. The only thing holding it back presently is that only a limited set of applications can run well under those circumstances.
Wow... that was a really nice rant. Gotta keep that one in my archives.
Heh. Yeah I'd say you pretty much nailed it.
Stupid people are valuable, because they have to be fed anyways, and they're cheaper than the robots and oil it would take to replace them. Television and radio keeps stupid people stupid, motivates them to keep working, and transfers their disposable income to the wealthy and intelligent.
Short term, stupid people will get more stupid and more abundant. Advertisers and businesses will promote stupidity. Long term, they will all become useless eaters when fusion reactors come online and manufacturing methods outstrip their abilities.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
One thing I noticed about a lot of these packages is that they often have terrible underlying data models, or at least data models that do not fit a particular business well. They tend to throw indirection and duplication at the problem. Perhaps this would not be a big problem if the package hid the underlying mess from the users, but if you ever want to extract and use data from such monsters, which is a common request, you have my sympethy.
If you want to make a better tool, allow one to model the particular company, sticking with certain conventions for hooks into the package.
Or better yet, sell development and expertise to help companies build one to fit their own company. In other words, become a domain expert company instead of software box company, and market that expertise. "We know how to build sales-force systems" instead of selling a pre-packaged blob of software. Such a company could still sell software, but in bits and pieces or as part of a bigger semi-custom-built package. Build a Lego kit that fits sales-force software (for instance) instead of the whole deal itself.
Domain specialists seems to be a missing software-related niche.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes indeed, if you insist on working for a 'shrink wrap house' that's where it's going.
If you want to work on customisation and services around Free Software, of course, you'll have a better chance of working where the work is.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
No, Communism is the system where you pretend to work, and the government - which owns everything and employs everyone - pretends to pay you.
That's right: I'm gumby dammit.
Siebel is an example of realy bad software with really good marketing. If you use it straight out of the box it is reasonable. If you customize it to meet you business process needs, you are in for a world of hurt. The company I work for spent over 20 million last year keeping alive and to continue development. My job is to keep it alive and running along with several other enterprise apps. Siebel support is the typical vendor game of send me a log, did you check the configs, turn the log level up, can you send me a log, someone will get right back with you. Repeat above sentence until your own techs solve the problem. Scalabilty is a joke. It scales just add hardware and lots of it. Our average workstation footprint for the thin client runs almost a gig of memory. Server side the thing is a pig per user for memory. The AIX port of the product actually has a windows directory and a windows registery emulator. If you run one of these kind of products the best money you can spend is in to hire a top notch DBA.
Siebel spends most of its user week telling the consultants what to do. All of the keynote speeches say this was hard, expensive and difficult but it was really worth it. I COTS software was supposed to cure those things.
...but not just to "site licenses". In fact the entire concept of buying (perpetual) software licenses for large enterprise apps (not such as Oracle database itself , but rather stuff like a giant business accounting and management app which sits on top of a big database) is doomed to vanish into oblivion. The software outfits who formerly wrote, sold and supported such apps are a dying breed. They are increasingly being bought out by one new owner after another until there is nobody left who can actually support the software anymore at the company who now owns the line, and a crisis is brewing because the existing customers (for why the software company was bought just to raid a customer base) are fed up with the crappy excuse for support and are all looking for new answers. All those "vendor-supported turnkey apps" that were bought and ramrodded into production as "Y2K solutions" are now a half-decade old, and extremely few of the promises of future-proofing, and ongoing enhancements that were made by the software vendors back then have been kept. The software vendors who are in business today developing enterprise apps know that their own future is only a destiny to be sold out to a bigger company someday and their primary goal seems not to make good systems for customers, but instead to make themselves as attractive as possible to a future new owner, which they can no longer do by selling perpetual software licenses. Instead, such apps are in the future going to only be rented or leased, and probably on a pay-per-use metered basis. That is the way it used to be in the olden days with "time sharing systems" and it looks the industry is coming back around full circle to this business model once again.
Sob. T'Pol where have you gone?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
The scarcity is in those capable of converting IDEAS into useful PRODUCTS or SERVICES.
That's totally bogus. There's plenty of those capable of converting IDEAS into useful products and services. IP only makes it more difficult because somebody who beat them to the punch in registering it. IP rewards the first, not necessarily the best. So all progress grinds to a halt until the IP rights expire. Being first should NOT bring exclusivity. It's this exclusivity that creates the scarcity. and, as I've pointed out before, all scarcities or shortages of anything are nothing more than a disagreement over the price, or, in this case, a result of law.
You may have the same ideas as me (as Thomas Jefferson mentioned), but that doesn't make you capable of putting it into a useful form...
I may have the same ideas as you, but that should not grant you the authority to prohibit me from "putting it into a useful form". Again that's what creates the scarcity.
What?
Yes and no. The humdrum products like true accounting packages and the humdrum and boring things like schedulers and production control software are not being written in the F/OSS community. If it satisfies some geeks whim does not a production tool make. Linux may be OK for a file share/printer server and a web server and a development platform for writing your own stuff on, but sometimes you ain't go tthe time to write your own and if there's no open source software availaable, then you have no choice but to purchase software. People who get paid are willing to work on anything you throw their way but open source programmers will not always write specifically what you want. That is not to say some who write open source don't get paid. IBM, Red Hat and others do pay them, but they ar eworking on what will make Red Hat, IBM and Novell money. Last I checked, none of these companies are working on accounting software or production control. Until the big things that RUN the business (not talking about Operating Systems or Databases.....plenty of those are open source) get ported, many businesses who cannot afford a programming staff will have to buy software and deal with it's limitiations...or pay for modifications.
Gorkman
If you had released your browser 7 years ago you would have had other programmers helping you to improve it.
I want results. In return for my 5 line freeBSD patch and 30 line KDE patch, I get an excellent system that works how I want it to. I cannot get that value anywhere else. Microsoft Windows XP, or Apple OSX is not as high quality as KDE/FreeBSD (My personal opinion, many will disagree), yet buying either of the former would cost me more money. I don't count my time because I enjoy programing.
OS also helps me as a programmer. Most people compile with GCC in the embedded market. When I use Emacs my boss doesn't have to approve the purchase price for my editor.
I think you have made a large mistake. Programs are mostly not things that run on the desktop. As a programmer I can still find jobs programing microwaves, car control systems, assembly lines, and the like. Open source will never be big in those areas because it is custom software for each. Microsoft Windows never ran on a majority of the computers shipped - the embedded market is invisible, but it is much larger than the desktop market.
The whole key to OSS is getting to that realization that the average person CAN do it themselves with commonly available tools.. That's the whole point of progress!!! In many ways it's a much better deal for a business.. it would keep customers comming back if done right. Just selling "computers" is easy... that's why walmart can do it. If you want to be a "professional" you've got to bring more to the table.
When i was much younger, and still in school, i switched from windows and all the crap that came with it, because i could not believe they expected me to pay for that system and each little tool basicly asked for some form of payment for full use. if that wasn't enough, the products were not stable at all. hence the switch to linux, a free system, that perhaps was not perfect but at least worked better and didn't cost me anything and allowed me to learn, improve, etc.
so, i get out of school, find myself a job in IT and discover that these enterprise software vendors are even _worse_ then microsoft and the rest of the gang. HORRIBLE! and the PRICES! i couldn't believe companies actually paid money for such crap.
and it doesn't stop there, the license model is a complete rip-off. the pricing, in most cases, goes up depending on the capacity of the server. but, it is the exact _same_ fsck software, you even use the same package to install it, there is no difference in the software what so ever. basicly those bastards are charging you more because you bought a bigger machine and they don't even have to do anything to earn that money.
oh, and besides all the misery, some of the software is so buggy, but because it is closed i can not even solve it myself (and a lot of those bugs are trivial to the point i'm wondering if they do any QC?). or, spawn error messages that are made up out of just numbers and you have no choice but to call their support number and hope it can be solved (because, yes it is true, in a lot of cases the answer turns out to be - we recommend a reinstall)
jeez, and they wonder why IT people are fed up by this? if they can't possibly figure out what is wrong, it boggles my mind.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Coke or Pepsi? Seriously though don't most places have an facilities department that takes care of the printer toner and soda type issues?
It all comes down to the definition of sizes of organizations.
What some people call "small" others call "big" -- let me explain.
Let's try looking at this scale:
* Small Business
* Medium Business
* Large Business
* Small Enterprise
* Medium Enterprise
* Large Enterprise
An example of small business would be your local liquor store down the street.
There is a wide, fuzzy line between large business and small enterprise, but many would agree that you get into enterprise type situations when you have a WAN (which implies multiple locations).
"Small" in kjh1's post is "big enough to have custom software and more than one programmer". That would rate at least as "medium business" on the above scale.
Right now, open source is moving through the scale from the middle out. So it is moving into the very large (think carrier grade Linux) and just getting started in the small.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Short term, stupid people will get more stupid and more abundant. Advertisers and businesses will promote stupidity. Long term, they will all become useless eaters when fusion reactors come online and manufacturing methods outstrip their abilities.
And what manufacturing methods will be available when fusion power becomes available?
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.