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Opening Up for Open Source
jondaw writes "Businesses want to save money and boost IT efficiency. Can open-source software do the trick? Cnet attempts to answer this open ended question and provides a number of good case studies and examples."
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You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.
Honestly most of the time the cost of the actual package (database engine, operating system, office suite) is inconsequential when compared to the cost of the IT staff required to support it. The minute you need to hire a new guy (or worse yet, a $160 / hour consultant or contractor) to support the environment - you can throw the cost of the package ($100 - $1,000 - even $25,000) right out the window because compared to $100k ~ $300k per year for an additional single person to keep it all running, the cost of the warez is inconsequential.
In the long run you save the most money by standardizing on a single platform - not for cost savings at the software license level, but because a single IT staffer can support it and support even more of them (by himself) down the road. Same thing applies to hardware - shave $100 per machine by going with home-built hardware, a different configuration for every single machine, and the minute you need to add a $50k / year (fully burdened salary) to the payroll all of your savings are not only gone, but blown completely out of the water.
The only way OSS is going to save a company money is if it lets fewer people do the same stuff, or lets the same number of people do more stuff - regardless of licensing costs. Most companies spend more money each year on executive perks and bonuses than software licensing, so you are pretty much on the money when you say focus on TCO.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If you run a Windows shop and mess up on a few licences, even by accident, the BSA will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
As a matter of fact, they can screw up your operations by merely conducting an audit during your busiest season:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-996210.html
Even if you don't use the big-buck CRM packages mentioned in the article, if you're running a business the logical choice is to avoid the risk of extortion and/or business disruption by choosing open source and telling the BSA to stick it where the moon don't shine.
Dude, /. was created by OSS proponents. There are no pretenses about the site. It glorifies the penguin and portrays Bill Gates as a borg. It is biased, but it's not pretending to be "fair and balanced" which is more than you can say for most other media.
So share price is the ultimate measure of profitability? Those charts and data tell you very little beyond the fact that around 2000 there were some suckers who were stupid enough to pay exorbitant prices for shares in... well lets' be honest, any tech company.
What you might want to look at are Novell and Red Hat, and the statistics like "profit margin" and "gross profit". Are they raking in money hand over fist? No. Are they making a healthy profit, particularly for companies of their respective sizes? Certainly. Contrary to what you seem to want to imply, they are doing quite well.
VA Software? Yeah, well they're pretty fucked right now.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You are aware, I trust, that the Mozilla foundation frequently sits on vulnerabilities for some time before offering patches.
As an example, rather then just making an unsubstantiated allegation, the most recent patch, 1.0.5, fixed a critical vulnerability ("Code execution through shared function objects") that Mozilla had been sitting on for 2 months, and a high vulnerability ("Content-generated event vulnerabilities") that Mozilla had been sitting on for 3 months.
There where also additional vulnerabilities ranging from High to Low patched in that update that had been known to Mozilla for 2 or more months.
And this is only recent. Before FireFox 1.1, Mozilla was far less forth coming about vulnerabities, often patching them at their leisure and then silently introducing them into builds without any advisory to let people protect themselves; go look at the disclosure list - you'll find pages of dangerous vulnerabilities you where never told existed and for which you remained unprotected against unless you where downloading builds on a nightly basis (and reading the list wouldn't help you - Mozilla used to intentionally keep it 2 major versions behind).
Mozilla built its reputation for security (a reputation that is dimishing as each new FireFox vulnerability is announced) by hiding its flaws and promoting fanboys (like the parent). Now that it has broken into the mainstream, it has to play like everyone else, without the special treatment and fanboy reality distortion fields to protect it.
Check http://eeye.com/html/research/upcoming/index.html site for a short list of overdue fixes.
And that's just the vulnerabilities THEY reported.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
MySQL is still younger than PostgreSQL.
And being funded better by providing a double license is why MySQL is improving quickly. The more OSS programmers that can afford to work on a project, the better the project is, usually.
But PostgreSQL is older and had more time to develop, so it's still the more fully developed product.
If PostgreSQL had the kind of money MySQL has, let alone Oracle, it probably would be better than Oracle by now. But it's pointless to discuss it, because that doesn't happen in OSS.
It doesn't mean PostgreSQL isn't a perfectly good database for the people that can use it. There's no need to have every "feature" - including the most obscure ones - of Oracle to be a completely adequare replacement for Oracle for those users who don't need Oracle's extra features.
All the trade journal articles have pointed out that up to now, you had to pay Oracle's price for Oracle's features - including the ones you'll never need. Now you can get MySQL and PostgreSQL and Firebird and others and get all the features you WANT for no or less money.
This is one place where direct comparison between OSS and commercial software breaks down. Commercial software HAS to be all things to all people. OSS doesn't. It can fork, be customized, do anything it needs to be useful to varied groups of people without being a bloated POS like Oracle or Microsoft Office.
The net effect, however, on commercial software is bad for them - people stop paying for stuff they don't need. Which means the commercial company can't charge the same anymore. Which means their profitability goes down. Which also means their customers save money. So in that sense OSS software reduces the TCO of even closed-source software!
Look at how many times recently Microsoft had to reduce its license fees for various governments that were considering open source.
Did Microsoft take that reduction into account when comparing their TCO against open source?
I wonder if any of the TCO studies take that into account!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!