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."

Comments

Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if it gets the issue of security right. The thing is, the whole claim that OSS has inherently better security has been exposed as hype for a long time now.

Some OSS projects have excellent security, because the project leaders place sufficient emphasis on it, and the coders code with that emphasis in mind.

Other OSS projects do not have good security, sometimes not even as good as Microsoft and co.

Consider this: I have downloaded patches for more security flaws in Firefox than for IE in recent weeks. Moreover, the IE patches were offered to me via automatic updates within minutes of being available on Windows Update, while the Firefox patches did not show up as automatic updates for several days after they were available from the project web site in some cases. They even had a whole version missed out of the automatic updates, because somehow a release was made that contained serious bugs of its own, and had to be withdrawn.

This is not intended to be a slam against Firefox; it's great software and the project seems to be run well, the vast majority of the time. Rather, this is intended to demonstrate that nothing's perfect.

Re:Yes, but...

[MightyMartian]

You are aware, I trust, that Microsoft frequently sits on vulnerabilities for some time before offering patches. Your metric for security appears to have nothing at all to do with security.

Re:Yes, but...

[rbarreira]

Consider this: I have downloaded patches for more security flaws in Firefox than for IE in recent weeks.

You say that as if you wanted to imply that Firefox has more security holes, but that's not a certain conclusion! Couldn't it be the case that Firefox just gets more attention from its developers?

Signed,
Captain Obvious

Re:Yes, but...

[Master of Transhuman]

"Moreover, the IE patches were offered to me via automatic updates within minutes of being available on Windows Update"

Uhm, that's WHY they call it "Windows Update".

Moron. Microsoft takes longer to patch, their patches break more things, and the vulnerabilities they patch are more serious than OSS ones in most cases. Just because Firefox, and indeed, other OSS products such as Apache or Sendmail, have had a number of security issues doesn't justify tarring the entire OSS field for bad security in comparison to Microsoft.

And comparing all of OSS to Windows in comparing security is just braindead. A more appropriate comparison would be either Linux/BSD vrs any version of Windows OS, or ALL Windows apps against ALL OS apps.

As quality of OSS code has been demonstrated to be better than commercial code in several studies, it is likely that security would be at least equal, if not better. As security-concious coding practices are relatively new, both OSS and commercial code obviously need more work.

And finally, nobody ever said OSS software is perfect.

They said it was as good and cheaper than commercial software in many cases. And it is.

Do we really even have to ask?

[yfkar]

If commercial closed software can do it, why couldn't open source software?

Re:Do we really even have to ask?

[Master of Transhuman]

"A product like Oracle, for instance, has had years upon years of time and millions upon millions of dollars poured into it."

While PostgreSQL hasn't had scores of millions of dollars poured into it, they also haven't had the "years upon years" - although they ARE one of the older OSS products around.

Nonetheless, their achievements are impressive.

Most of Oracle's "features" beyond PostgreSQL are stuff involving applications development, tuning, and other stuff that most smaller companies don't particularly need or which are so complicated to use that most DBA's probably don't even understand them. Oracle is one hellaciously complicated product.

Oracle has more "feature-itis" than even Microsoft.

A better comparison would be MySQL which is younger and doesn't have all the features a good database should have - but it's getting them over time.

Given that most open source is less than ten years old, and open source project methods vary across the board from one-man projects to corporate-sponsored projects with hundreds of people, I think this form of comparison to closed-source software as to end results is a bit premature.

Open source is division of labor at its best.
As the open source methodology matures, I think we'll see no real limits on what it can achieve - short of putting a man on the moon in ten years.

Re:Yes

[bburton]

Well, it's not always just about saving money. There's a lot of open source projects out there that are much less painful to work with.

Not having to worry about CD keys, crazy EULAs, spy/adware, and vendor lock-in are big pluses of most FOSS.

Not always - of course

[Elixon]

> Businesses want to save money and boost IT > efficiency. Can open-source software do the trick? It's clear that it can. But it is of course risky operation (as any other business decision) so the OSS solution must be selected with certain level of knowledge. OSS can boost efficiency but of course not always. So generalizing is not good way to ask this question. What I don't like is the SW business using OSS for faster start up. Simply pretend to be totally FREE - get fast response, fast growing community and then find ways how to generate profit from it. It is really dirty trick. Better to be honest from the very beginning and clearly declare the aims to prevent the community from being surprised.

Re:Open Source and Money? Are you nuts?

[Seumas]

So let's see...

Companies want free software and outsourced labor for $6/hr developers.

So essentially the new American business plan is this:

1) Get free stuff
2) Get free labor
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!

Open ended question?

[stinky wizzleteats]

Can open-source software do the trick? Cnet attempts to answer this open ended question

Yes.

...

(Not an open ended question)

Re:Open Source and Money? Are you nuts?

[g2devi]

Novell and Red Hat are bad businesses to own?

Tell you what. I'll pay for any property or computer equipment they have and assume any debts. (I'll need an equity loan, but there would be no shortage of people ponying up the money.) If what you're implying is true, the owners of Novell and RedHat would gladly accept my offer to get out of their sink hole companies and move onto something that would make them more money. *snicker*

If you want to make money hand over fist, you more than likely need a monopoly. Competitive markets tend to give more reasonable profits. Novell and RedHat have competitive profit margins for such markets. If I were purchasing a product, I'd likely purchase one from a competitive market rather than a monopoly. Vendor lock-in is not a pretty thing to have to deal with.

As for VA Software, they failed because Linux got too popular (so it's being preinstalled by several vendors or consultants) and too easy to install (so sysadmins do it themselves). They didn't try to differentiate themselves from the cheaper alternatives, so they got burned. It has nothing to do with open source. It has everything to do with proper business planning.