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

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.

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, 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

[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.

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.