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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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Geez. Do they even need to ask? Noobs.
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out of the automatic updates, because somehow a release was made that contained serious bugs of its own, and had to be withdrawn.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.
> Can open-source software do the trick?
For money, or for candy?
I am an IT consultant and I get a lot of clients who ask about the real cost of free software. Most business here are very cautious to choose switching for open source mostly because support for this solution is still somewhat more expensive than for the old paid solutions.
In the few companies I consult that are currently switching or have switched in the past, the Total Cost of Ownership of their computer infrastructured has lowered significantly, even though the cost of the support staff is truly higher.
But, anyway, support here is somewhat cheap, as I am in a developing country that pays a lot more for software than for the people running then in a number of times.
Absolutely. Two cases in point:
Case One: We were looking for a bug tracking solution and we had short-listed the contenders to a choice between Bugzilla, BugTracker and FogBugz. Although FogBugz was a superior product BugTracker won because we could modify it to suit our needs. We didn't like Bugzilla because of it's clumsy interface and the fact we'd need an extra machine to run it.
We saved money on the licenses and we got something we could modify and maintain ourselves. Free software at it's best.
Case Two: We were paying through the nose for anti-virus subscription and software. We all know that anti-virus software takes a lot of real estate. Most have *HORRIBLE* splash screens that no-one is interested in seeing and they tend to slow the machine considerably.
Our solution to the problem to the anti-virus problem was the Windows version of ClamAV. It has a nice outlook plugin that protects from e-mail based virus and we set a schedule to scan the disk every night. There is no "resident shield" in ClamAV but to be honest they rarely do any good anyway.
My former boss works at a much larger company (we're still good friends) and he's deployed the strategy across a company with around thirty machines and saved a fortune.
So yes, companies can save money using Open source. The hard part is convincing them that a not-for-profit organisation can deliver quality products. I find ten minutes with Firefox usually does the trick.
Simon
That is why Novell and red Hat are making millions of Euros and Dollars even though they are OSS
.XD
If commercial closed software can do it, why couldn't open source software?
> 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.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Very insightful. Are you an MBA or an MBO (Master of the Blooody Obvious)?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Remember Project David, the WINE ripoff featured last year? They're back.
Made in Japan - The Teriyaki Experience - in Oakville, Ontario, is running approximately 100 restaurants, from Newfoundland to British Columbia on a Point of Sale solution which is about 99% free software. They have an IT department which consists of one person. Using rsync, HQ has its central file systems updated from each location every 10 minutes. Nagios alerts HQ of the health of dozens of system critical threshhold variables in real time. The IT staffer can open a remote display on any location from his touchscreen notebook while sailing outside Toronto Harbor, monitor and control just about any aspect of system behavior via open VPN. There's nothing in the Windows world that can come close to this kind of retail automation or information automation cost savings. Free Software is, if you know where to look, providing cost savings that simply aren't possible with the Windows way of doing things, and providing superior solutions at the same time.
India?
No, Brazil.
I think we should be teaching our children about Intelligently Designed Operating Systems - clearly something as complicated as an Operating System cannot have arisen by 'programming', which was clearly proved wrong in the 1800's - observe the faliure of Babbage.
Operating systems crash because of the sins of their users.
As a Pastafarian I believe that a Bistromath is the one true computer.
Is there really any doubt as to what Slashdot's audience thinks about this issue?
You are absolutely correct, Glonoinha, when you consider costs of a developed country.
Talking once more about me experience in Brazil...
One of the companies I consult for has just renewed their campus wide anti-virus licence (about 1200 desktops running Windows). The cost of the licence alone was comparable to the salaries paid to 5 avarage-to-senior full-time supporters for that same year (if you disconsider the almost 100% government taxes on labour).
And that was for the anti-virus alone. Think about the OS, office production package, ERP, DB, server licences etc.
Those numbers are completely different when you have costy labour, but in our case here, just the licences make A LOT of the TOC.
Don't forget the cost of training and supporting employees. It's reasonable to expect every new professional employee to have fair to good skill in MS office programs and Windows. If the office uses something else, the training costs for new employees is probable a week or two. If business transactions (documents, presentations, email) need to be compatible with those of business partner's the cost of OSS becomes very high. The $250 of so for an Office license (for small businss) is small compared to the training costs or the difficulty in trying to send an almost compatible document to a client or customer.
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.
From the article: "Such a shift toward open-source software for CRM and other business software applications, such as enterprise resource planning, is now beginning at corporations across the globe."
I've got three questions about this, from my experience in a manufacturing environment.
1) Where is this open source software that so easily replaces the commercial software?
2) How can I convince a corporation that has been dealing with a vendor for a particular product for many years that it is worth the pain of switching, even if the end result is good?
3) At what point is a piece of software "safe" and when is better to be more open? Take for example OpenMFG. They could be considered more "safe" than other solutions because they seem to have everything together in a well-supported way. However, their license is unacceptable for anyone who respects the open source ideology. The product isn't free as in beer and only partially free as in speech.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of choice in ERP/MRP, from what I see. Unless the manufacturers start programming a lot of code themselves and don't mind giving up their work to competitors, there will always be restrictions on what open source solutions are available. I would love to see a completely free MRP that does everything needed without a lot of hassle, and still lets my company customize it to save ourselves time and money.
of coucse although india has some support for OSS the vast majority of it's bangalorebandits of the new wild east of software do not wna topen source. as they would have to show u[ their either a/ poor coding b/amazing code which owuld put everyone out of business and themselves out of a job.
..once upon a time.]
.. if they ahd not published that code you would not have learned so quickly... and if you had figutred it out on your own like thise fellows did .. no doubt you would not have released it publically so readers of Dr Dobbs could get at it..]
i was just kidding there.
the real reason why OSS and ant-NDA culture is bad as that they can't *enslave* indian developers into monkey-we're so grateful for the pittance wages. if they came to you with already existing open sourced code or they jsut open sourced it themselves.. there's no reason why you cannot sell the finished product yoursleves locally cutting out the middle man...
fairs fair.
the indians seem very short sghted for all their talents they fear not being able to be favourable to the waves of offshore insourcing
well as wages go up and your expectations rise.. they will jsut go to chine or russia or south america anyway.
and you know ? if you indian programmers are so hot.. why arent you starting your own amazing game houses and what not? with free software and so much out ther i DO think you can compete.
after all you seem to have the talent in coding maths [and the imagination
you seem pretty talented...
i am a computer science student in the west at a fairly advanced institution . my colleagues are nowhere near as gifted as my average old colleagues in maths or computer science. but you know what? they understand the value of acadmeically shared knowledge form whihc you benefitted. my country did not invent any computer langauges or any transistors yet here i am...
i see you dont release any of your code.. tahts pretty sad.
[except the one pice of code thats based around an academic proof of concept open to you published in Dr. Dobbs.
dont you see the irony?
btw im not some awful racist....
this is the same speech i trot out to my own anti-oss compatriots in the middle east, who without OSS they would never have gotten net access due to american embargoes against enemy states and exporting tech.
but our academics were able to use open standards the net was built on and examine bsd source code and the tcp/ip networking stack to create their own routers and so forth.
thus we were the first countries in asia outside of iraq to have the net.
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.
A MSFT rep or a politically minded CIO. Looking at examples across my customer base the cost of support is not any higher for OSS applications, or applications built on open source products, exclusive of the licensing costs. I bill the same whether I'm supporting an application built with .NET and SQL Server or PHP and MySQL.
Provided you're not trying to support open source products with MCSE's there are very few instances where the cost of support is higher in either environment.
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...
You're assuming that you never have to pay a 160/hour consultant (which is a cheap consultant, btw) to support a proprietary environment. I spend more time fixing applications running on MSFT than OSS, using a per application comparison. A perfect example is the last security patch that went out. A customer called in panic mode because one of their critical applications was returning 401 errors. Auto-updates to the rescue. Now some are beginning to come to grips with the fact that apps designed in the current version of .NET may need to be rebuilt or modified to run on the next version of .NET.
Additionally, if you're counting on a vendor for support, you're likely to be disappointed. One customer uses a proprietary application for mapping that was developed in NY. If their system tanked tomorrow, they could get phone support tomorrow and they pay for that. If they need a body to do something, their choices are fly in a tech, at great cost, or call me, also at great cost. But at least I'm not billing for travel on top of that.
If you break down the hourly support cost in a MSFT environment, you'll be surprised that it's not that much less. And in many cases, I would argue, more. Then add licensing costs on top of that, way more.
What I'm even more surprised about is how MSFT PR media talking points tend to get passed around like established fact by people who couldn't figure out how to access a single machine in a room full of server racks. There's a reason I run all my personal projects on LAMP servers.
But, honestly, it doesn't bother me that much. As long as the bozos in charge keep parroting those talking points, I'm going to have a lot of billable hours.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Can open-source software do the trick? Cnet attempts to answer this open ended question
...
Yes.
(Not an open ended question)
I think you're wrong. At its heart, free/open source has to be useful to everyone who needs it. If everyone who used it was expected to "give back" every little change, there would be no coherence as a zillion features that are useless to very few people are jammed in.
At its best, the model involves a few coders at the top who develop features based on either community need, service for a fee, or their own itch, all of which are integrated in the core offering only if it makes sense to most people. Its the same old hierarchical model of control, but there's no other realistic way to do it.
Based on what I see daily on slashdot, I would say the Bloody Obvious is probably too often forgotten. Far too many, especially in the OS movement take for granted that the OS approach is always better and cheaper, sometimes forcing another OS tool that does half the job in twice the time as a one-time cost of $50 would solve.
I myself make a living of using open source, free tools because my manager thinks it's cheaper. In reality, I do the maintainance, and did we run other systems, I would not have as much work as I do. I have a on-demand contract so more work means less noodles and more beef along with my studies.
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.
:-( ).
Real security is not a matter of patching vulnerabilities. It is a matter of getting design right so that those vulnerabilities are both confined and minimized. Sendmail, for example, is a textbook example of how not to design a secure program. BIND is somewhat better but historically it had many of the same sorts of issues. Apache is pretty good. Qmail is quite good design-wise (I am hoping that someone fixes the superserver though to fix that vulnerability issue with environment variables. Technically, that is not part of Qmail, though Qmail depends on it
99% of security issues should be addressed in the design phase. FOSS is no better than commercial software in this way.
In the end, FOSS *is* a large part of the solution. With *NIX, you get a powerful RAD environment for complex automation systems. This increases productivity. With FOSS, you are able to use these powerful systems without having to worry about millions of dollars in licensing fees and free up resources that would otherwise be spent tracking the number of per-seat licenses purchased vs. used... So yes, it makes sense.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
...I must sell my MSFT & Oracle shares first...
The only reason for OSS unpopularity is the lack of common sense in the management... the management has been brainwashed to think this way : "A corporation is good if it earns lot of cash, if the corp. is good then they must have a good product." Now, let's try this on politics : "a political party is good if it has many members, if the party is good then the ideology also must be good"...
I just wonder why I'm not dressed in a brown uniform and sing "Waterland, waterland..." everytime I'm drunk... or why I don't consult a little red book all the time...
anyway, both cases are called propaganda...
Yea, I was just messin' with GP / Chad. I'm guessing no relation, just two guys with good ideas at the same time. Only reason I said it was that both of them read more into my original post than I had written - I wasn't saying either technology or platform (commercial vs open source) was better, I was just saying that the big cost savings aren't found in per-seat licensing, the big cost savings is in more effective utilization of your employees.
The ones that said 'very wise, etc' are the ones that didn't read into my post that I was pro-commercial or anti-f/oss (good thing, because that's not the case) - they are the ones that agree that the savings of 'more work from the same number of employees' far outweighs the savings of 'per seat license costs'.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Totally off topic, but odds are the people reading this thread know the answer :
... what's the scoop on setting it up as a file server?
I'm grew up in the Microsoft world of networking, and before that did lots of Netware - now I am dinking with Linux (SuSE 9.0 ES, and others) and one thing that I have yet to even see mentioned is how to configure 'network shares' or 'a shared file system' on Linux. How do I do the equivalent of the following in Linux:
a) set up a particular directory tree on my Linux box as shared,
b) configure rights for users that are not actually logged in to the box (not telnet'ed or SSH'ed or FTP'ed in, just 'connecting' their Linux box (or Windows box, for that matter) to my shared drive, and
c) do the equiv of "C:\net use y: \\myLinuxBox\myShare" from my Linux box to the shared folder described in a) above.
I keep hearing 'use Linux as a server' but never 'use Linux as a file server' - implying that I can use it as an application server for web services or FTP or telnet or ssh or database server (all of which I have done, for fun or profit) but
Yea I know, lamer - but if I don't ask, I won't know.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
TANSTAAFL
TANSTAASB (silver bullet)
But that won't stop Business looking for both... rather like Alchemists and the Philosopher's Stone. Maybe, one day, Corporate CTO's will go the same way as the Alchemists, hopefully by blowing themselves up... one can but hope.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
As part of a panel discussion I moderated recently that included the participation of CIO representatives of about 30 major companies, we learned that larger businesses are:
1) VERY interested in F/OSS;
2) are NOT interested because of the potential cost savings, but rather because they believe that F/OSS can offer better technology with shorter delivery cycles;
3) are going slow because of the relative lack of enterprise-friendly support options.
If anyone is interested I can maybe write up a journal entry about this.
Your post is a blatent lie. The last Firefox update was the 25th of July. Its now the 22nd of August. There havent been ANY patches to download in the last MONTH
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Done any Windows + data-base + backup installations lately ? Or did you maybe just watch it being done by a crowd of truely efficient (and duly certified) experts. These experts coming from the "front room", of course. As is well known, the front room is where all the light is collected (the money too) and it is where all the light comes from in small biz.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
There's a nicely compiled list of Linux companies in Omaha. My experience is that companies in midwestern cities are slightly less eager than big cities/big co's to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to purchasing high-dollar solutions from Microsoft and the like. The local user group is pretty active too.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52