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

Just what are they asking?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Can open-source software do the trick?

For money, or for candy?

Free software pays for better support

[mpoli]

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.

Re:Free software pays for better support

[Glonoinha]

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.

Re:Free software pays for better support

[Daniel Dvorkin]

You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.

Are you kidding? This is never overlooked, because the anti-F/OSS crowd keeps harping on it. "Sure, you'll save $x,000 on software," they wail, "but what about the cost of wages? That will go way up, because open source is haaaard!"

Which, of course, is bullshit. The fact is, F/OSS IT solutions cost no more to administer than comparable proprietary ones do, and often cost less, because Oracle DBA's and the like make businesses pay through the nose. I fought a long and mostly successful battle to move my employer away from proprietary to F/OSS for our IT needs, and I built the infrastructure mostly from scratch, myself. Wages for proprietary software: one employee. Wages for F/OSS: one employee, who was a hell of a lot happier working with his choice of tools than with whatever crap a "solutions vendor" wanted to foist on us.

The upshot? We have a stable, working IT infrastructure, and because of the money we saved, the department was able to grow in recent years from one employee (me) to four, keeping pace with the company's growth from a four-person shop in a single office to a $30 million / year multinational. Granted, this may not be all that impressive by MegaConglomerCo standards, but we make a good product and a lot of people, including me, are pretty damn happy about how things worked out.

Yes

[Ckwop]

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

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...

[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?

[CyricZ]

The main limiting factor is, like usual, time and resources. A product like Oracle, for instance, has had years upon years of time and millions upon millions of dollars poured into it. While the open source community can produce the mighty fine PostgreSQL, they just don't have the time nor resources to produce a product equivalent to Oracle.

Like it or not, open source projects are constrained by the same factors of production that any other good is constrained by. They can't be avoided, be it an open source project or a commercial, closed-source project.

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:Open Source and Money? Are you nuts?

[DaHat]

Oh yes... because Novell and Red Hat are such great examples of making money hand over fist.

Let us also not forget VA Software, one of the original poster children for making money through Linux

Here's another couple of case studies

[DSP_Geek]

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.

Re:Why is this on slashdot?

[cnerd2025]

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.

Re:Open Source and Money? Are you nuts?

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:Yes, but...

[Michalson]

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.

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.