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Is Fear Reducing the Publicity for Open Source?
sebFlyte writes "Are companies deliberately keeping quiet about moves to open source because they are afraid of the reactions of proprietary vendors they still have relationships with? ZDNet raises and tries to answer this question in a two-part special report, 'Open source behind closed doors'. It comes to the conclusion that, in all probability, companies are keeping quiet to avoid reprisals of one sort or another. One part of the fear of publicizing migrations is nicely summed up in the second part by Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe: 'Guys are really shy -- it's the Munich Linux thing. They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.'"
is FUD working ?. /.
yep...its leading to articles like this on
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
Lets see you have a new idea.
There is some risk in using it, it might not work, might upset your current suppliers or customers.
You decide to try it. If you don't tell anyone you have no risk of upsetting your customers or suppliers.
If it works you get the benefis before your customers know what's happening. If it doesn't work maybe your customers will make the same mistake.
I can't think of a compelling reason to publicise deployment of opensource technology, except to the shareholders if they want details of strategy.
FUD is the _main source_ of publicity for open source.
Would you have even known Linux existed if you hadn't heard all this screaming from MS saying "WINDOWS IS BETTER THAN ALL THOSE FREE OPEN SOURCE OSES THAT RUN 80% OF THE INTERNET, NYAH NYAH!"?
Well... MySQL *is* a toy system. Yes, Access is even worse, and it's not like MySQL doesn't have its uses; but any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.
If you want a good database, why not look into PostgreSQL?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Here's a little secret kiddo: lots and lots of suppliers are like that. All of the suppliers that we use give us large volume discounts. If they start losing some of our business, they'll try to keep us, but they'll also jack up their prices. Loyalty is rewarded in every aspect of business. Just because this is new to you doesn't mean it's new or at all unusual.
They don't understand it and are afraid of things they don't understand.So there is little incentive to inform them. We only really need the managers when we need their approval to buy something. So they only ever hear about things that costs money and gets a distorted view of things.
TCAP-Abort
I bet in part it is due to some admins sneakily switching over the companies network/web/whatever server over and not telling the boss because they don't need to know and it saves hassle
Unhuh. And why is it you're not validating user input? Bad data should never have a chance to get to the database in the first place.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It may also be ignorance. Let's say a company whose workforce is accostumed to windows does tech support for some hardware products. One of their clients phone, they have a problem. During the phonecall the client mentions he has linux installed on a partition. Bingo, the tech support guy genuinely think that the problem is an interference or a misconfiguration because of the presence of "that other os".
:)
Once I offered to backup an old win98 machine with a linux livecd and an usb stick because the system was clogged, and I didn't trust myself to install more drivers on it. People instead were thinking the opposite, with running linux as the risky choice. D'oh!
Sometimes it works the other way. I phoned my ISP cause "my internet was broken"
Tech support starts talking about configuration, on windows. I cut short: "I am using linux and tested both my installations and one of OSX. My ethernet hub blinking lights says that my network card works, too".
"So it's the modem or the line" (both their business, and of course it was a line problem).
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Perhaps they don't want their competitors to know that they too can have the exact same solutions for free....
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Sure, blame the programmer. In the meanwhile, the systems that run MySQL will continue to silently fail due to bugs, and distrupt your data, while those who run better database systems will catch the bug and fix it at an earlier stage.
If this is true that is. I saw something in vTigerCRM where if I store a long website URL into an account, it will just become shortened without any warning. So I'm inclined to believe this is true. That is *Very*, *Very*, *Seriously* foobar, IMHO.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
And why is it you're not validating user input? Bad data should never have a chance to get to the database in the first place.
I disagree with the implication that the application layer is the only layer responsable for data intgrety.
Maintaining a constant database is as important as maintaining a secure network.
You wouldn't simply install a firewall on your network, ignoring all other security measures and saying "but it's the firewalls job to do that..."
The same applies to data integrity. Both the app layer and the data layer should do their own validation.
Ubuntu is the pet project of a very rich guy who does Ubuntu for fun. There are not too many other products on the planet that are produced and given away for free "just because". People would be idiots NOT to question why a product is given away for free.
Would you take a free ham sandwich from a guy standing on the street? How about some free car tires from some random guy who says that they're jsut as good as the tires you buy from a store? "Free" generally means "something wrong with it". Only recently has society had an abundance of very wealthy people who have enough surplus time and money that they're willing to give it away for nothing. It's going to take several generations for people to wrap their minds around, assuming that it lasts that long. It's a completely foreign concept to just about everybody who has to work to earn a living.
their internal tech moves because nobody really gives a damn. It would be the height of arrogance for a company to assume that the world cares whether it moves to open source or any other tech for that matter. Most companies aren't in the business of announcing to the world what their internal tech moves are.
I don't know what internal tech McDonalds uses, and don't care. McDonalds knows that I don't care, and therefore doesn't waste time bothering to make irrelevant declarations to the world regarding their internal tech.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The whole "convicted of abusing their monopoly position" is entirely meaningless. I wish that you lemmings would quit repeating that, as if the US judicial system was overseen by God, Himself. They were arbitarily chosen because they have deep pockets, and very strong rivals who were getting whipped silly. I can guarantee that that case didn't happen to protect you or any other end user from the big, evil "monopoly".
Try running a restaurant where you have fountain drinks with both Coke and Pepsi. products. See how much of a price break you get, if either vendor will even agree to sell to you. It happens every day, in every business that I've ever worked in, studied, or owned. You just aren't aware of it.
Microsoft invented the EULA that we all see. Until recently they were not even a binding agreement because a laywer and a notary needs to be present.
However MS set teh standard and changed the industry to ignore laws with some strange eula that the user does not even see to make them imune to any laws. Did you know sony has eulas for their cd's?
Why the heck are you comparing apples and smoked salmon? We're talking about large volume licensing, the kind that happens via a plain old-fashioned no-legal-doubt-about-validity contract. Their single end-user licensing has absolutely nothing to do with large volume pricing. As far as that "accepted practise" goes, it depends on where. Any country accept volume discounts, but some countries do not allow a dominating company to base those on purchases of competing goods. In other words, you can give me a good price for 100k copies of software, but not depending on whether I use 100k licenses or 100k+20k licenses from someone else. Instead, they offer site licenses which circumvent the problem by making the marginal cost zero, which effectively means you might as well put the other 20k users on MS too...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is another explanation. I worked for an expert systems company when it was "the next big thing". There were very few reports in the press about companies developing expert systems, though people in the field knew a lot was being done.
The major reason was that the possibility of getting a competitive advantage by producing something that nobody else had.
The same may be true here but in a different way - you just removed a large amount of your cost base, but you don't want your competitors to know about it because they might start doing the same thing.
Please don't label me as a troll. I understand the benefits of OSS as much as anyone.
Honestly, I think much of the problem comes from over-hyping OSS. It should be obvious that the usefulness of OSS is directly related to the quality of the software, but unfortunately there's a tendency to lump all open software together. Witness how many people respond to "There's no good OSS equivalent of Photoshop" with "Use the GIMP!" when in reality there's no comparison, even with the Photoshop GUI hacks for The GIMP.
Numerous times I've looked at open source clones of software, only to dismiss them because they're written by bored students with little software engineering experience. I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system. You run much less risk when there's a company behind it. Sure, I *could* learn the code and take over it myself, but that's unrealistic. You can't just pick up a 50,000+ line program and understand it. (In many cases looking at the code would be enough to make me avoid that program.)
Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.
The whole "convicted of abusing their monopoly position" is entirely meaningless. I wish that you lemmings would quit repeating that
Translation: "I can't actually refute this based on facts, so I'll just insult you all for bringing it up, and then try to make it look like they're victims."
Two wrong don't make a right. I know it's fashionable to ignore ethics in American business but that does not mean the consumers are not allowed to complain about sleazy businesses or point out their slimy behavior.
MS is amongst the top of the sleaziest corporations. YOu can bitch and moan all you want about how people should not be allowed to say that but it's futile. You are not going to be able to silence people who have a bone to pick with a corporation who is working so hard to destory open source and calling people who use and write open source software communists and anti-american.
What is good for the goose and all that. Why is it OK for Bill Gates to call me a communist just because I like linux but not OK for me to call him a criminal because he (his company) was tried and convicted despite an appeal?
evil is as evil does
I've been through one software audit ... we were squeaky clean, but it took about 4 hours of my time. Multiply that by the 25,000+ employees of that company, at their fully loaded pay rate and it was DAMNED EXPENSIVE to come up squeaky-clean.
All of the suppliers that we use give us large volume discounts. If they start losing some of our business, they'll try to keep us, but they'll also jack up their prices. Loyalty is rewarded in every aspect of business.
Loyalty may be rewarded in business, but loyalty is something measured over time. Purchase rates are a measurement of space. If a company is effectively punished not for decreasing their purchase rate but instead for purchasing also from a competitor, it's generally regarded as anti-competitive practices, not any sign of a business trying to instill loyalty. Seeing how there doesn't seem to be a move away from Windows on the desktop in most places (which means that with ever growing companies, there's even more Windows purchases each upgrade cycle), but instead Linux and other free software are making end-roads into the server market where Windows never existed, it's even further ludicrous to claim that reducing rewards is somehow a measurement of loyalty (short of loyalty to supporting Microsoft as a monopoly).
It's at this point I'd like to draw a strong analogy of Microsoft to Coca-Cola. Why? Because both are a clear example of using IP to drastically mark-up the innate sale price of a consumer good, then using this drastic mark-up and the exclusiveness to have a flexible difference between the sale price to consumers and the sale price to distributors. It's this flexible difference that gives Microsoft and Coca-Cola the undue control over distributors, allowing a form of anti-competitiveness impossible in industries without the same sort of IP protection. After all, while one company that makes bolts can surely try to punish you for buying bolts from a separate company, the non-exclusiveness of bolts allows you to completely dump them for another company who won't try to screw you over in the same way (of course, an ideolistic view ignoring logistics like shipping). In the end, the almighty dollar will mean that bolt companies more obsessed with loyalty and screwing over the disloyal will run out of customers because their bolt prices will be too high.
So long as their IP protection for Microsoft and Coca-Cola, though, this cycle of price reduction can't begin. So, we can either motivate everyone to switch to screws instead of bolts, and hope that screws have enough competition without creating another Microsoft, or we can motivate everyone to switch towards a system that cuts the IP exclusiveness out of the equation. The second it was realized that computer code could function, not just be humanly interpreted, the ability to copyright it should have been expressibly outlawed. This is what makes recipes and computer code different than music and books. It's also the reason why software patents, assuming you think patents are okay, are the sort of IP that makes sense for recipes and computer code.
Oh, and as a small aside, yes I realize that Munich was a clear example of MS actually losing sales. And they were, at least in the short term, promised discounts to lure them to stay. So, if anything, Microsoft seemed to actually be rewarding talk of disloyalty. But yea, in the end, Microsoft was hoping they'd kill Linux, et al; I'm sure at that point, they'd go back and punish all those who were disloyal or spoke of being disloyal. Really, if you're girlfriend was threatening to have sex with another guy, would you be more inclined to dump her or would you throw lots of money to get her to stay? The only reasons I'd throw money at her is if a) I was really pathetic and desperate or b) I was for sure I'd end up marrying her and hence be able to do worse and use her examples of wanting to cheat as an excuse. There's nothing healthy about such a relationship.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Lets not forget that Microsoft got into corporate america via. stealth installs. Dos/Windows applications could be installed by end users and thus business departments could add their own IT functions themselves without needing to go through IT. As a result they switched from their mainframe/mini setups to windows for business applications....
Its ironic that Linux is getting into IS shops the same way (though its IS avoiding having to go through budget this time around). Anyway I'm all in favor of stealth installs. Hell anything that defuses power in a corporation away from management is pretty good in my book.
Economically speaking (I'm a linguist, not an economist, damnit!), this relates to things like scarcity and COGS (cost of goods sold). The direct expenses in selling software come from the expectations of the consumer: flashy box, manuals, media. The bulk of the expenses in producing software come from time: paying people to make things (code, packaging, marketing). In the case of downloadable software, the only realy direct expense in distribution is bandwidth.
In the ham sandwich case, for example, the price is driven by the relative scarcity of the item. There is only one ham sandwich, and you can only sell it to one interested party, before you as the salesperson no longer have the sandwich and have to prepare anothher. Each incidence of an item sold increases the COGS numbers in a pretty linear fashion; for software, what expense there is comes in the form of labor. Gold code can be reproduced and distributed for far under the ham-sandwich-type model.
And furthermore, bullshit to grandparent's "you wouldn't take free stuff". Ever been to a college campus or a radio station remote broadcast? People will do freaking anything to get a free t-shirt or a can of Coke.