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Surveys Show Increase In OSS Popularity
segphault writes "Ars Technica takes a look at the results of two different surveys about open source software adoption." From the article: "The survey also addresses the most important question: what motivates organizations to adopt open source software? According to Optaros, cost savings is one of the most significant factors. Optaros says that companies with over US$1 billion annual revenue reported average savings of $3.3 million in 2004 as a result of open source technology, and companies with annual revenue between $50 million and $1 billion reported an average savings of $1.1 million."
studies show that studies about the obvious reveal obvious facts.
I think we can assume that there may be thousands of good reasons for something, but reaching for peoples wallets will convince them much easier. Stopping smoking will make you healthier, driving a beetle instead of an SUV will slow down further global warming, switching to open source will increase security and flexibility.
But Norway reduced the number of smokers by massively increasing tobacco tax, people demand more efficient cars now the oil prices are way up and the main reason for OSS adaption is cost saving.
It's interesting that the article mentions another study by IDC in Europe (instead of one by Optaros and InformationWeek querying American companies) with different results:
But then most European countries signed the Kyoto treaty.memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
It's kind of sad people think of "cost savings" as one of the biggest benefits... Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want... These are things that should be topping that list, but I guess for a business where "the bottom line" is the most important thing for you, that's all we can really hope for :/
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Are the survey respondents taking cost of ownership into consideration? I see no mention of it in the article. Of course OSS is cheaper up front; but cost of ownership includes how much it costs to actually use the software. The real bargains are the OSS that is not only free up front, but also a better product than the alternatives (Apache comes to mind).
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
On the development side, there is nothing like outsourcing the development of your applications to thousands of developers for free. of course OSS is a viable market strategy, your code gets tightened up for at practically no cost. From the adoption standpoint, you don't really have to worry about software going stagnate and if it does, you always have the source to fall back on. OSS works great as long as you have the talent within your organization to support it.
Summing it: "European companies seem to value the flexibility of open source solutions, while American companies value the savings."
That is good, but somewhat disturbing. Is US economy so money-centric despite its capitalistic nature?
According to Optaros, cost savings is one of the most significant factors.
Quite a few people could have told you that for over a decade. I wonder why it took so long for OSS to catch on in the business world? Sure, Microsoft has had their monopoly, but I would have expected high-end businesses to quickly figure out there was a 'better way'. So, was it lack of awareness, lack of training, or something else?
While I believe that open-source products have many long-term benefits for a company (better legacy support, the ability to patch and make alterations as needed, long-term cost savings, etc), companies aren't going to switch immiedately. Why? Because switching costs a lot of money. Let's say I'm a business with 100 computers (desktops). I bought them from Dell and my employees use them. Let's say I want to switch them to Linux. Well, first, I've already paid for Windows (came with the Dells I bought) so I don't get that money back because I'm using Linux now. I also have to retrain workers to use the new systems (yes, those small problems like "Where's the My Documents folder" cost a lot of money for a large organization). So, switching is costing me money rather than saving it. In the long term, I could value the flexibility, free upgrades, etc. that Linux offers and believe that would be more profitable for me in the long run. Of course, on the server side, the situation is easier since if I'm going to be paying a server admin anyway I can hire a UNIX admin and you can buy UNIX servers without paying a Windows tax, but if I'm currently using Windows Server, it can be hard to justify switching. It's always hard to surplant an installed base. Open source will get there, but there is no panacia of cost savings or ease in the short term. I believe that those benefits will be there in the long term, but it can often be hard for companies to look past the end of their nose.
Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want... These are things that should be topping that list
/.ers, but really, the general public cares about (in no order):
That's what counts to you, and to a lot of us
1) How much does it cost?
2) Does it do what I need?
3) Is it easy?
4) If it breaks, will someone fix it for me?
It's kind of sad people think of "cost savings" as one of the biggest benefits... Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want... These are things that should be topping that list, but I guess for a business where "the bottom line" is the most important thing for you, that's all we can really hope for
I think you're introducing a false dichotomy. After all, why should a business care if the software does what they need, can be fixed, and doesn't do clandestine things while they're not looking? Because it potentially loses them money.
That's what TCO is all about.
If you can convince a business that OSS will do more of what they need, will be more cheaply repaired if it breaks, and they won't hemorrhage money through security holes, they'll go with OSS. You're right, it is all about cost; but cost and the other factors you identify aren't different things to value, they're one and the same.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
what motivates organizations to adopt open source software? According to Optaros, cost savings is one of the most significant factors.
You mean people like open source software because it's free? Duh! I could have told them that without the survey.
No Sigs!
but reaching for peoples wallets will convince them much easier.
Yea, that's what I thought when I founded my company. I was providing consulting and integration services. I tried to present my company as advantageous over other because while labor for a Windows server was the same as a Samba server, there was a >$700 savings with Samba and in some cases the savings would have been in the tens of thousands. I thought that I would be "selling" a lot of Samba. Boy was I wrong.
One year out of the gate, I have "sold" no Samba servers. I have sold two dozen Windows and Netware servers but that's about it. In fact, the only Linux I have been able to "sell" have been specialty servers like spam/virus gateways and Rsync backups to supplement, not replace, tape backups.
So far, no one wants it even if it is free! Thank goodness desktop service remains strong. If it weren't for spyware and viruses, I would have folded six months ago.
Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want... These are things that should be topping that list
You're so right. Those would be very excellent benefits...if every user was also an ambitious coder with time to tweak, recompile, and test multiple complex software packages written in various compiled and interpreted languages.
Unfortunately, most users just like to, well, _use_ things that _work_for_them_ without a lot of f'ing around. So, they find a little less benefit to themselves in having the source code and a compiler at their disposal.
Instead they like the thing that simply costs them less--in money, time, headaches, whatever. Isn't that just a tragedy?
the savings are more or less the same, therefore companies with less budget have a greater percentage in savings.
In other words:
People with less money have more reasons to go open source.
Within the context of any one sourcing decision, the freedoms offered by OSS can be quantified as cost savings.
"Freedom to use software the way you want" = productivity gains = don't have to hire more staff = cost saving.
"The ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want" - those freedoms are available with much (although by no means all) closed-source software: but only at a ridiculously high price. In a true apples-for-apples comparison, that high price can be expressed either as a cost on the closed-source side, or a cost saving on the open-source side.
On the other hand, in a skewed comparison (i.e. if the closed-source model in the comparison does not include those additional costs), it follows that these freedoms allow for a much lower budget for contingencies under the open-source model. Again, cost savings.
Why is it sad? People like free stuff. It's not like big corporations are the only ones that like free stuff either. You listed some good benefits, but most non-programmers cannot do the things you listed. Why would you expect these to top the list of a survey that I assume was filled out by mostly non-programmers?
No Sigs!
So if I did my super swell math correctly 3.3 Million to 1 Billon is .33%
Not what I would call a great savings. That is just a drop in the bucket for these companies, they probably spend more on office supplies.
>If you can convince a business that OSS will do more of what they need, will be more
>cheaply repaired if it breaks, and they won't hemorrhage money through security holes,
>they'll go with OSS
I'm afraid that most enterprise experience with OSS is that there are just as many, if not more, reported security holes in (for instance) Linux than (for instance) Windows. I spend a good deal of my time explaining to management why that is a good thing - more reported security vulnerabilities means the OS is more transparent. I always leave them with the parting thought... "Do you really believe that just because MS and Sun report fewer security bugs, that their software has fewer security bugs?"
You are right, the benefits of OSS need to be presented as a TCO argument. But it's mistaken to expect to sell that on the basis of "they won't hemorrhage money through security holes", they'll still spend a lot of money updating their infrastructures with every new security patch, the point is that if they follow through, they won't end up in the headlines for letting some script kiddie compromise their systems.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
In business, money is the meat of the matter.
Everything else is gravey or icing on the cake.
But OSS sure does make great gravey and icing.
I'd like to see someone do a study regarding the TCO for small businesses. It seems like nowadays the focus is on large corporations, but we can't forget that "Mom & Pop stores" bring large amounts of revenue as well.
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
Using FREE software allows a company to hire programmers to modify that source code to better fit their business needs. The OS etc of a system should be free, having programs custom tailored to your business model should not. It's not that the OS and user environment aren't valued, it's that for the most part everyone needs the same thing, so why should everyone have to pay through the nose for it? And why should you not be able to modify it and use it the way you see fit? And beyond that, why should you have to re-create everything from the ground up each time you want to add something to an existing application? Share and Enjoy!
Unfortunately, "free" carries a negative connotation in the business world: worthless.
The smart thing to do is charge a f*sking fortune for something that is free. Make it a status symbol/exclusive/BS. The well-known red hat and IBM are perfect examples.
Sounds crazy, but it's true. As you understand Linux is an **unbelievable** value for the SMB. Lack of cheap MCSA's makes "free" sound like a whole lot of trouble.
Related story: I've got the small company I work for running linux for some things. My boss (Not a PHB) *still* does not want to convert the Windows file server that requires way more baby sitting than the busier linux box. It's only a file server for gosh sake!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
>sudo su
What's wrong with just su?
Were that I say, pancakes?
An application that costs more, but seems to be easier to use, will draw more users than a cheap or free app that might be perceived to take more time to learn. In many cases, consumers will buy a more expensive piece of software simply because they recognize the brand, and already know how to work it, rather than accept another piece of software on the claims that it is more cost-efficient, easier to use and reliable.
"Curse your sudden, but inevitable betrayal!"
TCO also includes
Yep, it's important to look at the whole picture.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I for one can't understand why the software industry is basically the ONLY ONE giving away the result of its work and talent.
It isn't. You just wrote an opinion and gave it away. Think of all those poor starving opinion writers for newspapers and magazines. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
doh. oh well at least both work
The philosophy of OSS is a two way street. Who gives a damn about big business hiring programmers to custom tailoer OSS if they are not in turn contributing those contiributions back to the community, assuming they are worhty of contributing?
Truth is most people simple take with no return. People are starting to see new business models that basically take all the OSS building blocks and assemble them into something more usefull. As long as we/you/they are willing to give for free others will be willing to take and profit.
How long before other OSS developers start to realize that sometimes life is about making money off your hard work...and at other times it is about doing it simply because you can. Why should we spent nights and weekends writing free code to simply be hired for less than $100,000 ( really more like less than $60,000 ) by a CEO making millions? When was the last time a chemist slaved away for free? when was the last time a home builder built a house for the masses for free?, When was the last time a docter treated a patient for free? F*%$ when was the last time an insurance company said jee...huricane/tsunami/earth-quake victim this one is on the house. For christs sake when was the last time a burger form McDonalds was free?
Blah this post is turning into a rant for no reason so I will just quit before I get to many troll mods.
what?
I personally think the cost factor is *the* reason OSS has gotten as far as it has. When the bubble burst, companies were hooked on their expensive software packages and products but couldn't afford the licensing anymore. OSS came to the rescue and along the way showed people that paying a lot for your software doesn't mean it's any better. People have found bottom line gains with OSS even excluding the cost savings through such things as increased stability, uptime, etc.
Most importantly if it is free and falls down on any of the above criteria in any way anyone can do something themselves to make it cheaper, do what they need, easier or not break.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Cost savings means MORE profit!!! That simple. A friend of mine has a mid sized company in Seattle and switched to OSS and the savings made his profit much larger (accounting looked great) and he then sold the company to a competitor for a huge gain.
Come on, cost savings means the money goes to the owners (shareholders) pockets and not Microsoft, Apple or any other propreitary system.
Also it saves paying the tech guys for stupid certs like the MCSE etc.... which mean nothing but more wages...It drives labor costs down as well which is why big corporations and governments like it.
From what I can tell as a sysadmin for the CS department at a University:
1.) Better development platform.
2.)
We get all the windows stuff for free. We have a site license for everything in the entire MSDN Academic Alliance catalog. And we still roll more Linux than Windows.
Programmers want Linux.*
~Will
*And a few faculty members still want Digital/True64 4G for their Fortran compilers, since the GCC-Fortran kludge sucks and Lehey is expensive... but I digress...
sig?
Making money is much more fun. Besides, how can you save money if you don't have any to save?
Who moved my sig?
In other words, FUD ("Licensing concerns") is actually having an effect in the US. Partially, it's because the larger the company (in the US), the more likely they will be hit with license violation lawsuits. (e.g. SCO aims for IBM)
Partially, companies have licensing concerns because they don't understand the GPL. They don't believe they can get something for nothing.
OSS.
This is due to Linux != OSS || Linux <> OSS, whichever you prefer.
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
The percentages you came up with were 0.33%, assuming $1B revenues and average Open Source savings, and 0.11% for another company just below $1B but with average savings at the mid-sized company rate.
The net profit margin of the archetypal discount store, Wal-Mart, is 3.5%. If we assume the hypothetical $1B company has similar margins then an additional 0.33% would mean almost 10% higher profits. Sears, a typical large department store chain, has a profit margin of 1.6%. As you can see, this is fairly typical in their class. So, 0.33% would mean an increase in profits of over 20% if our hypothetical company had financial numbers like Sears.
Obviously, if a CEO were to implement a POS system or somesuch that yielded a savings of 3.3 million dollars, he could expect investor confidence to rise and that would be reflected in his stock options. I am sure that most CEOs bonuses are based at least partly on profits, so he could expect to be rewarded for his wisdom in choosing Open Source solutions.
And while the other company in your analysis had only 0.11% of their total revenue in additional profits, think of a $50M revenue company that was saving 1.1 million. That would be a significant increase. And keep in mind that use of Open Source software by corporations is still quite limited. The savings are sure to multiply as more and more Open Source is phased in.
What gets me is point #4. The software arena is littered with orhaned software. The best way to insure you have an unsupported application is to buy a proprietary closed source software package. Oracle, MS, SAP, Peoplesoft all force you to either to upgrade or lose support. Companies get bought out by rivals and product lines get slashed. Companies go out of business and their clients have no access to the source. That is a huge risk. I think more user education/manager education is needed as to the risks of proprietary closed source software.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Why? Sure, standards are great (so good that Microsoft needs to make their own!), but we live in a money-driven society. Cost savings are the number one influence for almost any decision.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
With OSS there's no clear strategy for apportioning blame elsewhere if things go PEAR-shaped (heh... PHP joke, sorry). You take responsibility for yourself, and those brave enough to do so are rewarded.
But no-one rises through middle-management by bravery, they do so by political contrivance added to a certain required degree of competence, camoflauge and understanding.
The current situation is that commercial solutions are poor for many, many applications (it still shocks me how bad many 'commercial' systems are after growing up in the OSS world).
But this suits many businesses perfectly, as it gives them both a specific vendor, and a generally accepted way of doing business system that can plausibly be blamed for a wide variety of outcomes.
Therefore low-quality, closed-source software meets a systemic business need that is at the very heart of many enterprises.
Nothing, except that when Knoppix boots you don't know the root password.
OS X does that too, last time I checked: you can sudo but unless you explicitly set the root password you never know what it is.
All's true that is mistrusted
For some sufficiently large value of $$$, RedHat and/or Novell/SuSe will take responsibility.
The difference between a chemist giving away his work for free and a programmer giving his work away for free is that a programmer only requires time to create his work. After buying a computer, which he probably already owns anyway, he only has to contribute time to give away stuff for free. Also, most programmers enjoy what they are doing, and don't think of it as work, but actually a hobby. The cost comes down much more when you consider open source software, and the fact that you can run a computer for almost nothing. A chemist on the other hand has to pay for many chemicals, many of them very expensive. He also has to pay for lots of equipment, in order to have a proper lab, so he doesn't burn his house down. This is why I think programming is so great. It lets you be very creative and productive, without paying tons for equipment and supplies.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That must have changed because I can su without a password on my older knoppix disc (no idea what rev off hand).
Were that I say, pancakes?
It's about TIME I heard about a study that states the obvious: not having to pay for your software saves you money. I was getting really tired of all the MS sponsored studies showing that free software was in fact more expensive.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
As opposed to most commercial software, which isn't designed to do what the users actually need?
why shouldn't i be allowed to write software for free and give it away? why should i have to make business out of it? why shouldn't i just want to help other people and try to produce a work of art in the form of good software? how many poets get paid for their work? how many composers and musicians? answer: less than 5% i'd estimate. and some of the very best are amateurs in the sense of 'don't get paid'. exactly the same is true for the art form called programming.
The cost of commercial software often is not the problem, this often would be negligible.
But company bureaucracy forces you to write a project plan, rentability calculations, get permission of pointy haired bosses and so on.
Why bother with that, if you can use free software?
Sometimes my collegues and me do semi-private projects like setting up a department wiki. This would be impossible without free software and if we had to go through official ways.
If you think back to the outsourcing situation which started a few years ago, companies started moving offices/staff/call centers to other countries to save themselves money. This gave them the edge on the competition, who soon had to start making the same out sourcing decisions to stay competitive in the market. The more companies that move, the more pressure there is on all companies in that market to do the same thing.
Open Source Software might be able to follow in similar footsteps - because it will start giving the competitive advantage to a few companies, others will be "forced" to compete in that market. Apply the same logic as above, and you have the opportunity to phase out proprietary software.
One of the stigmas attached to outsourcing though is that while costs may go down, so does the quality and the service. In some cases "its good enough" is fine, but as we know in some areas OSS has the advantage of being superior in terms of quality, functionality and reliability. It's almost like outsourcing from Asia to the US/UK and getting a cheaper, better and more free service/solution.
When was the last time a docter treated a patient for free? It happens all the time in more civilized countries. Seriously though doctors aren't all about those $$$, some probably actually got involved to preserve life. The basic point though is that you are failing to appreciate is that people will do things for other reasons than money. For one thing you fail to appreciate that OSS developers benefit from the use of their products as well. Why work on Linux so Google can have cheap servers? Well, because I can run Linux too.
Definitely true.
I install a few servers for local people every now and again and frequently get mails asking me to come visit small companies to tighten up their networks.
I could "sell" maybe a third of them on the idea of a caching-proxy server (squid) setup and managed for 400 UK pounds. Up the price to 700 and the uptake was higher.
I felt bad for charging so much for free software, but if that is what it takes ..
Yup, and opensource by nature of it being open and staying open has the potential to compound, snowball if you will. More users will mean more developers working on it releasing code that improves it all faster. Of course more developers doesn't always mean better code, but on the whole it's going to work. There's a tipping point and we're probably finally getting there. Of course supplanting proprietary software producers is not good for them if they don't adjust to the change, but it is good for everyone else. It will make all other businesses that much more profitable. Which means more jobs and pay, opportunities, etc.
I wasn't trying to say you shouldn't. I have given lots of code away for free and will continue to do so. My problem is the expectation from non programmers that all software should be free.
Probably some day when you are trying to write code for a living you will loose some of the idealism...hopefully not all of it.
what?
This is really all about the development of a much more matured and experienced network purchasing executive. A lot of companies and people have been through this excersize for years and have learnt their lessons and the change in the market place reflects that. Of course there is a lot of old software out there yet to be replaced, with companies holding onto for as long as they can, for them there is a double benefit, the get the maximum value out of the original purchase (excluding of course maintenance and security costs) but they also feel the will be able to make the swap to a more mature open source market place when they want to update to something better.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
People now *expect* their software to be free. Do they think software writes itself?
just because it is OSS, doesn't mean you can't charge money for it. at the same time, all these OSS devs at several companies _are_ getting paid.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
... morphs Ada code into C.
Not the first time I hear this crap.
Damm where does this FUD come from. All base gcc front ends - that is (in alphabetical order) Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Java and Objective-C are standart compiler systems - compiling directly into object code. No intermediate C at all.
Martin
It's kind of sad people think of "cost savings" as one of the biggest benefits... Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want...
I agree with you, but the freedom to use a software package for your own reasons/goals is an important benefit of free software. I actually think of this attraction to low cost to be one of free software's greatest strentghs. People will come for the low cost and stay for the increased flexibility, security, control, and large support community.
Most of these benefits will only become apparent to users after they have used a system for some time. Ironically enough the benefits, in my experience, do not become truely apparent until the user has some kind of problem, and he is able to find a solution/patch from the community rather than spending hours on hold with a vendor whose running out the clock on its SLA.
Linux : Hotrod
Microsoft's Steve balmer threw linux at a chair, saying "that's our $3.3 million in revenues!"
Linux in your wallet? Damn Small Linux.
As a general rule most health-care is open source, because doctors realise that publishing how a procedure is performed benefits everyone, and that the real money in medicine is being able to perform those procedures effectively. The reason you can't remove your child's spleen is because you don't want to try because you might cock it up, so even though the information is out there, you really want someone who can tell one end of a scalpel or clamp from the other.
The flipside of course is pharmaceutical companies, who would rather addict their customers to something that keeps the symptoms of illness at bay temporarily rather than a cure, who fight over patents and intellectual property, who maintain high prices even though people in the developing world are dying because they cannot afford basic medicines, etc etc.
There are a few parallels really aren't there?