New OSS Doomed In Enterprise?

Rob wrote to mention a Computer Business Review Online article which posits that immature open source software is doomed in an enterprise environment nowadays. From the article: "Open-source startups and relative newcomers must target a new breed of CIOs, which Graf dubs chief process innovation officers. Rather than old-school CIOs who focus on a company's data management, these guys design processes with the company's network. "If you want to become strategic to the company, you need to deal with business processors. 'The key question for open source is, Which open source technologies are mature enough to survive the consolidation that's coming?' Graf said. 'Linux? Definitely. Eclipse? Definitely. Mozilla? Most likely.'"

Comments

OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its all about accountability. Even if Microsoft may not have the best product, when it fails, the suits are able to hold Microsoft accountable. A little harder to do that with Debian, or any OSS without corporate backing. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[inter alias]

Read the MS EULA.. They can't be held accountable for anything.

What they offer is paid support. 3rd party paid support is often availible for OSS, but some exec's probably feel it need to come directly from the maker.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost right.

It has nothing to do about being "able to hold Microsoft accountable". Seriously. Have those conversations with them, and hey will do *NOTHING* to help your enterprise for the damage their software causes (for example the millions lost to viruses affecting your corporate network, your employees, etc).

If you push *really* hard (with your legal team) -- and this is far far harder than it sounds with Microsoft -- they will cover your losses *exactly* as deeply as the Debian folk will --- the cost you paid for the software.

It has everything to do with the Microsoft sales guy who takes our CIO out to lunch, and has a bigger lunch budget than Debian, etc.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[jav1231]

As already pointed out, MS will do very little. This is a myth that people just assume because you "bought" it. The idea is, you buy car and if it does something horribly outside it's designed function you can goto GM, Ford, Chrysler, whoever and they will be held accountable. Therefore, Microsoft will too. It simply is a myth and this presumption is something the MS likes to play with in their FUD. This whole idea that CIO's are "savvy" and "a new breed" is completely garbage if they still believe MS will ever come back and say, "Yeah, our software had a huge coding bug that cost you $12million. Here's a check to cover your loses and a patch to make sure it doesn't happen again." And yet, they like to leave that impression when they say, "If you load Debian, whose accountable?"

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[haus]

Please name one example of Microsoft every being held accountable for their software failing to work as promised?

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[CastrTroy]

Except in the case with MS, you paid to get software that fails. If you use open source, and don't pay for support, at least you didn't spend money to have software that fails.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Theatetus]

the suits are able to hold Microsoft accountable

No they're not. They may think they are, but they're wrong. If a Microsoft application fails and destroys millions of dollars of data for you, and you sue Microsoft, you will at most be able to get back the price you paid for the application. Microsoft does not warrant or guarantee their software; no commodity software maker does.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[AKAImBatman]

As already pointed out, MS will do very little.

That's not entirely true. Microsoft will sell you an entire army of tech support drones and Microsoft Certified Support Providers. That way your boss can go back to his boss and say, "Microsoft is working on it." To which your boss's boss will say, "I'm glad we paid for Microsoft! Just imagine how difficult it would be to get support if we paid for Linux!" Thus your boss's neck is saved from the chopping block by simply passing the buck.

If your boss decided to keep things internal, he'd have to tell his boss, "We're working on the problem right now and hope to have it fixed soon. We could purchase support from company XYZ to speed up the process." To which your boss's boss will say, "If we're supporting it internally, why did it break in the first place and when is it going to be fixed? Is that third party the vendor? Then how do they know anything about anything?" If he gives the answer, "See, this open source stuff...," he'll hear the words, "You're fired!" before he finishes the sentence.

Of course, your boss's boss may be smarter than that. But many managers won't take the that risk with their own necks.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[typical]

The point is not that Microsoft can be held accountable -- it's that the purchaser cannot be held responsible.

Corporations are highly risk-adverse in culture.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[yfkar]

No, the MS EULA does not mean that they can't be held accountable for anything, even if the EULA says so.

Whether they can be held accountable is up for the courts to decide.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if Microsoft may not have the best product, when it fails, the suits are able to hold Microsoft accountable. A little harder to do that with Debian, or any OSS without corporate backing.

If your business is in shut a state that sueing MSFT or some linux distro is in the cards then there's more to worry about.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[ScuzzMonkey]

Whether they can be held accountable is up for the courts to decide.

Provided you have sufficiently deep pockets to fight it out with the legal juggernaut that is Microsoft's counsel in that venue for a decade or more, sure. But Microsoft is actually pretty good about keeping the few major corporate entities which might do so appeased for their particular needs, so this is unlikely to happen, and for all practical purposes for the vast majority of users, the grandparent is correct.

Besides, at the heart of the argument, they have pretty clearly signalled that they don't intend to accept responsibility just by including that language in the EULA, so that should give pause to anyone who thinks that's an important factor in purchasing decisions.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[ScottLindner]

That's exactly what I was thinking. I'd like to see a rebate from M$ for all the damage in the IT world because of their crappy software.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[jav1231]

I'm not sure what the "army of drones" is. I work for a major communications company. We have one TAM from Microsoft. OTOH, I've had to go directly to MS for help on only 2 critical problems in my entire career (excluding TechNet, where I have searched error messages and such). One was phone support and the other was our TAM. I think only once did I ever get asked, "Did you call Microsoft?" For the record, I've worked for 4 major corporations. I think for most MS companies, the need to have MS support for servers just isn't there. Maybe for small companies, but there are just too many techs out there who can support MS, but I digress. What you're saying is true and underscores my point in that it's all perception, not reality and that, again, cuts the thunder out of these "new, savvy CIO's."

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[ScottLindner]

The real reason why OSS isn't used is more to do with making sure you have someone that will be there to continue supporting the product for the full lifecycle of your deployment.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[The_Wilschon]

I think that for the suits, it might not be that they can be held legally accountable, but there is someone to blame, even if only internally. ie, Word doesn't work, suit thinks "Curse that Gates character!", but say Abiword doesn't work, they don't know who to hate. Or, when I go work on my grandmother's win98 box, I sit there and think "Gates, you're to blame for all of this." I'm holding MS accountable, but not in a legal sense.

Hmmm... this post doesn't make all that much sense... I hope it gets the point across anyway. I'm sick, and I just woke up after dreaming about flying cars and dorm rooms that were underwater, and heat detectors orbiting the earth and glowing red...

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[PFI_Optix]

This is why "Red Hat" is almost synonymous with "Linux" in a lot of business circles. Red Hat offers enterprise support for the product they develop. That gives the suits some peace of mind.

I've said for a long time that one of the things Linux needs to gain marketshare is solid support for businesses.

Also on that list: better documentation--it can really be atrocious at times--simpler installation (yay for Ubuntu), and less convoluted processes for interfacing and emulating Microsoft networks. It's getting better, but I shudder to think what would happen if I tried to switch my users (and techs) over to Linux right now.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[ultranova]

No they're not. They may think they are, but they're wrong. If a Microsoft application fails and destroys millions of dollars of data for you, and you sue Microsoft, you will at most be able to get back the price you paid for the application. Microsoft does not warrant or guarantee their software; no commodity software maker does.

The point is that if a Microsoft program does this, the suit can blame Microsoft for it to his boss, and therefore his own position is secure. Why would the suit care about those millions of dollars - they aren't his money ? But he cares very much indeed about his own job.

Microsoft might not be legally responsible for anything, but they still make a good scapegoat.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Theatetus]

Microsoft might not be legally responsible for anything, but they still make a good scapegoat.

Huh? I can use Microsoft as a scapegoat, but I can't use RedHat or the Debian team or Linus or Theo as a scapegoat? Or for that matter, Sun, IBM, or Novell? Why not?

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[emurphy42]

Which is completely backwards. If your OSS support goes away, you can hire someone else, and they will have access to 100% of the information they need. This is not the end of the story, of course - many proprietary companies are reasonably reliable, and the original author of a program (OSS or proprietary) has a huge head start on anyone else for understanding that program - but it's still an issue worth considering.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[skoaldipper]

What do you call service packs and patches? The public (customers) at large and various IT staff hold them accountable for these. Their life cycle model is no more unique than what other software development companies have.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[ScottLindner]

I used to think that way for a long time, and still partly do. But as I deploy more enterprises for our customers I've learned that an engineer's motivations and how business really work do not align very well. I used to get all bent out of shape when a certain development product was decided by upper management with absolutely no consideration for that product's ability to solve the problem the engineers are charged with solving. As I get greater insight into the real motivations for these decisions I'm starting to agree with them. I just accept the tools provided, and do the best I can. We've never failed to deploy because a tool sucked, we just grumble loudly and that's about it. This may sound like a tangent, but it's really related to the same reason why OSS is avoided. Things like Jakarta are great, but other OSS's projects really do suck from a deployment perspective. How many times do we have to rework things because another latest and greatest OSS thing comes out that looses all steam and support a year or two later? Our customers have no problem dumping huge $$ on a company to make sure the product stays supported for years to come. It's actually cheaper, much easier to manage, and significantly reduces operational risks. Although immensely frustrating at times being one of the engineers that has to deal with a crappy product when significantly better OSS exists.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[grotgrot]

Please name one example of Microsoft every being held accountable for their software failing to work as promised?

Read their EULA. About 10 years ago they changed the US one to say that they warrant the product will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying documentation for a period of 90 days. You can get a refund if it doesn't.

This may sound lame, but it is a lot further than most products go. Most just say they have no warranty at all, and so if they turn out to just calculate grains of sand instead of what the box says, then tough.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[inter alias]

I'm aware of the dubious legality of EULAs and would love to see the issue taken to court.

I wasn't talking about the the legal situation, I was talking about what MS is selling, and it sure isn't accountability. The problem is though, a lot of execs think they are.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Plunky]

Huh? I can use Microsoft as a scapegoat, but I can't use RedHat or the Debian team or Linus or Theo as a scapegoat? Or for that matter, Sun, IBM, or Novell? Why not?

Because as soon as it is your decision to step outside the box, it becomes your fault when something goes wrong, no matter if the Microsoft way would not have worked in a million years. Its not big and its not clever, but thats the way some people see things.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[haus]

I am sure that anyone who is using free software and runs in to difficulty in the first 90 days can get their money back as well.

Oh wait a second....

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[24FightingChickens]

That depends on how large your company is and what your contract says. The EULA only affects little operations and retail purchasers. Companies that have ten thousand licenses or even 100,000 licenses are bound by their agreements with Microsoft, not some shrink wrap agreement.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[JoeZeppy]

Please name one example of Microsoft every being held accountable for their software failing to work as promised?

I'm so fscking tired of hearing this retort everyone brings up "MS accountability". No one ever said if you lose money, Microsoft reimburses you. No one says that about *anything*. Accountability means one thing to a business, minimizing risk. Perfect example, from a piece of vendor software by a major financial software company. Major financial institution, using commercial tax processing software, new version comes out every year, supporting the new tax laws. versions 99, 00, 01, 02, 03 supported on NT. Version '04 comes out, vendor states the software is no longer supported on NT4. Since NT4 is no longer officially supported by MS, they can't get support writing the app for NT, ergo, no more support on NT4.

At this point the software works fine on NT4, nothing is really changing, version '04 is not substantially different from '03, no expectation that the app will no longer work. But the corporate position is that it is less of a risk to spend the money to upgrade the entire tax department to XP, which required new PC's to handle the new OS, than to bet that they wouldn't have problems, which could:

a) cause clients tax returns to not be processed, losing them money due to IRS penalties, etcetera

b) cause them to seek reimbursement from us, losing us money.

c) make us look bad due to a bad business decision, causing our stock price to drop, losing us money.

d) cause us, as a licensed tax preparer, to be exposed to IRS fines and penalties, losing us money.

e) see C above.

f) possibly run afoul of various SEC and federal regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley regarding operating under a known risk instead of taking steps to mitigate it, which could lead to fines and penalties, losing us money.

g) see C above.

Anyone see a common thread here?

If the app is supported by the vendor, and there is a problem we can't figure out, we can call them up and reasonably expect them to do everything they can to fix it, patch it or provide a workaround, and they have a reasonable expectation of the same from MS. If we know it's unsupported and we have a problem, we can be pretty sure their response will be "sorry, can't help you."

So the bean counters looked at the fixed cost of buying 30 new PC's and the chargeback cost of having LAN support swap them out, versus the range of possible costs of not upgrading ranging from $0 to $x millions, and decided to upgrade.

And that's what people mean when they talk about accountability. It's a lot more nuanced than suing Microsoft because your server crashed and you lost your database.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Disoculated]

Oh, please. Did you get that post off of a slash comment storage site? That argument has been used against open source forever, but you'll still find the same OSS tcp stack, text editors, shells, compilers, mail transport agents, DNS servers, timeservers, firewall software, media encoders/decoders, graphic manipulation libraries, webservers, vnc servers, DHCP servers, CIFS servers, FTP servers, and a whole lot more making up the underfabric of the internet without offering much, if any, direct support. We just accept that they're there because they've always been there.

    Comments like these just prove that the commenter is too far removed to understand that they aren't going to see then next OSS killer app start up until someone else tells them it's there.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[MikeCapone]

What's important is the impression that they can be held accountable. The actual fact that they won't let themselves be held accountable is less important...

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the court of customers and sales they will be held accountable. As much as many of us love to hate Micro$loth they do have the ability to deliver what corporations seem to want. OSS doesn't come for free like so many people seem to think...or should I say want to believe.

Now of how Micro$loth has gotten to that point (stealing code? monopolistic practices? bullying hardware manufacturers? etc.) is another issue.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[PitaBred]

I think the word you were looking for was averse. But what you say is spot-on in many companies. That whole "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" bit.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest that you choose Theo as a scapegoat because it's likely he would give you the most entertaining reaction.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[someone1234]

I highly doubt that a company can squeeze any money out of M$ once their product fails. And it will fail (it failed for us). Your company could, however make a good contract with a 3rd party firm supporting OSS. Even if they fail, you can get your money back and try another supporter.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[labratuk]

You can get a refund if it doesn't.

Yeah, I mean, how could Debian ever afford to offer refunds for their products?

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

We do not need more support contracts. What we need is to encourage the hiring of people who are skilled and proficient with Linux systems. This does not mean more certifications. Certifications are training courses and the real world is hardly a predictable obstacle course. This is not a new problem for businesses--how to hire someone who has the proper skills without hiring someone who can make an hour long presentation out of catchwords.

Support contracts lead to support centers hiring telephone monkeys. That's nice for new college graduates willing to work at $15/hour but there are many of us, 10+ years out of college, who would like to make a wage which allows for some financial stability and security.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only some people. This is the operating procedure for most large companies (1000+ employees). While inside the box an employee gets ridiculed for every innovative idea they have. Once given the mobility to think outside the box they are held accountable, as you point out, for every single little glitch--even if someone gets a papercut.

On one hand you have to appreciate the Darwinism in society. On the other hand you would hope that human beings have advanced beyond the behaviors of the jungle. Guess not.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[zootm]

Being accountable in court and being accountable are completely different though — if a company (like Microsoft) consistently fail to fix problems, the company will up and move to another vendor.

Coming "direct from the maker" is the interesting part. I guess a lot of places don't trust 3rd-party support to be able to fix problems in all of the disparate components that make up a Linux (or whatever) distribution, when they had little hand in making those components. But regardless of the EULA, what both sides are offering is support, and it's just difficult for 3rd-party support to be able to offer the types of support that MS can. Novell and Red Hat can do this, but it takes a lot of manpower.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[emurphy42]

A difficult tool is reasonably justified if the overall difficulty of the project is reduced, e.g.

• Employees already familiar with it; it's easier for them
• End users already have mental block against the easier tool; it's harder for them
• Support for the easier tool appears eminently unreliable; it would become harder if this support went away
• Difficulty of the tool is outweighed by reducing the number of other packages/developers that one must interface with, and/or reducing the difficulty of said interfaces

What other situations would justify choosing a tool that, in isolation, is not the easiest choice to use?

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Master of Transhuman]

While the psychology is true, the end result is a disaster for virtually all companies.

Marcus Ranum did a whole rant on this and pretty much cleaned the clock of the concept that "accountability" has any meaning at all.

In other words, it's bullshit.

And nothing SAP says about OSS can be taken seriously. They are deathly afraid that the ERP marketplace is going to go the way of the CRM marketplace - with giants like Siebel being considered responsible for the mess, and OSS entries like SugarCRM cleaning their clock.

And they're right - that's exactly what is going to happen. I can't predict how fast, but it will happen.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[ScottLindner]

There are things that are harder to measure. Like guaranteeing the company will be around for X number of years, buying bulk support up front for your needs, etc. Those are the biggest reasons that most products are chosen on the projects I work on. I'm certain there are others. But my real point, as you also supported, is that there are reasons that don't make sense when taken in isolation, but make great sense when looking at the whole. Which many times really irks the nerds (like me) when we gotta deal with junky software when much better OSS is out there. What bugs me most though, is that you can pay for the same things with OSS. They just choose not to because they don't understand the business model. Which is OK I guess. We have been burned hard before by too loose adoption of OSS. I still strongly support the use of OSS when I can sneak it in, but I believe in wise choice and applicaition of it. Anyway.. there is no absolute right answer to this argument. Each organization needs to choose on their own what works best for them. If you are changing quickly and don't have a huge deployment or long support cycle, go with tons of OSS.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[sumdumass]

Largley this is because people in the know, goto thier application vendors and hardware venders for fixes. Microsoft supplies a product but often a failing server is because of harware or some software issue. Most often the server runs applications outside microsoft's realm and they provide fixes and workarounds for even microsofts failing if it mean keeping thier product working.

Rarely have I reserched a BSOD or some other cryptic error message and found it to be microsoft was the only person who could fix it. Usualy, it is a sign of bad memory or some other hardware component while in some cases it could be the software running on it.

OH, and that army of microsoft drones,Outside thier phone support, they are the same consultants you could have got by picking up the phone book in the first place. Microsoft does have some tech on staff but they usualy use the MCPs and other people in microsoft programs. The real difference is when microsoft sends them, they collect a premium while when you call them they don't rape your wallet as much

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Plunky]

Heh, actually I wrote a stonking great comment saying pretty much that (was pretty good!) but considered that maybe it was just an ill informed rant, took the 10 minute breather and cut it down as I have never actually worked for any such company and my view is that I would rather live free than be a slave.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[Lonewolf666]

I'm afraid that you may be right. Of course, one might ask "why do you keep buying Microsoft if their software is crap?". Which would put the suit in question back into the position of being responsible.
But then again, that would require more forethought than most managements seem capable of.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[hcoder]

Let's say you have support for X commercial product from its vendor. Let's say product X has a serious bug. What to do? Of course, your boss will tell his boss 'we have called the vendor's tech support'. Fine.

Let's say a few months has gone and the vendor still cannot fix the issue. What your boss will tell his boss? 'oh, I'm sorry we chose the wrong product...'

I'm sure not every oss product is enterprise ready. Many of them has no business like attitue which enterprise users demand. I've read an article that said 99% of sourceforge/freshmeat projects are abandonware. That may be true.

But I think that's irrelevant. You need a product from vendor X which has future, bugs are getting fixed, new features are implemented at request, etc. Who cares what licence or distribution product X has? The upper management wants rock solid IT infrastructure inside its budget and should not care (too much) about license philosophies.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[KermitJunior]

if a company (like Microsoft) consistently fail to fix problems, the company will up and move to another vendor.

You're obviously new to the corporate world.

Re:OSS will almost always be doomed in Enterprise.

[zootm]

Congratulations, you were the first respondant with the answer I was waiting for ;)

And yeah, I'm speaking in the way that things should work, rather than how they do. I expect that MS haven't been terrible in this aspect, however.

Maven 2

[955301]

Maven has come quite a ways in the past year as well. If you're looking to ditch your overly complicated ant build scripts for organized simplicity with reports, take a gander:

http://maven.apache.org/

I'll go out on a limb and say it will be more important than eclipse in 2 years.

Re:Maven 2

[Karma Farmer]

Maven has come quite a ways in the past year as well.

Uwe Boll says "BloodRayne" is ten times bettern than "Alone in the Dark."

That doesn't mean I'm going to run out and buy a copy of BloodRayne anytime soon.

Re:Maven 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Maven has come quite a ways in the past year as well. If you're looking to ditch your overly complicated ant build scripts for organized simplicity with reports, take a gander:
http://maven.apache.org/
I'll go out on a limb and say it will be more important than eclipse in 2 years.

That is definitely going out on a limb

Re:Maven 2

[_xeno_]

Um - no. Because they fit two entirely different needs. I'm currently working on a project that's using Maven to build the project and reports, and using Eclipse as the IDE. Maven handles the build via the Eclipse "external tools" feature. (Although there is a Maven plugin for Eclipse, I'm not using it.) Eclipse handles being the IDE, Maven handles downloading random libraries from who-knows-where and creating massive HTML documents. I mean, Maven handles the build process.

It's sorta like saying "I expect automake is going to be more important than vi soon" - they fill different areas.

Maven might be as important as Eclipse, but Eclipse will always be important in its own way. I've seen enterprise systems use the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for their tools. I'm currently working on another project that wants to use the RCP as the basis for their client. Eclipse and Maven simply fulfill two different roles.

Re:Maven 2

[Anonymous Coward]

So when are they going to get round to addressing the issues described in this document? http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Repository+ -+Security+by+nat+pryce

Re:Maven 2

[xero314]

If you are looking to have to rewrite most of the available plugins and fight with configurations for weeks on end please consider Maven2.

Someone at my company recently convinced the rest of the team (excluding myself) that we should begin to use Maven2 for out build process. Maven2 is neither complete not bug free. Please do yourself a favore and stick with ant, where you have more fine control of your file structure and many more options for tasks already available (and I will also add that the exisiting tasks work).

Of course this is probably why OSS will find it hard to get into enterprises space. To often OSS is released before it is ready for production use and a bunch of fanboys (I have never felt the need to use that term before) push it like it's the silver bullet for whatever problem.

Re:Maven 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that, when you really NEED transitive dependencies, Maven is the only way to go. Ivy integration of transitive dependencies with Ant is a total hack, and while not all of the plugins have been rewritten yet, the number of options available is increasing on a daily basis.

The reason that many of us like Maven is that it means we can ship our code to someone we don't know, across the country, without having to do anything more than type in which version of what dependencies and plugins we want to use and it will build a complicated project, correctly.

The projects I work on tend to depend upon 30-50 open source libraries, so if I want to be able to hand off my code to someone, I don't want them to have to spend two days finding and downloading all of them (or to have to go through the whole process again when I update half of the dependency versions three days later.) Maven is the ONLY solution for this kind of problem.

Re:Maven 2

[955301]

The *exact* reason I suggested Maven 2 as oppose to Maven 1 is because you jumped on that bandwagon prematurely. You have only yourself to blame for moving from ant to Maven 1. It's a scripting/properties file nightmare!

Maven 2 on the other hand has plugins written in Java like ant and builds faster than your and script. I have over 30 projects building with ant, half at my client, an enterprise level corporation.

This is not a silver bullet. But neither is ant. It's a lot closer to being one as far as build process go though.

Re:Maven 2

[955301]

Your link is outdated and referring to Maven 1. And I agree with it. Maven 2 is far better - in fact it's a complete rewrite.

You should try it out again. It's time. Everyone knows the landscape changes constantly.

Re:Maven 2

[955301]

You must have misunderstood. I didn't say Maven 2 would replace Eclipse, I said it would be more important.

Coordination with other team members and consistent builds/reporting are far more important than a choice of IDE's.

You tell me which is more important than the other between automake and vi. Make would be a better comparison, and to that I say, make has been far more important than vi. Because it promotes sharing of your project.

If you'd like to generalize, rephrase my words as "your team build process" is more important than "the editor a team member uses".

Re:Maven 2

[955301]

The paranoid should not be using a public repository. Set up your own Maven proxy:

http://maven-proxy.codehaus.org/

Then, tar a local repository with known good md5's and commit that with your project.

Re:Maven 2

[_xeno_]

And what I'm trying to tell you is that Eclipse is far more than just an IDE. It's a platform for building rich, cross-platform, client applications.

There's a lot more to Eclipse than the IDE.

Re:Maven 2

[955301]

No you're not. You're trying to tell me that you think you can't call an apple more important than an orange. And once again, Maven 2 will be more significant that the Eclipse IDE. Not the Eclipse framework, not the SWT, not the company that sponsored it, but the IDE.

Anyone else?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else read this as a Star Trek reference?

Re:Anyone else?

[slapout]

Yeah. My first thought was "Enterprise? Didn't they cancel that show?"

Kirk: Scotty, I need more power!

Scotty: Sorry capt'n, the warp injector system isn't working. But don't worry, I've got the source code, just let me fix a couple bugs in it...

Keyword = immature

[CodeShark]

Enterprise environments won't use -- or at least should not use immature software from any source -- open or proprietary. In fact, most major enterprises have a very slow and conservative adoption software adoption process to prevent a single application from breaking other existing applications. Software requiring interfaces between systems are even more rigorously tested -- and this is all a good thing.

My thought is that the problem is that few enterprise businesses are assisting in developing the maturity of applications that would enable more widespread use. Every large enterprise has small projects that would benefit from open source tools, etc. out there, but if the enterprise isn't willing to spend the developer resources, then it essentially locks the door to the acceptance of more mature open source tools that are validated "in-house", thus facilitating greater acceptance throughout.

Re:Keyword = immature

[Lumpy]

Huh? then why are we bing pushed to upgrade every SQL server here to SQL2005?

That is a VERY immature product from Microsoft that is guarenteed to break lots of things because it is forcing SQL99 so every old app we have that is SQL97 will break.

(Yes I have tested, yes they break)

Re:Keyword = immature

[Creepy]

Actually, I'd go one step further - Enterprise environments won't use any software unless they get enough customer demand for it.

The company I work for is no exception - our ex-VP (due to aquisition, now an upper manager) claimed we would "Never, ever support Linux." The reason for that claim was that Linux had no paid support if there were problems. Since that time, we started supporting two Linux platforms that have paid support (Red Hat and Novell [SuSE]).

    That's not the end of it - some of our UNIX customers (specifically AIX and IRIX) started to put pressure on our management to support the "unsupported" Mozilla because AOL was not supporting them well with Netscape. Shortly thereafter, we started supporting Moz. Eclipse support came more as a need - we needed an extensible IDE tool that we could ship for XML editing.

SAP certainly didn't jump out on a limb naming those 3 tools because I know several other enterprise tier companies that use them besides ours.

Re:Keyword = immature

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'd go one step further - Enterprise environments won't use any software unless they get enough customer demand for it.

That doesn't make any sense. Are you confusing use and produce?

Re:Keyword = immature

[drinkypoo]

Actually, I'd go one step further - Enterprise environments won't use any software unless they get enough customer demand for it.

That doesn't make any sense. Are you confusing use and produce?

It makes sense when you realize that everyone has customers in a capitalistic system. The IT department's customers are the users, or the managers of the users, depending on how you look at things.

Re:Keyword = immature

[CodeShark]

Actually you prove my point because while there is management pressure to upgrade, you are going through the process of testing first. A PHB that forces a bad upgrade usually won't last very long in today's IT world, hopefully if the issue is forced either you win, or at the worst his/her bad decision doesn't take you down with it.

Re:Keyword = immature

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy had it right in the end of the post. OSS can survive in an enterprise environment (wether immature or not), if the enterprise is willing to spend time on development and participation in the OSS community for that project. In the end, the cost of development, could outweight the hefty licensing fees for some seasoned 'enterprise' solution. Thats what they need to figure out before they get started. And hopefully they can give back some of the work to the community, thats how OSS is supposed to work.

Re:Keyword = immature

[EastCoastSurfer]

Admittedly I don't have a lot of experience with MSSQL2005 yet, but other versions had server switches you could cut on for compatibility with the previous server versions. Is this feature not available in 2005 or does it not work as advertised?

As far as upgrading apps, we haven't had any problems with stuff that was written in mssql7/2000 moving to 2005. As we do more extensive testing I'm sure we'll find some stuff.

Re:Keyword = immature

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm...

Being that the common antithesis of OSS in the average business is Microsoft. I would just like to inquire as to why anyone can possibly believe the any product they make is Mature...

They operate on a basis of why create and or this version stably and reliably with emphasis on security and function when they just turf it inside a 2 year product cycle in favor of another brand new immature, insecure, gui enhanced version.?

There is no motivation to do so, and so long as Corporate America keeps eating their Soylent Green gruel it will always be the case.

SAP says that immature open source software...

[s0l3d4d]

relatively immature open source software has little chance of surviving in the enterprise, said an SAP AG executive during a speech at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

D'oh? News value? 1) immature software has never had good survival rates in the enterprise environment and 2) SAP probably wants to sell SAP software, so even if there was an open source, MATURE application, that would be enterprise strength, to be used where SAP is used, I don't somehow think that SAP would suggest anyone to use that.

Re:SAP says that immature open source software...

[LightningBolt!]

Are you implying there's a bias to this article, which appears to be simply a short interview with Peter Graf, SAP executive vice president of solution marketing? I disagree.

"SAP's approach to IT's 'consolidation wave' revolves around its proprietary NetWeaver business process platform and Enterprise Service Repository, an applications composite that sits atop NetWeaver."

OK, well, maybe there's a little bias.

Re:SAP says that immature open source software...

[electroniceric]

2) SAP probably wants to sell SAP software

You can take that to the bank. Why is it that this article only quotes one company's VP of marketing, and yet we're debating the premise that there's some wave of consolidation coming, and open source is not yet mature enough to be part of it - and oh, by the way, SAP is trying to sell some new consolidation platform. This is only news in that it's coverage of what line a company is pushing. It'd sure be nice to see some background reporting that establishes whether this claim is even reasonable, but the reporter probably isn't making enough money in this story for that.

Immature is always doomed

[tsa]

Of course immature OSS is doomed in the Enterprise. Who wants to use any immature software where correct functioning is important? Software being open source or closed source has nothing to do with that. At the end of the day performance is the only thing that counts.

Re:Immature is always doomed

[tsa]

Sorry, with Enterprise I don't mean the spaceship, but a business environment.

Re:Immature is always doomed

[dasil003]

Of course immature OSS is doomed in the Enterprise. Who wants to use any immature software where correct functioning is important? Software being open source or closed source has nothing to do with that. At the end of the day performance is the only thing that counts.

Also implicit in the article is that OSS needs to succeed in the Enterprise. But that is not true at all, open source software is not beholden to investors seeking profit. A project can languish in obscurity for years before it matures and suddenly becomes useful to huge numbers of people. Or a better project can make it obsolete overnight. But whatever happens the code is out there. There's no point in trying to ascribe business life cycles to open source projects.

Businesses are like animals struggling to survive, open source projects are like whole eco systems that fluctuate widely based on climate, but don't sink or swim by single events.

Re:Immature is always doomed

[gad_zuki!]

>Of course immature OSS is doomed in the Enterprise.

Yeah, but you know Geordi runs it anyway.

Re:Immature is always doomed

[kadathseeker]

Who wants to use any immature software where correct functioning is important?

I dunno. Why do people use Windows anyway?

performance is the only thing that counts.

Yeah, that's what I keep telling people Linux is all about. Look at that uptime baby!

Re:Immature is always doomed

[clear_thought_05]

Why do people use Windows anyway?

Becuase it is established and supported.

"performance is the only thing that counts." ... Look at that uptime baby!

That's a very misleading and incomplete way of explaining performance. Are you thinking reliability?

Re:Immature is always doomed

[kadathseeker]

I was going for a joke. I could make alot more serious criticisms of MS, but I'm sure you've heard most of them. I know performance is more complex than just uptime, and yes, I still use Windows occaisonally. Right now in fact. Because I can't get #@&* ndiswapper to work.

Re:Immature is always doomed

[Bloke down the pub]

Businesses are like animals struggling to survive, open source projects are like whole eco systems that fluctuate widely based on climate, but don't sink or swim by single events.

Worst analogy ever! And it didn't even involve cars.

Duh

[voice_of_all_reason]

Well, of course OSS is doomed. Brannon Braga is like the anti-me of King Midas. Everything he touches turns to crap. First Enterprise, now this.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Teh WTF?

OSS must gain the enterprise in order to thrive

[ficken]

I agree - OSS must gain ground in the enterprise for it to thrive (more). Once good OSS has established itself as reliable and accountable, then the software will gain the respect it deserves. In order for this to happen, the software must be mature enough to withstand 'the beatings' of the suits (think maintenance costs, feature requests, etc). The only immature OSS products we use at work are in-house stuff. It is just a matter of time before the (other) big players in OSS come to the top - not just Linux, MySQL (and more).

Re:OSS must gain the enterprise in order to thrive

[nietsch]

You have mixed up 'your ego' with 'OSS'. OSS is just a collection of software licences, it is not an entity with a mission. It does not need to thrive or respect from anybody, nor do books or other software. It is just things, tools if you like.
You on the other hand seem to need some respect. I will not and can not judge if you deserve that, but demanding respect has never gained much.
Maybe next time when you make such comments about OSS, replace OSS with 'software with a healthy fuck-you-licence'. If that makes no sense anymore, then your previous statement was nonsense too.

Re:OSS must gain the enterprise in order to thrive

[ficken]

I will not succumb to your enticement for a flamewar.

"Enterprise" is just a buzword to please The Suits

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS is Free from such corporate (WHORES WHORES WHORES) influences.

No no no no...

[Trails]

Open source will always be under the shadows of immaturity and fear of reverse engineering. However, open source does have something going for it: price.

The relatively minimal costs of open source versus not will continue to be an upward pressure on their implementation.

The conclusions in the article ignore this, and are, imo, flawed.

Just propaganda

[thunderlizard]

This article had nothing to do with how well (or poorly) open source will fare in the corporate world. It was sheer propaganda from SAP. It was essentially saying "buy our crap, because the other crap out there isn't as integrated as our crap is"

Re:Just propaganda

[hax4bux]

Spot on, mod parent up.

Don't complain that SAP is brittle, heavy and expensive. Buy our crap or everybody else at the CIO club will mock you.

I wonder if the dinosaurs would buck each other up w/stories abouth "mature design" rather than worry about evolution (or meteorites).

Re:Just propaganda

[Hognoxious]

I agree. Just knock together a few scripts with PHP. Much better. Except for accounts payable - which is in VB 'cos Fred who wrote it doesn't like PHP.

Re:Just propaganda

[bzipitidoo]

I agree. Where are the stats, tests, and so forth to back up the claims made? Not even biased tests are mentioned, let alone cited. And even that's asking too much. Just what is being claimed? "Immature" isn't defined beyond vague implications that OSS is characteristically "less mature". If anything is immature, it's the speech that article is based on. The article isn't much better, as it uncritically parrots the speech. What a load of FUD. We have a vague term that isn't clearly defined, that is, defined well enough to test. Pretty hard term to pin down too, as simple criteria such as "more than x years old", or "x hours of testing performed", or "no critical bugs found in last x months", or "is OSS" all have problems. But that term sure makes things sound bad. Perhaps MS-DOS is mature, so mature it's senile. Maybe Enterprise organizations should worry the software they use is senescent, lacks capabilities, scales poorly, is buggy, was designed by terrorists, is morally wrong, or a dozen other things. The speech errs in the same way as Intelligent Design. Without measurable, testable criteria, a rational discussion is impossible, and conclusions are worthless.

Obviously!

[stinerman]

I beg TFA's pardon, but isn't any immature software doomed in enterprise-level applications?

Enterprises are not the sweet spot.

[bubulubugoth]

Mostly of them, will use High level, IBM, SUN and Microsoft support, they will pay for it. IBM OpenSource strategy is start using OSS products, grow in demand, and switch to their high class product...

Example, start with bluecode+geronimo and later switch to Websphere+Db2

But, Enterprise, are only a niche market, very well payed indeed, but there are just a few. The other market, medium sized enterprises, small, and micro, those are the sweetspot for Linux, becose they CAN work with "inmmature" sotfware becose theire also "inmmature" bussiness...

That is the figth OSS is winning, with mysql, postgress, apache, php, samba..

Fortune 100 have the money to pay for another Fortune 100 for its IT integration... but again... there is only 100... the other hundreds and thousands of bussiness, those are who need linux to lower costs, add more technology to their process...

Further more... the lack of applications for linux, is a normal step in the madurity of a market.

Rigth now, there are may software houses, developing, specific solutions, and in a few years, will become mainstream solutions. There you have compiere, OpenOffice, they still need work, a lot, but its getting done.

Out of the box solutions for linux are needed to the mainstream, and may are building them...

Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, all must what their ISV which are making crossplataform or linux plataform applications...

Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[MarkusQ]

This is a crock. As others have pointed out already, immature software is unlikely to be used in an enterprise environment (unless it was developed in house) regardless of the license. But wait, there's more. I happen to have a number of immature open source projects of my own at the moment, and I don't give a flying fig if they "make it" in an enterprise environment.

Why? Because unlike Microsoft, I don't expect any revenue from them and thus won't be disappointed if I don't get any. I wrote them because I needed them and open sourced them because I wanted a few more eyeballs on them. But even if no one else ever even downloads them, I'm not <voice='spooky'> Dooomed </voice> because I'm not selling them in the first place. For the vast majority of open source projects, saying that they won't make it in "the Enterprise" is about as relevant as saying that cows will never use the iPod.

--MarkusQ

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[corellon13]

Although I agree with your assessment that the success of OSS is not solely dependant on its success in an enterprise environment, I think you underestimate the importance of success in that environment.

In a perfect world everyone would develop software and approach it the way you do (which I applaud). However, the fact remains that enterprises have a HUGE influence on what is successful and what isn't. Once an enterprise becomes invested in a product, it is in their best interest to support the wide use of that product. As this product becomes more of a standard and widely accepted by everyone (even outside of the enterprise environment), they are basically developing future talent at no cost.

Using your Microsoft reference, Microsoft has been able to successfully create a Windows competency throughout the computer world. This created a kind of standard and demand that really all started in the enterprise environment and spread like a virus to homes and everywhere computers could be found.

All this to say let's not under estimate the value of getting OSS accepted in the enterprise. This can be done with price, if not maturity, as most enterprises are always looking to cut costs and you can't beat free!

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[brunes69]

For the vast majority of open source projects, saying that they won't make it in "the Enterprise" is about as relevant as saying that cows will never use the iPod.

Some cows do, you insolent clod!

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[brunes69]

In a perfect world everyone would develop software and approach it the way you do (which I applaud). However, the fact remains that enterprises have a HUGE influence on what is successful and what isn't.

You're not getting it. What is "successful for an open source project? If an authour opens his code, and one other person finds it useful (either as it is, or in another project), then that project iss a success. Basically, it is having a userbase of two - the authour, plus one other person who finds it useful.

Anything else, more users, more support, financial gains - that's just icing on the cake. It does not define "success" in an open source project. This is what business people can not seem to grasp - the vast majority of people involved in open source software are not looking to recieve any kind of financial gain, or any kind of market penetration. They are just doing it for themselves, and for other people.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Completely irrelevant. All code is written and is "immature" at some point, even the code created in the enterprise. In addition, all code of any complexity is immature when viewed from some perspective. I think it is ridiculus and arbitrary to say that it is time to draw a line in time and say that any code not yet "mature" cannot pass. Why is that some feel it necessary to set limits on things they obviously do not understand?

I am the software architect for a major entertainment company whose products many of you probably consume. I use what works, my code, others code, opens source, whatever. I read the code, understand it, own it, integrate it. If something need fixed, I fix it. Done.

I pity the enterprises that have some clueless tyrant trying to tell their peeps what to use and what not to. *sigh*

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[DocLandolt]

// Dooomed

<voice type="obnoxiousNag">Invalid Syntax</voice>

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[drinkypoo]

For the vast majority of open source projects, saying that they won't make it in "the Enterprise" is about as relevant as saying that cows will never use the iPod.

Are you sure about that? If they're not using iPods yet, it's only a matter of time. Maybe apple will make a cow-print-cover iPod shuffle with special bovine headphones available as an accessory from the apple store.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[wallywam1]

I think you pretty much nailed the key issue, that being the purpose of the software. Individuals or small companies want to have lots of customized features and be able to implement changes quickly. However, large corporations want to deploy core functionality quickly with low variability in cost and time frame. Another key issue is that regulatory requirements are generally more applicable to the enterprise. If, for example, you're trying to meet FDA regulations for GMP and your validation plan is hundreds of pages long, a change better be pretty damned important before it's going to be implemented. Formal software testing and validation requirements are easier to manage with planned release cycles and streamlined functionality.

In the book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", the author recounts a seminar in which the speaker asked for a show of hands of who could make a better hamburger than McDonald's. Every hand in the room went up. No big surprise. Ronald McDonald and the Hamburgler can place a Big Mac in the hands of millions of people every day. Mom and Pop can't do that, but they can give you regional flare and can change their menu as often as they want in response to their customers' requests. I think there's room for both business models.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[davidsyes]

Wait, cows CAN use the iPod... Here's a commercial...

"Introducing the new "cowPoddie". Strap this around the neck of your cow, and plug in the accessory earplugs and let your cows moo to the myoosic.

Act now, and we'll include the matching drool cover. It comes in two cow-matching colors. Protect your investment with this.

But WAIT... Call in the next 3 minutes and you'll get a special RFID tag for your heifers and a new "servicing kit" that protects your arms and shoulder from blowback.

Free monkey, pump and instructions included..."

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[MarkusQ]

For the most part, I agree with you. However <rant>

I think there's room for both business models.

Except, in this case, I don't have a business model. None, nada, ziltch.

And you know what? Not only do I produce software without a business model, I've been known to sing songs I just made up on the spur of the moment, without an agent or a recording contract. I say things to people without testing them on a focus group, and I don't care what my Q factor is. I got up this morning with a few interesting ideas which I spent the morning working on, but I didn't update my vision statement because I don't have one.

Does anyone else remember the days when people just did things because they felt like it?

</rant>

Ah hem. Thank you.

My point being, of course, that the fundamental thing so many people seem to miss about OSS is that it isn't a business so it doesn't need a business model, anymore than algebra or sex do. Yes, you can build a business around any of them, and it may succeed or fail, but that's your problem. The algebra, the sex, and the open source software will still be there whether you make money off them or not.

--MarkusQ

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[jedidiah]

The bit from "Rich Dad Poor Dad" is a false dichotomy of course. The choices are much wider than McDonalds versus the greasy spoon. If you really can make a better burger, you may one day find yourself going toe to toe with McDonalds (Wendys). OTOH, McD's itself was the new kid on the block at one time and still hasn't displaced some older players (White Castle). This is to say nothing of all the regional chains.

You should not restrict yourself to one or the other. There's a continuum and if you're really stubborn you just might displace the 800lb gorilla someday.

Starbucks wasn't built in a day you know.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[bigpat]

You're not getting it. What is "successful for an open source project?

In other words, the "Enterprise" can go screw. (I don't mean the venerable starship)

Seems to me the "Enterprise" is too big and slow to make much of a difference to the adoption of new technology. It is individuals and small/medium sized businesses that make up the vast majority of the marketplace and also are the ones that really drive new technology. If you are talking about "The Enterprise" you are talking about an organization that can't afford to take risks even if they promise great benefit.

I as an individual or small business person can adopt or drop new OSS as soon as something better becomes available. But the Enterprise has to send proposals to committee and department heads to have it evaluated and put a plan together and train its staff and all those things that Big business needs to do for better or worse. All this means that big business is not where you should expect the most innovation and to expect big business to drive OSS adoption is beyond foolish and isn't necessary for OSS to succeed.

OSS is for the rest of us, it is not for the guys that can afford to piss money out the windows.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[wallywam1]

You're right. I should have said that the analogy emphasizes the differences by using polar opposites rather than points out the only two possible cases. How about tacking on your first paragraph after my last?

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[Elektroschock]

Which open source technologies are mature enough to survive the consolidation that's coming?' Graf said. 'Linux? Definitely. Eclipse? Definitely. Mozilla? Most likely.'"

Nonsense! Most Enterprises do RUN immature software and are conservative.

Btw: Everyone runs immature software.

There will be no open source "consolidation". Open Source will survive.

In fact open sourcing is a guarantee for software to survive. Look at software like BaaN. It was not open sourced, so it will not survive on the long run. It is dead as Cobol. When your company runs the second product on the marketplace, open sourcing will make it sustainable.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[corellon13]

I'm afraid you are "not getting it". If you read and my post accurately, you will see that I say basically the same thing. Success in the view of the developer and most people that support OSS is defined exactly as you said. However, success defined by the OSS community is not the same as the business. You are knit picking at my words. I'm not agreeing with the enterprise environment's definition of success. The whole point of this thread was to talk about OSS in and its "success" in the enterprise environment. That is the definition I commented on and I stand by that. The fact is that business influences that success and thus affects what people in the OSS community will be able to call success. I understand that OSS is not about profit and commercialization. However, what good is it if it does not have an impact on people everywhere (both inside and outside the OSS community)? I would argue that OSS is not merely there just for us to be able to toy with code and be able to lay claim to brilliance that ordinary humans will never understan. OSS is great because of its potential to provide a free flow of ideas and innovation. Right now, that is being limited due to its lack of success in the home and business (success being defined as accepted use at home and in business and a viable alternative to commercial versions).

At least you got a 4 insightful for what I would have thought as off-topic at best and trolling at worst.

Re:Doomed I tell you, Doooomed

[brunes69]

I understand that OSS is not about profit and commercialization. However, what good is it if it does not have an impact on people everywhere (both inside and outside the OSS community)?

Again, missing the point. Most developers don't write OSS to "have an impact on people" or to change the world, or make money or anything else. Frankly, we don't give a shit if our code has an impact on anyone. We do it because either we need the software ourselves and it doesn't exist as we want it, or we do it for fun. That's all.

I would argue that OSS is not merely there just for us to be able to toy with code and be able to lay claim to brilliance that ordinary humans will never understand.

You'd be wrong.

I can tell you, as an OSS developer myself, that you and most other people totally mis-interpert the motives of us. We're not in it *for anyone or anything or any reason*, other than it's something to do that's fun. For an OSS developer, writing code is like watching sports is to others. They don't watch sports because it accomplishes anything, they do it for something to do.

Because writing OSS is a self-fufilling process, you don't need anyone elses approval or any kind of userbase to define success. Success is the act of writing the code in the first place. Which is why OSS will always succeed.

Entrepeneurs and Small Businesses

[neonprimetime]

From my point of view ... OSS is not doomed ... but it needs to get some roots dug in ...

And where, you ask should these roots start at?

OSS users / programmers / advocates must start at the smallest level, meaning Small Businesses and those young entrepenuers.
It's the ideal target audience to hit because they can't afford the MS licenses, and
other software fees ... so if we get 1 or 2 OSS users / programmers / advocates jumping into these situations and voicing their opinion
then sooner or later we'll start seeing all the small business using OSS and from there it can only grow ...
Cause if 1 or 2 of these small businesses blossoms into the next IBM, MS, eBay, whatever then you instantly have a large business
using OSS ... and once other large businesses stuck in MS he!! see that this new up and coming business is saving HUGE on thier software licenses & fees ... the revolution will begin!

Re:Entrepeneurs and Small Businesses

[maxume]

It's the ideal target audience to hit because they can't afford the MS licenses, and other software fees

People cost way more than software. When you are paying someone $35,000 a year to sit at a computer, $100 bucks for the operating system doesn't matter. High end databases and the like are a little bit different, but if you need them, you are probably paying people who know how to use them a good deal more than you are paying for the software. If you aren't paying people who know how to use them, you have a bigger problem than the cost of the software.

Maybe true for use in "production environments"...

[Richard Steiner]

...but that doesn't mean immature but stable/useful FOSS won't be valued (and isn't valued) for testing, for development, and for other things which are not directly related to production applications or servers.

We've been using FOSS software in our mainframe environment for years for everything from text editing to file management to compiler pre-processing, and I really don't see that changing.

Re:Eclipse?

[Anonymous Coward]

A little OT, but why the [heck] does the app consume 75-85 MB of RAM just sitting there idle when it's first launched?

Why climb Everest?

I'm sure he hopes this to be the case

[wrook]

I'm sure Mr. Graf hopes this to be the case.

However, whether he is intentionally ingoring it, or whether he is ignorant, the fact of the matter is that "consolidation" on "stable" applications doesn't stop OSS projects.

Quite the reverse, actually. If you start a new (and immature) OSS project with 1000 programmers, you will almost certainly fail. Successes generally come from small seeds that grow over time. As they become more stable and popular they gradually take over the dinasaurs in the industry. Those that don't become stable or feature rich are weeded out.

Because OSS doesn't rely on speculative return on investment, being unpopular and unknown for several years doesn't hurt an OSS project at all. And then when it does what most people want, it bursts forth on the scene surprising all those people who weren't paying attention.

It is most unlike proprietary software. I think Mr. Graf will be one of those people who are surprised...

Uh, huh

[typical]

Large companies buy software from "stable organizations" not because they're worried about the quality of the software, but because it's safe. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft or IBM (or, increasingly, Linux or Eclipse). You're part of a crowd -- safety in numbers.

A purchaser at a corporation might get *fired* (cutting his salary to zero) because he bought something that turns out to not be what the company wants, but he isn't going to get that much of a reward (say, doubling his salary) if he manages to save the company the cost of the purchase by finding a free alternative.

As a result, it's in everyone's best interest to keep their head down, run with the herd, and make maximally ass-covering decisions.

If I'm trying to solve an engineering problem, I'm more than happy to use all kinds of high-quality packages that aren't backed by a large company. But that's because I'm trying to solve an engineering problem.

A purchaser isn't trying to solve an engineering problem. A purchaser is trying to solve the problem of how to maximize his job safety and income. And today's corporate reward structure heavily penalizes risk-taking.

If you want to produce solutions more in line with actually solving the original engineering problem, you go work at a startup or other small company where people don't have any problem with risk-taking.

If you go to work at a large company, you're going to be working with a large collection of highly risk-adverse people. That may be perfectly reasonable for them -- if one is middle-aged and has a wife, kids, and a house, stability matters a hell of a lot to you. If that doesn't fit with your mindset, though, you might want to try out those smaller companies.

Re:Uh, huh

[tinkerghost]

Hmm risk taking.....
4 years ago, my father landed an account for mfg steel mill eq - est cost $24M US. Profit Margin 60% -> $14.4M US
Last year, post buy out by another company, his plant made ~$46M US sales. Profit Margin 15% -> $6M US.
This year - another buyer with virtually identical deal - $24 - $30M US of equipment w/ 60% margin. Turned down because it was 'too risky to devote half a year to 1 customer'.
Crist, you can almost get 100% cost overruns and loose 50% of the sale and still match last years numbers - where exactly is the risk in this situation?

Re:Uh, huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Curious, does adding "my father" to your story make it any more likely for any one to beleive you?

Re:Uh, huh

[tinkerghost]

not likely, but since I was not directly involved, I though I would include the particulars instead of the more vague 'someone I know'.

Re:Uh, huh

[st1d]

For future reference, you should know that on Slashdot, "my uncle's, neighbor's, sister's, best friend's, garbage man's, psychic", carries much more weight than "my father", regardless of the context. :)

Re:Eclipse?

[Anonymous Coward]

The slow and bloated camp of Java haters must be loving that :-)

The camp of Java haters was never slow, these folks are rather quick. I agree with you that this camp is rather bloated. //end of joke

It's the people, not the software

[truthsearch]

In managing processes it's all about the people, not the software. Each company has their own workflow. No generic software can ever fit that. Software can only provide the framework. Each company must customize their own workflow and processes into their systems. That's why IT departments use so many of their resources just on this one problem. Within an IT department many companies have a team dedicated just to customizing systems for IT workflow. Most of the others are working on the business workflow. That's what custom corporate software has always been about.

So in conclusion, this article is useless. Businesses (especially financial where I have my background) have been doing this for over a decade. Open source software is a perfect fit because it's customizable, standards compliant, and open. Case closed.

SAP says OSS has issues?

[HangingChad]

I just love it when CEO's from companies producing large, expensive, proprietary data systems start throwing rocks at OSS because it's immature. When I hear that my internal babelfish translates it like so, "We're getting our ass kicked by some open source product so we have to frame the discussion in a way our customers can justify spending thousands more than is really necesary."

Well, it may be immature but it's not bloated or overly complex. And it doesn't cost a fortune to implement or require expensive hardware or expensive training for how to customize their proprietary business objects or require any of the monstrous administrative overhead systems like Siebel demand.

Maybe you should focus on making your product a value proposition instead of trying to run down open source. If you did more of that then maybe your crapass product wouldn't be getting the snot kicked out of it. Funny how big government and big business start thinking they have a right to exist instead of earning their living like everyone else.

Re:SAP says OSS has issues?

[Hognoxious]

When I hear that my internal babelfish translates it like so, "We're getting our ass kicked by some open source product so we have to frame the discussion in a way our customers can justify spending thousands more than is really necesary

And the open source ERP sytem that's kicking SAP's ass would be what?

Not saying you're wrong. Just asking.

Re:SAP says OSS has issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is SAP are always releasing immature releases of new products in order to let their first clients wade through the bugs... you've gotta have big balls (or big pockets at least) to risk a .0 release of something they've probably just bought in or knocked out themselves!

Not to mention the number of their products which use things like Tomcat, Struts, Eclipse etc. Last time one of their honchos slagged off OSS they pretty quickly came back to say how they love it really...

Re:SAP says OSS has issues?

[HangingChad]

And the open source ERP sytem that's kicking SAP's ass would be what?

Depends on what space you're talking about, but generally if you want to see SAP or Siebel reps grind their teeth start talking expansively about SugarCRM.

Re:SAP says OSS has issues?

[Hognoxious]

Nice answer, but not to the question that was asked. In case you weren't aware, ERP != CRM.

Other things that have to be considered.

[IAAP]

The relatively minimal costs of open source versus not will continue to be an upward pressure on their implementation.

I have to doubt that a bit. As I am investigating F/OSS right now, there's some things are a real pain in the ass and that would eventually add to the cost of installaion and operation of it.

One is that when I'm installing F/OSS software, almost always, there's bunch of dependencies that I don't know about when I first install it. Yes, yes, there's the 'README' that has some of the dependencies. But it almost never mentions the dependencies of the dependencies. I guess these folks didn't document exactly how they built their built there development environment, therefore, they may have forgotten somthing that's needed? Regardless, all of that stuff has to be hunted down. It takes a lot of time. And time is money.

A lot of F/OSS projects are started and never quite finished or they're not suported any longer - so, it'll be up to the users/consumers to maintain it.

The GNU license. If I ask, let's say, if I compile some proprietary code with gcc, does that mean my code is now under GNU? I'll get basically two different answers: yes or no.That's scary to the corp types. At the very least, there's going to legal costs associated with settling that. If I end up going with this start up, I will have to get legal advice. That's yet another cost.

Or, I could just say fuck it! And spend my litle money on MS and the others. It depends on the cost bebefit analysis.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[Theatetus]

ne is that when I'm installing F/OSS software, almost always, there's bunch of dependencies that I don't know about when I first install it. Yes, yes, there's the 'README' that has some of the dependencies. But it almost never mentions the dependencies of the dependencies.

Do you live in a strange world without package management? apt? yum? portage? ports? I know software on Windows has horrible issues with library versioning and sharing, but that's no excuse to drag that same problem into a real operating system.

A lot of F/OSS projects are started and never quite finished or they're not suported any longer - so, it'll be up to the users/consumers to maintain it.

A lot of proprietary projects are started and never quite finished or they're not supported any longer. In this case the users/customers don't even have the option of paying someone else to maintain it. It's just gone. My last company had about 3500 POP users on an old POP server called Post.Office. It hasn't been supported since 2000. When the company that made it went under and support disappeared, they couldn't even find somebody who could migrate the user base to another server. If the POP server had been open source, they could have sunk in a few grand to get a contractor to do the migration and recouped the cost pretty quickly.

The GNU license. If I ask, let's say, if I compile some proprietary code with gcc, does that mean my code is now under GNU? I'll get basically two different answers: yes or no

Ummm... no you don't. Are you trolling or just stupid? The GPL is quite clear that the output of a program is not a derivative work and so need not be distributed under the terms of the GPL.

At the very least, there's going to legal costs associated with settling that. If I end up going with this start up, I will have to get legal advice

Check out the MS Office EULA some time. The license forbids you from using Office to create materials critical of Microsoft (no, I'm not kidding). Did your lawyer check that out? Why not? If you can skip on that legal question, why would you hire a lawyer to find out what's explicitly said in the GPL, that the output of a program is not a derivative work?

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[Trails]

You point out some key gaps in many OSS that are part of the problem, but I attribute these to immaturity. Lack of proper documentation is a sign of an immature product. However, enterprises are often faced with the following choices: - build it myself: will cost a fair bit, I will be running code tested only via whatever testing I do. Time consuming, and costly if my inhouse development proves not up to the task - build on top of OSS: leverage pre-existing OSS software. Still has a lot of dependence on inhouse dev, but there'll be a knowledge base, to some degree, regarding the product. - buy it: buy an "out-of-the-box" solution. On thing about "out-of-the-box" solutions: they never are. And most software providers, once you've bought their license (ie once they've got your money), aren't interested in working too hard towards integration. You become "locked in" in that once you've invested in their implementation, the cost of rreplacing it means they'd have to practically burn down your offices before you'd ditch them. Open source is not the be-all, end-all of software, but for many problems, the cost factor, especially for mature OSS or companies with highly competent inhouse dev, is too enticing. Don't expect banks to buy GenericOpenDatabase 1.0 for their transactional software, bnut their XML parser, for example, could very well be a mature OSS.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[IAAP]

Ummm... no you don't. Are you trolling or just stupid? The GPL is quite clear that the output of a program is not a derivative work and so need not be distributed under the terms of the GPL.

If that is what exempts people and businesses for F/OSS usage, then F/OSS is will be relegated to the arrogant hobbyist and Bill G, Ellison, etc al. will continue to become richer, I will lose an option, but, on the other hand, you can pump up your little ego.

BTW, packages DO NOT ALWAY WORK. So, thank you, you just gave me yet another reason AGAINST F/OSS. See what arrogance gets you?

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[Theatetus]

If that is what exempts people and businesses for F/OSS usage, then F/OSS is will be relegated to the arrogant hobbyist and Bill G, Ellison,

What is "that" referring to in your sentence? I pointed out that the output of a GPL'd program is not a derivative work. So, yes, that is what allows you to create a proprietary application with GCC, for example. How that makes Bill Gates richer in your mind is beyond me.

BTW, packages DO NOT ALWAY WORK

No, but the packages for tested, stable software you should be using in an enterprise do.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[IAAP]

That = Are you trolling or just stupid?

Also, the GPL is NOT clear. If it were clear, then I wouldn't have questioned it. Would I? Nor would there be so many conflicting answers that have appeared on other threads that dealt with the GPL. ( Search under GPL 3 here on /.)

And packages, in many cases, do not work when installed. My bench mark? Windows Installs. In very rare cases does a program installed under Windows not work. And ys, that's F/OSS'es competition. Being free isn't enough F/OSS has much work ahead of it.

And I'm done with this thread. You've already wasted too much time boosting your ego. Bye!

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[ZachPruckowski]

1) The GPL v3 isn't out yet.
2) What we've seen of the GPL v3 is a very rough draft, and subject to change for the better.
3) If and when GPL v3 comes out, it won't be mandatory. You'll probably be able to get a lot of software under GPL v2 for a while, especially if v3 is incompatible with v2.

In short, don't worry about v3 yet. Just read v2, and when you get to the part where output is not a derivative work, then you know you're clean. you can also check RMS's website, because he prolly has that in an FAQ somewhere.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[WeAreAllDoomed]

BTW, packages DO NOT ALWAY WORK. So, thank you, you just gave me yet another reason AGAINST F/OSS. See what arrogance gets you?

you're obviously used to dealing with commercial software vendors who kiss your ass because you're "the customer". what makes you think the previous poster gives a damn whether or not you select F/OSS software?

i've had several impolite run-ins with F/OSS software zealots and project primadonnas. but i keep using the software, because the software is good, free, and, oh yes, the people involved are generally honest and straightforward.

if you allow your bruised ego to make the wrong decisions on software, be my guest.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Check out the MS Office EULA some time. The license forbids you from using Office to create materials critical of Microsoft

I make a habit of trying to read at least most EULAs I agree to and have read a number of different MS EULA (including Office), but have never seen this clause. Can you provide any reference on this? I've just gone back a did a re-read of my current Office EULA and unless I just read too fast and missed it, there is just nothing like that there. Is this one of those MS urban legands which gets passed around /.?

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[jedidiah]

The L/GPL is QUITE clear. Oracle gets to make 60K per cpu closed source software with it.

If that isn't clear enough for you THEN YOU ARE INFACT A MORON.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[jedidiah]

That fact that YOU personally are too dense to get something does not mean that it isn't obvious.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[st1d]

Just more proof that you can always find problems with things that you want to find problems with. Oddly enough, if it weren't for the existance of F/OSS, this individual might not have had the opportunity to attack the work of people who volunteer their time and effort to creating software that helps others work easier. So, if you think about it, F/OSS added to the poster's quality of life, in an odd, twisted sort of way.
.
In fact, it may have even saved many such people's lives, because they might otherwise find entertainment standing outside a Habitat for Humanity site, complaining about the "shoddy" work on the new house, until they end up with a claw hammer stuck in their skull :)

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[budgenator]

It's assumed if your trying to build from CVS that you actualy know a bit about what your doing and having dependecy problems isn't unusual, in fact it's expected when living on the bleeding-edge. If your having those kind of problems installing from the stable branch on to a modern distro your doing something very wrong like forcing redhat rpm's onto a SuSE machine, so I'd suggest not spending a little money on MS products because you'd likely fuck that up beyond any repair as well.

Re:Other things that have to be considered.

[budgenator]

Most of the software I use in windows is F/OSS and it all installed without problems. The Gimp dose hang up once in a while in windows.

Re:Eclipse?

[AKAImBatman]

A little OT, but why the check does the app consume 75-85 MB of RAM just sitting there idle when it's first launched?

Question: A little OT, but why does Mozilla consume 80-100 MB of RAM just sitting there idle after it's launched?

Answer: Features, features, features!

Yeah... IT is changing

[dangermen]

This does not surprise me. Open source has to mature in some really 'mature' ways these days. Businesses want accountability. .ie if you make widgets, how many widgets/hour can you not make because of a cowboy network/systems engineer? How many days were we not able to sell widgets last year because of IT?

Open-source really needs to focus on what can be seen as key business objectives(stability and operational cost). The old days of 'the one guy, jack of all trades' is harder to find these days because businesses don't want that. They want an measurable and replaceable IT structure. Those managers and engineers who cannot help provide that will find themselves without jobs.

Process is taking us back to the Mainframes(for good reason too). ITIL was designed around mainframes. Mainframes were centrally controlled and help meet business objectives. This also means though that MS has to get their crap together because blue screens cost money and today's tools can see that. They are just as vulnerable.

Re:Eclipse?

[frodo from middle ea]

Not to sound like a elitist or any thing, but if you are working in a enterprise environment, you really need a fast PC with lots of RAM. Currently I am sitting at a P4 with 2.5 Gigs of RAM.

Even if Eclipse consumes 75MB of RAM doing nothing, I prefer that as it appears a lot more responsive. May be it's time you talk to your boss about getting you a proper workstation.

Remove the 'OSS' from that title

[npsimons]

immature open source software is doomed in an enterprise environment nowadays

That should read "immature software is doomed in an enterprise environment nowadays". But then I guess it wouldn't be a flamebait/troll article as everyone would read it and say "duh", and quickly move on.

Why do people always have to pick on OSS? Oh well, I guess that's the price of success. And part of the beauty of OSS is that picking on it will only make it better . . .

Re:Remove the 'OSS' from that title

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people always have to pick on OSS?

Because doing so gets your article (and ads) splashed all over the front page of high-traffic blogs like Slashdot. Duh.

OSS = Operation Support System

[Anonymous Coward]

Please use full name when referring to this acronym. Except for Linux-fans, many business people know this acronym as Operation Support System providing inventory, management, support, planning and other processes within a company.
There's already enough confusion out there.

It's also the official stance of the real engineers:
http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/oss/

Similar thing with PSP - is it a gaming device, or a graphical application?

**Alert Redmond**

[psbrogna]

Somebody should run over to Bill's Place and let them know what Mr. Graf has to say about software like SugarCRM. They want to reconsider their partnership.

Seriously? Nothing to see here folks, high potential gains is often associated with higher risks.

Ignoring Small Scale

[cloudscout]

Even Microsoft supports a type of open source development in the enterprise. Look at their Scripting Center. They've recently added a section for community-contributed scripts.

I'd be willing to bet that most large companies have at least one person on their IT staff who participates in this type of community development system to create tools for their enterprise.

It may not be what most people think of when they talk about open source, but I'd say it's an example that is too often ignored.

This is a no-brainer

[br00tus]

As the article says, *immature* open source projects are done, the key word being immature. Certainly - any company large enough to have a real CIO position would have been hesitant to put immature technology into operation in the past, with not that much changing up to the present.

The article writer considers Linux as a mature technology. I worked at a Fortune 100 financial company not long ago where engineering was testing Red Hat Linux, but had none of it in production. Whether you call it data management or business processes, a critical machine could have literally billions of dollars worth of trades processed over it in a day, and engineering placed a very high value on stability. Most critical machines ran versions of Solaris which were more than one version out of date, even if they were new machines with new applications - IT management didn't want any surprises, they didn't want to be the ones to find a bug in the latest version of Solaris, or even the previous one. And if you have, say, hundreds of Sun Enterprise 4500s all over the world, you might tend to see bugs that shops with dozens, or a handful of E4500s might not. Wanting maturity is not a new thing.

I would agree that consolidation and focus on business process is the new fad among CIOs. So perhaps the days where in large companies an immature open source project would make its way in by 10%-20% of the environment are gone while this fad lasts. But there are plenty of smaller companies who do not have the budget, and are willing to use it. My friend works for a company with $1 billion in revenue, which is one company in a corporation which has over $3 billion in revenue - the revenue is just shy of putting the corporation in the Fortune 500. Despite all of that, the IT department uses a ton of open source, and only uses propietary technology when necessary. They've even been using immature open source software when mature, good propietary solutions exist for some things, simply due to budget. Despite a lot of things, at the end of the day, free as in beer looks very, very attractive to a lot of companies over even a slightly better competitor that costs tens of thousands of dollars. Even for companies almost in the Fortune 500.

Take out "open source"

[semiotec]

and the article is still just as pointless.

So I did read the relatively short and concise article, but I still came away thinking that if you replace the business buzzwords, like "strategic", "consolidation" and leave out "open source", the article becomes something like:

1. business/enterprise customers don't like immature softwares, even if they are free

which is either a very obvious comment or a very ... obvious comment.

2. SAP ... blah blah blah... better than IBM, Microsoft and Oracle

which is probably not surprising, coming from a SAP executive.

seriously, where's the news? Did anyone really expect this guy to say anything good about anything other than SAP?

Finally, is there a piece of software (other than "Hello World!") that was never "immature"? Somehow just went straight from planning to finished mature product?

My cellphone provider

[zlogic]

My cellular provider (MTS Russia) has migrated from its old but reliable Cboss billing system to a really buggy thing named Foris about two years ago. People knew that Foris was buggy and certainly immature, but management still forced the move. The main reason probably was because Foris was designed by an MTS-owned company while CBoss was a third-party product and had to be paid for. A company like MTS can certainly adopt any OSS product as long as it helps them cut costs, no matter if the application is mature or not.

I.T. Doesn't Matter

[LukePieStalker]

Nicholas Carter famously, or infamously, said essentially the same thing in the article "IT Doesn't Matter" in the Harvard Business Review a few years ago. The bottom line was that risk aversion with respect to technology was a good thing. Contrary to a bazillion dollars worth of commercial software marketing, being on the bleeding edge of enterprise software didn't confer a competitive advantage on you. It usually ended up hosing you.

This pissed off people like Steve Ballmer no end, because it meant that companies like his couldn't automatically push the "new new thing" at customers. However, it also plays to their agenda to some extent because they are the entrenched thing and the entrenched thing, according to this theory, is exactly what you want.

Re:I.T. Doesn't Matter

[typical]

I'm not saying that risk can be ignored. Obviously, a correct evaluation does factor in risk.

My argument is that the costs of risk are over-weighted in a corporation relative to trying to achieve that corporation's goals (but not necessarily relative to the individual's actions).

The "you need this because it's new" argument is broken for a whole different set of reasons.

SAP, Markets and FOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

SAP addresses a large but limited and very lucrative market: large-cap firms that have clearly-defined production processes. For those companies it is worthwhile to effectively outsource most of their IT by running SAP. Much as companies once installed IBM mainframes and paid IBM consultants to write software and run the mainframes, so today many firms run SAP software. The primary problems they encounter are customization and cost.

Customization of SAP is complex. Many firms who initially attempted to customize SAP to fit their business processes eventually gave up and changed their business process to suit SAP! Problem was that, with each SAP update, it was necessary to re-apply any customizations, which required a team of SAP developers. Long-term this was prohibitively expensive.

SAP is expensive: you must pay a high cost per seat for the database (usually Oracle) and an additional charge per seat for each SAP user. So in the long run, you pay, pay, pay.

There's little reason to get excited when a SAP representative speaks about FOSS since they are, for the most part, in a market largely unaffected by FOSS currently.

But as FOSS developers begin to infringe on SAP's territory more and more, chipping away especially at their more cost-sensitive customers, expect to hear SAP bellowing loudly about the "weaknesses of FOSS".

Article ignores bottom-up scenario

[Experiment 626]

It appears TFA is only looking at the top-town approach to OSS getting into the enterprise. CIO is looking for some well-established solution to managing data across the enterprise, so he's not going to go with an immature OSS product.

I think where small OSS projects are most likely to find their way into the enterprise is in a bottom-up scenario. Rather than being the result of some enterprise-wide strategic business partnership, they get going when middle manager goes to developer and says "find a way to get data from X to Y". Often, some immature OSS tool will happen to be the best solution to this specific need. The OSS tool gets used for some particular task, then when another department has a similar need, they look into how the first department did it and the OSS tool gains ground from there.

If it's being deployed on a large enough scale to even be a blip on the CIO's radar, then no, an immature piece of software (OSS or commercial) is not the answer. But that doesn't mean it won't find use in the company somewhere.

New products to meet new requirements

[Ingolfke]

I don't think this is really an OSS question. As IT technologies mature and end users demand stable/commoditized products those products (OSS or Commercial) tend to leave the marketplace, or are applicable only to a niche. Any new, or less mature, product is going to have a very very hard time competing with products that are better supported, more mature, or more feature rich. At the same time, as the market matures people expect more from the end-to-end solutions, and new products arise to perform those functions. They could be glue software that links together several other mature applications, they could be applications that help manage or report on the new more mature applications, or they could be brand new applications that leverage the standard/consistant application infrastructure.

SOLD!

[IAAP]

2. SAP ... blah blah blah... better than IBM, Microsoft and Oracle

I find your argument for SAP quite compelling. I'll take it!

Your PHB

Remember: this is the pres of SAP talking

[postbigbang]

SAP has their own developer network, and doesn't need any of that stinking open sauce stuff.

But there's some wisdom in thinking that mature, reliable code should be used. Being able to see the freaking SOURCE might help make a wise judgment on the merits of good code, wouldn'tcha think?

Maybe SAP's incapable of finding interesting OSS companies to buy, as their entire ecosystem surrounds SAP which also stands for NOT INVENTED HERE. I hope the helium he inhaled in San Francisco doesn't give him a headache.

Star Trek

[shamowfski]

I immediately thought they were talking about software on the ship the enterprise.

Re:Eclipse?

[Bloke down the pub]

Not to sound like a elitist or any thing, but if you are working in a enterprise environment, you really need a fast PC with lots of RAM. Currently I am sitting at a P4 with 2.5 Gigs of RAM.

Not to sound like someone who actually knows what he's talking about, but that must be one heck of a bloated terminal emulator you're running.

Can someone define enterprise?

[Theatetus]

What exactly distinguishes an "enterprise" from a "business"?

Re:Can someone define enterprise?

[ficken]

Enterprise - a unit of economic organization or activity (Merriam-Webster). Enterprises are usually really big businesses with a really large user base. Its a buzzword for the suits.

Buzzwords.

[labratuk]

process innovation officers... design processes... strategic to the company... business processors... technologies... consolidation...

I've never heard more bullshit in a summary.

Re:Buzzwords.

[Theatetus]

Seriously. What is all this crap? I'm still thrown by the word "enterprise"; it seems to mean either "company with more than one building" or "company whose officers are stupid enough to pay too much for software and consultants".

And what's up with "partners"? Why does everybody want "partners" these days? Why not pay companies to provide you goods and services (or, God forbid, hire people to do that internally) and get paid for providing other companies and people goods and services?

Re:Buzzwords.

[Fordiman]

'Enterprise' is, and has been since I can remember, a generic term for any organized endeavor. In business circles, it seems to mean 'business', but in business circles, half the fun seems to be pretending every word in the english language means 'business'.

What I want to know is: what is a 'business processor'?

Seriously. It really seems like a contrived term. I mean, are we referring to any processor capable of running a spreadsheet or what?

Re:Buzzwords.

[Theatetus]

And what is a "Sales Engineer"?

Re:Buzzwords.

[labratuk]

"enterprise" == "My needs are (penis is) bigger than yours."

I would rather go back to paper.

[argent]

After using SAP for a year I would personally rather go back to doing my timecard, purchase orders, and expenses on the back of a shovel using charcoal and calling it in to a Tourette-afflicted trained chimp via a tin can telephone.

God Damn that's broken software. I'm having a hard time saying if it's actually worse than Lotus Notes, but if not they're tied for last place.

And more...

[$ASANY]

The other thing open source has on commercial software is speed. Not in the sense that it runs faster, but in the sense of from decision to deployment, it blows commercial software out of the water.

Example: our government client had a roll-your-own configuration management process that involved a hamstrung issue tracking system, emails, emailed spreadsheets and frequent teleconferences. They never were able to complete the test/fix/test/fix release process for software on time without deciding to let some things go unfixed, or hacking out functionality that couldn't make it through the QA process in time. We stood up a linux server running bugzilla on a machine no longer capable of being used as a desktop in a day, the client saw it, loved it, and it's been in production ever since replacing the custom system they spent gobs and gobs of money on.

Why did we win? Because accounting didn't have to get involved to approve a purchase of hardware and/or software. Because something "good enough" could be pulled from apt-get in two minutes rather than having to go through a purchase cycle. If there's an existing solution with some degree maturity out there on sourceforge, from the word "go" to "done" is one heck of a lot faster with open source, largely because the bean counters are eliminated from the cycle.

At least in our shop, the biggest chunk of time spent getting anything done is in obtaining the approvals required in order to spend money. I would imagine that's often encountered elsewhere.

Re:And more...

[st1d]

Agreed, and while larger organizations might have more layers to pass through, often these approvals are more difficult in smaller companies, simply because there is less room to pass the buck if something goes wrong. Having licenses that are common and well understood, in the sense that once you read the GPL/LGPL/etc. you know what you are working with, is a tremendous asset in getting approval.
.
As far as testing software prior to approval, there is much to be said for loading the software onto a test system (even a laptop), and having it available for demonstration at the same time that you are trying to get the needed approvals. It's far more powerful to demonstrate the system in a working simulation, as it tends to show the client/boss that you are serious about the new item, simply because the people who deal with these issues are so used to marketing speak that they are all but numb to the "I think it would really help us!" argument, and seeing exactly how it will work, and being able to ask questions and have their concerns dealt with immediately allow them to feel more comfortable with such approvals.
.
While closed-source demos can act in a similar way, F/OSS has two advantages over it. One, "trial" software tends to be limited, either lacking important features (which are often blatently marked by greyed out options or similar means) leaving an unsatisfactory feeling to most people. Two, it's one thing to say how flexible the software is, but there is nothing quite like the sense of confidence you convey when you casually open a source file and say, "And in addition to what it's already capable of, I think we could save a lot of time and money if we added [an additional data item] into the source code here, thereby making [a department or process] more efficient".
.
If nothing else, you'll have an advantage over most salesfolk, who often barely know anything about the software outside of their marketing literature, as well as an added advantage when the decision maker talks to others, as it's unlikely the closed-source competition will be able or willing to do the same. (In fact, if the decision maker asks the closed-source company about alterations to their product, chances are they will be quoted a considerable sum, without even knowing they are quoting against F/OSS.) Most importantly, you can do this for any member of the decision making team, be it management, accounting, or a parent company or customer.
.
These issues never seem to come up in TCO arguments, however. :)

Re:"Enterprise" is just a buzword to please The Su

[westlake]

OSS is Free from such corporate (WHORES WHORES WHORES) influences.

Like OpenOffice.org is free from Sun?

OSS can demand as much money, talent, organization and discipline as any proprietary project. The suits do have a voice.

It's a lifestyle: like prison, some say

[postbigbang]

And so the original post, not having been correctly put into context, is just plain alarmist and silly.

I told you so...

[baywulf]

I told the OSS guys to add driver support for the latest generation of phasers and warpcoils to their code. But did they listen to me? No... They don't realize what kind of hardware support is needed to make it in the enterprise.

meaningless phrases competition

[bw-sf]

This about takes it: "Open-source startups and relative newcomers must target a new breed of CIOs, which Graf dubs chief process innovation officers. Rather than old-school CIOs who focus on a company's data management, these guys design processes with the company's network." This has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. It's just dick-waving stupidity. Immature/buggy/flaky software of any stripe -- OSS or shrinkwrap or whatever -- doesn't make it for reasons which should be obvious.

Re:meaningless phrases competition

[Fordiman]

Um... what do you expect? You don't get to be head of marketing anywhere without 'linguistic innovation' (i.e.: the ability to pull cool-sounding terms out of your ass) in your skillset.

Re:Eclipse?

[rgigger]

Question: If I leave a nagios monitoring screen open in Firefox (it refreshes every few minutes or so) why does it eventually use up all the memory on my box (about 1.5 gigs) and have to be killed and relaunched.

Answer: It has memory leaks.

Re:Eclipse?

[skoaldipper]

I haven't followed mozilla in a while, but as best I understand it, Mozilla runs on top of what's called an APF (Application Programming Framework); who's main purpose is for cross platform compatibility. All browser application components like XML, CSS, and HTML all run on top of it.

Purpose? So a mozilla application developer does not have to port from one platform to the next. It's already done at that lower APF layer, which is compiled for each platform on which it runs. Price? memory and performance.

OSS has different business model

[Anonymous Coward]

than propietary software. If it's community developed FOSS then there are no investors wanting a quick return on their investment. The FOSS project can take the long view. If you are a software user and haven't been brainwashed by the marketdroids, this is a good thing. Taking the long view is good for your business.

SAP needs to pay attention to what they're saying.

[argent]

"What really matters is the business value you provide and how much you can provide IT value to the organizations,"

So far, my experience with SAP is pretty unpleasant. Its only goal seems to be to force every end-user to spend as much time as possible negotiating its obscure interface through undocumented and inconsistent dialogs and menus, rather than doing actual productive work.

Re:Eclipse?

[AKAImBatman]

Or to be more abstract about it: Features, features, features! :)

Re:Star Trek: Enterprise

[MS-06FZ]

Yeah, but the show was cancelled.

in other news

[wardk]

when asked if "immature" PROPRIETARY software would end up being treated any differently, he shut the hell up.

YES!

[StarKruzr]

Believe him! He has a really low uid!

Also, what makes you say Bush is trying to keep the Smart out of the USA? Is he also managing to keep it out of Mexico and Canada?

Re:YES!

[Lumpy]

Mexico and Canada have smartcars all over the place. I suggest you actually research about it first before making a statement that is full of innacurate information that makes you look really silly.

Smartcars are exceedingly popular in canada. There is a waiting list for them because they can not import them fast enough. Mexico, the sales are dismal as the older style cars are still being manufacturered there and selling for 1/2 the price of the cheapest imports. (Oh and the economy in Mexico makes our poor look rich.)

I knew it!

[MarkusQ]

I thought to myself as I typed that line: sure as anything, someone will point out that somewhere it's been done.

But then I though: you're just being silly. A cow with an IPod!?

Thanks for confirming my belief that, with enough eyeballs, you can find a real world example of any random joke.

--MarkusQ

Re:Eclipse?

[skoaldipper]

Ah, yes indeed! Cross platform compatibility is a feature too, no? I was just trying to be precise as to where that biggest hunk of memory use stems from. And I'm quite possibly even wrong even there.

"Mature" takes a different meaning with OSS

[Hosiah]

Something you have to remind people is just how fast OSS software grows up. I can remember when KDE was klunky and not very usable, Red Hat had trouble detecting hardware, nvu was barely able to handle a simple layout, and Gimp had only about ten filters. Time and again, I've been able to point somebody who was complaining of missing features and bugs at the new version of the same program, where the issues were addressed.

Filing bug reports or even offering simple feedback helps the development along. But at any rate, I see OSS develop at a faster time scale. Three years ago, how many of you heard of Firefox?

FUD: So what else is new?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

immature open source software is doomed in an enterprise environment nowadays

Immature open source software is no more or less "doomed" than immature closed-source software in an enterprise environment nowadays. There have been only two changes:
- Open source software now has a chance when there's closed source competition.
- There are mature products available for some applications.

All software starts as immature and potentially improves with upgrades based on information collected when it encounters the real world. Once there's an incumbent product, a newcomer has to have a major advantage to break into the market. When a market incumbent is well established but the market is not mature to the "commodity" level, with a bunch of interchangable suppliers competing solely on price, the advantage may need to be a factor of 10 in cost/benefit.

On the other hand, if there isn't anything to do the job, the difference between doing it and not doing it is a factor of several in benefit, and competing businesses need the job done, an "immature" product that DOES do the job can break in easily. First player to try it and make it work gets a big jump on his competition.

This claim is FUD. Limiting it to open source software is double-deep FUD. It's an attempt to scare entrepenuers - and venture capitalists - away from open source projects. To the extent there's any truth in it at all, it applies equally to ALL software projects (and all innovatiove startups).

Open-source startups and relative newcomers must target a new breed of CIOs, which Graf dubs chief process innovation officers

Not to be confused with the OLD breed of CIOs, which wouldn't consider open source at all.

Which open source technologies are mature enough to survive the consolidation that's coming?

And now that he's eliminated NEW projects out-of-hand, he goes after ESTABLISHED projects, and tries to take out THEIR resources by rattling the effigy of "shakeout". A "consolidation wave" that is supposedly coming.

What consolidation wave?

The problem for open source projects is, and continues to be, convincing an enterprise to try their product at all - not being displaced by a global rush to a "more mature" equivalent.

The problem for companies trying to build a business model on supporting and/or distributing open-source projects may be closer to that of a conventional business. But it seems to me there's plenty of business to go around, and it DOES go around.

What we see now is that the suits are finally catching on to the suitability of open source products for use in mission-critical applications. It is no longer courting a pink slip to adopt them, and some managers are advancing their carreers by doing so and producing corporate success. And as they do this, less clueful suits will begin to mimic them. Both the clueful and the non-clueful result in more adoption of open source products, and thus the "opening of the enterprise market" to companies making money off providing and supporting such projects.

Of course, as the herd of suits comes out to buy open source, there will be fads, resulting in far more adoption of one version of a functionality than another. And there will be well-publicised disasters, resulting in a stampeed from one to another - IMHO a far more significant factor.

But the broad adoption of open source products into enterprise should produced increased support for multiple and diverse projects, rather than a consolidation.

Unlike an open source project, a closed source product is supported by a single corporation that must make money continuously. So if some of its customers don't upgrade or switch to competing products, it is at risk of going under - and other customers using it in mission critical processes will rush to find alternatives before they find themselves hanging high-and-dry. Once alternatives are found, the revenue stream dries up, and the company folds or is absorbed

Doomed? Yeah.

[Fordiman]

Most OSS projects are doomed. A good (made-up number between 50 and 100) percent either never see the light of day, or become dead projects within their first year. Those that remain fall off one by one until only the bleeding edge software remains. That's just how good OSS evolves.

Corporate culling notwithstanding; what CIOs don't really seem to realize is that we don't NEED them. Sure, they pay the bandwidth costs, help with the code and all, but if they suddenly stopped doing that it'd be bittorrent and volunteer programmers all the way - until another corporation suddenly 'discovers' OSS again and it becomes hot again.

Naw, seriously. These corporate types are good for a chuckle, and for making things a bit easier, but I somehow doubt that their actions will influence how 'immature' (what defines that?) OSS congeals.

Obviously, he must be referring to

[gwayne]

the doomed TV series about the U.S.S. 'Enterprise'!

No such thing as free lunch

[Anonymous Coward]

for enterprise punks. This 'maximum profit at minimum expenses' logic of some enterprise PHBs is what's immature here. If you want mature software perhaps you should contribute some cash dude. Mature software doesn't fall from the sky for free just because you'd like to get a bonus. Get a haircut and get a real job corporate punk!

Pundits never fail to miss the obvious

[JSBiff]

Which is, how can any project which is non-commercial ever be doomed, as long as the maintainers are still interested in it? Now, if someone wants to start an Open Source company, where they need a product which generates revenue streams, they might be doomed for not being mature enough.

But the projects which are either a labor of love (probably most Open Source projects), or which fill a need better than any other OSS/Free Software (Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc) will continue to plug along, without much corporate adoption, until they either die from lack of interest/competition, or reach a critical mass where they are suddenly the hot new Open Source tool that everybody starts using. But, the plugging along phase can last a long long time given dedication from the developer(s).

Since Free Software is fundamentally different from commercial software, I would say it can NEVER be doomed the way a proprietary software package can be. Often, when the companies that make proprietary software go under, it's gone forever, because whoever inherits the source code after the bankruptcy (assuming the source even survives), will probably never do anything with it, and never let anyone else do anything with it.

Open Source/Free Software, however, can easily have a second life. If anyone ever gets interested in the software again, they can use the source code to re-start development. Free Software can, basically, never truly die. . . just go inactive for awhile, or indefinitely.

Doomed In Enterprise?

[ExoticMandibles]

But I thought they cancelled that show last year!

larry

He is right

[mrjatsun]

> immature open source software is doomed in an enterprise environment ...

This is correct.

immature commercial software is doomed in an enterprise environment ...

This is also correct... So what we have here, is FUD :-)

Re:He is right

[capt.mellow]

yep, from the 'no shit, sherlock' department. but it makes a provocative headline eh?

Baseless Article

[kgutter]

The person who wrote the article does not know anything about IT in Corporates or SOHO. In India thousands small business are joining Open Source revolution , they are fed up by TCO of MS softwares. Some of the big Corporates have already running linux ,i know a company where from manufacturing to ERP is powered by linux. What the author does not know is that , millions of ppl in china and in india are converting to linux or have converted , its high time he give some visit in these places to know the truth. I want to write more , but the article does not deserve it.

Workflow

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to get to know the workflow of the business to make a difference at the company. Possessing analytical skills will get you further than someone who only know how to develop software.

Re:Eclipse?

[SillyNickName4me]

I manage to run Gnome 2, 2 rdesktop sessions, gaim, linphone, firefox and a java applet (for managing pictures) all in 256mb without swap on a 'thin client'.

Using that right now for posting, and Firefox is consuming some 45mb.

Sure, it has a few leaks, I have read about those, and I bet people are not reporting those for no reason. Yet I have to see them on an install without extentions still.

Re:Eclipse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to sound like someone who actually knows what he's talking about

because you don't...

Re:Eclipse?

[stupidfoo]

No no no! You've got it all wrong. Didn't you read how that's not a memory leak, it's a feature!

Why, why, why?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do stories about open source software survivability ALWAYS have commercial software vendors making dire predictions? In this case it's SAP. Of course someone from SAP is going to say how open source software is doomed in the enterprise because they have a commercial product competing in that space!!!! OMG!!! How stupid do you have to be to believe anything that Mr. Graf says?!?!

Makes my head hurt... He may have some valid points, but he most certainly has a hidden agenda with a majority of his comments. Especially those at the end of the article.

Even more fun.

[twitter]

I just love it when CEO's from companies producing large, expensive, proprietary data systems start throwing rocks at OSS because it's immature.

What's even more is how he presents the "mess" created by non free software as a reason to eliminate free software. From the fine article,

"The mess that companies have with their IT today is unimaginable, and the larger they get the more mess they have," Graf said. Some SAP customers have as many as 3,000 systems, for example.

3,000 systems and NONE OF THEM TALK TO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL WRITTEN BY GREEDY PIGHEADS. Would you like to buy another one? The one, the only, final solution that's somehow different from the other 2,999 we sold you? Ha, ha, ha.

How anyone thinks they will escape the mess outside free and open software is beyond me.

Re:Even more fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

GREEDY PIGHEADS

Cute. 3,000 different systems is a bit extreme, but it's not uncommon to find a few hundred here and there.

Mostly though... the lack of interoperability underlines a lack of long-term planning, and is hardly related to whether or not they are sold by "GREEDY PIGHEADS" - these are mostly in-house custom apps, not individual commercial solutions. Windows as a platform might be undersirable in the proprietary sense, but it certainly has al sorts of interop mechanisms to work with. In the end, there's always the lowly socket and XML.

If corporate developers write "silo" applications that don't talk to anything else, that's hardly the fault of Oracle, Microsoft, SAP or whatever.

Lack of vision and planning is what causes these problems, not whether or not you're using operating system X or "free software" Y. Enterprises that did it right did so with proprietary Solaris, propietary OS/390, propietary OS/2. They can also do it with Linux, and with Windows. It has nothing to do with "GREEDY PIGHEADS".

You seem to be "in the know" when it comes to enterprise integration... instead of trolling please enlighten us as to how developing LAMP applications exclusively (or whatever your ideal replacement for "GREEDY PIGHEADS" systems) will suddenly magically endow large companies with the necessary vision to create extensible enterprise ecosystems that actually work.

Re:Duh Humor is IRRELEVANT, I see...

[davidsyes]

Ahh, moderators acting in FUTILITY. Even if it is flamebait, the guy STILL had the word "Enterprise" in there.

Do we care?

[ChaoticCoyote]

The whole world of computing isn't comprised of "enterprise-class" users. A one-size fits all approach -- trying to make any given OSS product work for geeks, hobbiests, small businesses, corporation, education, what have you -- is unrealistic.

OSS is a good model for innovation, for creativity, for exploration. Many OSS applications work well for niche markets, hobbiests, and researchers -- but I don't see why the "success" of an OSS package should be predicated on its acceptance by "the enterprise."

Re:Eclipse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any particular font you would like that "Fuck you" in?

Re:Eclipse?

[Bloke down the pub]

Actually, it's not a memory leak. The original article has the words in quotes (a subtlety that both the person who submitted the story and Zonk seem to have missed). Seems it's just a big fat hog, plain and simple.

One thing CIOs don't realize

[melted]

One thing CIOs don't realize is that non-OSS software is often more immature than betas of OSS products. Was Win XP mature before SP2? Not really.

Nice Microsoft Troll

[WebCowboy]

Its all about accountability. Even if Microsoft may not have the best product, when it fails, the suits are able to hold Microsoft accountable.

Masterful troll, and as anyone who has had experience dealing with an uncooperatinve Microsoft-based solution knows it is a statement so blatantly full of crap it is hilarious. MS has a whole departmnent of legal people whose sole job it is to make sure Microsoft holds as little accountability as legally possible.

A little harder to do that with Debian, or any OSS without corporate backing.

Which is why Debian is not the favourite of corporate customers. IBM, Novel and Red Hat DO back their open source offeringe VERY well though. In fact, an open source solution from one of them is probably a much better bet in terms of accountability than Microsoft, becasue they are "solutions providers". Microsoft is a fairly immature player in that game--their business model is built around selling little boxes stuffed with shiny discs full of data and a bundle of useless paper certificates and "getting started" manuals. MS "innovation" with respect to their business model has been insignificant--it has amounted mostly to replacing physical boxes with certificates, product keys and activations. Since they have such a product-oriented mindset, the best you can hope for accountability-wise is a few hundred dollars in refunds for a scratched disc or botched install of Office as per some canned EULA. A "solutions provider", on the other hand, negotiates a far more comprehensive contract with explicit terms and conditions their business customers can rely on for accountability. The business never gets EVERYTHING they want, but they get a much better deal than Microsoft can normally offer.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Absolutely true. That is why there is a lot of open source out there that has been deployed and managed by IBM. Often their "free software" solution costs more money than going with Microsoft, however IBM has the reputation of being more reliable, mature and accountable than Microsoft.

Correct -- I know from experience!

[ErichTheRed]

Linux still can't shake the reputation of bad support that it picked up along the way. That's why the RedHats and the Novells of the world are making money by putting out and offering paid supprot for a Linux distribution. When you buy one of the commercial distributions, you know you're getting solid code in most cases that has gone through at least some integration testing.

If a company chose to roll their own distribution, they would most likely have their own army of well-paid experts who will handle everything that comes up. However, even they would be somewhat foolish to use a critical piece of software that isn't ready for prime time. Let's say an entire app is built on YetAnotherCoolMiddleWareLibrary version 0.0.0.1.5alpha/unstable, which isn't a surprise in some cases. Are you going to get support from the guy who wrote it? Is this guy even available, or was this a student project that he's long forgotten about? These are the questions that businesses ask, right or wrong!

The other problem that Linux tends to suffer from is poor documentation, especially in some of the more obscure corners of a distribution. Linux people working on code tend not to be the world's best technical writers, so you wind up with problems sometimes. I've seen documentation for some stuff that consists of code comments and an e-mail transcript or two detailing some esoteric config notes.

Microsoft and all the other commercial vendors have the same model. They'll put out software, offer you varying levels of support, and they have a raft of experts to write patches, service packs, etc. to fix holes. That's what businesses want.

I've been through this same debate once before. When my old company decided to go to Linux for a mainframe-replacement project, they chose RedHat. The simple reason was because they knew what they were getting.

Trust him on this one

[oreaq]

If anyone knows about immature software it is SAP.

No sequel to OSS Enterprise?

[RedLaggedTeut]

I am saddened to hear Open SpaceShip design is not making good progress with the Enterprise.

Maybe if they had used a cluster of borg processors, this had not happend, but now I cannot but welcome our Xenoid Mutant Lords of Closed Space Ship design.

Enterprise means low quality

[Anonymous Coward]

If you see the word Enterprise slapped on a product it is a warning that hte product is half-baked and the quality is unacceptable.

Ignore it

[fthisjob]

That whole article was just FUD and advertising from SAP, and probably paid for. By taking it seriously you are in fact lowering yourself to the level of PHB. What is this obsession with 'mature' - its just another word thats overused and ready for bullshit bingo. A systems basic quality has little to do with how new it is, if it was well written the bugs will be easy to fix. If it was written poorly you will need an army of consultants regardless of how 'mature' it is.

Re:Ignore it

[metachimp]

'Mature' is another way of saying 'vendor lock-in'...

These big, proprietary systems and their requisite entourage of consultants and proprietary tools are about to go the way of the dinosaur.

Of course the guy from SAP is trying to steer people away from OSS components.

Re:Ignore it

[fthisjob]

"These big, proprietary systems and their requisite entourage of consultants and proprietary tools are about to go the way of the dinosaur." I wouldn't count on it. SAP growth has exploded over last few years, and despite everyone knowing that its 'the emperor's new clothes' it just keeps on spreading like a cancer. My guess is SAP has at least a decade left before the upper suits wise up. Why should they wise up now? Nobody ever gets fired for buying SAP. Companies go bankrupt because of SAP but nobody gets fired..

Commercial apps built on open source

[Anonymous Coward]

What this is missing (even with the Eclipse? Definitely) is the increasing number of commercial applications which are based on OSS technologies. The most obvious example I can think of are the IBM solutions - the next version of the Lotus Notes client is an Eclipse RCP application.

OSS is here to stay because major commercial vendors are putting their weight behind it and delivering applications built on it. In the case of the Eclipse/Lotus Notes merge alluded to above, that means 120 million corporate desktops with an installed and functioning Eclipse runtime within a year or two.

It going to be a good time to be a third party tool vendor (commercial or open source) targeting this framework.

Mature products

[wysiwia]

Graf said. 'Linux? Definitely. Eclipse? Definitely. Mozilla? Most likely.' What about all the others: OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim, etc?

O. Wyss

Re:SAP needs to pay attention to what they're sayi

[st1d]

Hey, those are features! After all, if you pay handsomely for complicated software, you need to have it feel complicated when you use it, don't you? :)

as doomed as Vista

[penguin-collective]

Any kind of new, unproven software is doomed in the enterprise, whether it's a new (version of an) open source package, Windows Vista, or anything else. It doesn't matter whether it works well, it doesn't matter whether it is almost certain to save money, people tend to stick with what they know when the going gets tough. That's why so many enterprises and even small businesses still run mainframes, Windows 95, DOS, AS/400, etc.

So, this is nothing open source specific. You can bet that companies will stick tenatiously to their open source solutions once they have been adopted. And, once adopted, getting open source out of the enterprise will be even harder than getting commercial solutions out: companies like IBM and Microsoft can simply discontinue products, but open source can't be "discontinued". And that's, not coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like open source.

chief process innovation officers

[cpugeniusmv]

Immature Chief Process Innovation Officers (CPIO)?! Somebody needs a time out.

Going with MS is more than warranty...

[finnif]

You guys don't see one major problem with OSS: the potential for copyright and patent infringement.

Microsoft is never going to come after its users and claim some kind of patent infringement. If someone goes after Microsoft claiming that, it becomes their problem, not the end user. Now imagine you had used an OSS product that gets shut down for patent infringement. No guarantees are made to protect your company from exposure to that lawsuit.

Or just imagine the OSS had been lifted from other GPLed software and put under a license you believed to be GPL-free. Oops, suddenly you have GPL guys coming after your company for extending GPLed code.

Ass backwards

[np_bernstein]

I've never understood this argument. I was never under the impression that most OSS project's goal was to "run in the enterprise" or "succede in a business environment" -- I'm sure there are a few, but not the majority. I think the majority of projects have a goal like "make the best free unix OS" or "make the best IDE" or "Make the best web server" if they get succede, or get close then enterprise shops will consider them. There may be licenese and support issues which are separate, but I'd be surprised if I saw that goal on a OSS project website. That's a business goal more appropriate to Microsoft, Redhat, or IBM.

More SAP Bullshit

[Master of Transhuman]

'"The mess that companies have with their IT today is unimaginable, and the larger they get the more mess they have," Graf said. Some SAP customers have as many as 3,000 systems, for example. "They would be happy with just 1,000," he said.'

The above is the only part he got right.

The rest of it is mere justification for SAP's position in the ERP marketplace - and a response to the fear that ERP is being blamed for most of the mess he describes.

Sooner or later CIOs will realize that building apps from OSS tools is far cheaper and more effective than being saddled with a dinosaur like SAP for the next twenty years.

Take anything SAP says about OSS with about the same barrel of salt you can take from anything George Bush says about Iraq.

OSS Apps No Match...

[clintcan]

For professional applications, in my case, thats dreamweaver and the macromedia studio suite.

I've tried dreamweaver, plus a host of other freeware, opensource tools. Those who say that WYSIWYG editors are evil and text editors are better should better think twice before going into the web design arena - Dreamweaver's interface is very suited for whipping up webpages when you're in a deadline.

And don't get me started with nvu as a replacement. I tell you, it is more suited for quick html fixes than a replacement for dreamweaver (killer features are templates, code completion, real-time data preview, etc.).

I use tools which get the job done - and fast (in my line of work, this is necessary). But I'm also a linux geek, so I use Dreamweaver (MX version, not 2004, I heard it works for Dreameaver 8) in wine :) - and it works pretty well in it too.

Oh yes, I don't like gimp's interface - although I use it sometimes, I find fireworks faster in getting the job done in a few clicks (also running in wine)

Software vendors to know the business alright

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't seen many software vendors that understand their clients' businesses (and not many business consultants either, for that matter). So the story does not have any particular relevance, because businesses will buy and use any particular software that suits their needs and provides the value/drives the business purpose they expect. In fact, they might just go for the undersold, undermarketed, understated OSS solution pricesely for the fact they don't have to deal with those slimy sales people promissing the f* out of their software!

"Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"

[Per Abrahamsen]

It is CYA, a basic survival strategy for surviving in an enterprise environment. Go with the flock, don't stand out, and you won't get fired. It used to be the main argument for buying IBM, now it is the main argument for buying Microsoft.

It is the same reason "analyst reports" are so popular in the enterprise. Nobody believes them but they help promote the number one goal in that environment of fear, namely avoiding personal responsibility at any cost.

Once someone figure out how to build a corporate culture that does not build on fear, they are going to crush the competition.

Mexico's economy is fine, thank you.

[jotaeleemeese]

Mexico is the 14th economic powerhouse in the world and a member of the OCED.

The problem in Mexico is not the eocnomy, is the distribution of the resources.

For historical reasons the wealth is highly concentrated in a privileged few. Mexicans live in poverty but few live in abject misery.

Then I don't understand.

[StarKruzr]

Why would it not be profitable for *someone* to import them from Canada or Mexico?

Someone did get fired for buying IBM

[ThinkOfaNumber]

I tried to dig out the story, but all I have to go on is my (leaky) memory. Apparently, [he] was fired for buying IBM, because he bought IBM just because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", not because "IBM is the better option".

If only I could google my memory...