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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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

[gad_zuki!]

>Of course immature OSS is doomed in the Enterprise.

Yeah, but you know Geordi runs it anyway.

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

[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.

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.

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.

"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?