Is Open Source too Complex?

Jason Pillai writes to tell us ZDNet is reporting that at last month's Microsoft Worldwide Parter Conference in Boston Ryan Gavin, director of platform strategy, claimed that one of the big downsides to open source is complexity. From the article: "Gavin noted that the flexibility of open-source software in meeting specific business needs also means systems integrators and ISVs have to grapple with complexity costs. 'It's challenging for partners to build competencies to support Linux, because you never quite know what you're going to be supporting,' he added. 'Customers who run Linux could be operating in Red Hat, [Novell's] Suse, or even customized Debian environments,' he explained. 'You don't get that repeatable [development] process to build your business over time.'" More than once I have had complaints that my setup is more difficult than necessary. Is open source really that much harder, or just different than what most are used to?

Comments

This should be fun to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same argument MS used for Java for years. It isn't true for Java either but it amazing how many people ended up believing it even here on slashdot. The fact is most large systems are pretty complex. The art of writing software is giving the person who uses it the impression that it is very, very simple. Take Goggle for instance. The search engine does some truly staggering stuff to return results to you when you type them in that box. You don't generally think about this because it works.

Now think about how often when using an MS product you suddenly realise that it is doing some really clever stuff because it doesn't actually work. An example:
Excel used to have a limit on the number of characters in a cell. That limit was 255.
The limit was lifted, in, I think Excel 95.
However if you have a worksheet that contains text greater than 255 characters you can't copy the sheet to a new book. If you use the copy paste commands from the window bits of formatting get lost. If you use the "copy sheet" function Excel will truncate any bit of text longer than 255 characters. If you use the same function but perform a move instead of a copy it works just fine. Now that is complex.

The man is full of crap

[Lumpy]

Open source is ready and IS used in business today. Many are even 100% open source because thay made that decision when they were small enough to not have the mess of an IT infrastructure that makes it near impossible to change over.

Where I am now we are 100% Open source except for vendor specific tools that are given to us by the vendor. The IT team here works hard to make them work under Wine so that we are 100% functional. New Sales people get over no windows and no Office2006 within 4 days and are as productive in open office and ubuntu as they were in windows.

Upper management and unskilled IT that cant handle standing outside their box are the #1 reason that open source is ignored and they buy yet another "solution" from a vendor.

REality - closed source vendors DO NOT give better support than Open source. Been there done that hearing the "that will be fixed in the next major release in 2 years" so many time I want to strangle them on the other end. MSFT tech support is 100% worthless from the OS level to the enterprise level apps (sql2003 enterprise)

I get better support from the people that write the Open source stuff. IF you PAY THEM the developers will bend over backwards for you.

The article is 100% fud.

Re:All Software is complex.

[ozmanjusri]

a guy from Microsoft, who has probably never configured or operated any of the systems he mentions, is telling a group of people, who also have probably never used those systems, that it's really scarey if you move away from Microsoft...

And this is NEWS?

It's even sadder than that. If you have a look at the website of IBS Synergy, the ISV they're quoting, it's an amateurish effort, full of spelling errors and broken links. The company has a grand total of five customers, two of which seem to be the same organisation, and one of which appears to no longer exist.

If this is the most authoritative source Microsoft can assemble to substantiate their claims Open Source is complex, I'd say they're a long way from being convincing. It's almost sad to see they're still stooping to such pathetic tactics.

Re:BS

[rainman_bc]

Even for OSS, that's just not the same as being able to distribute one package that works everywhere. On Windows (9x, 2k, XP Home, XP Pro, Vista's 7 versions), I can ship one binary package that works for everybody.

Depends. Do all 9x boxen have the .net runtime? Do they all use the same MFC? Only the most basic program can you make it run on any platform. Or are you coding in Java???

Microsoft doesn't have to approve my package before making it easily available to users - any Windows user can download my one simple installer and have it work for them regardless of their version.

Odd, I use FC5, and I use third party yum repositories for any software not officially provided by the main Fedora repository.

Now look at Linux: there are many different distros, with many different package formats. I'd have to provide RPMs, DEBs, tarballs, and probably multiple versions in each format (since it might depend on different packages for different distros). Users would have to know which package to download.

That's what apt-get or yum are for. And with synaptic or yumex it's a piece of cake.

If the experience is going to be easy, I have to beg the distro's maintainer to provide an official package--some distros are very slow to add new products.

Again, see my comment above about third party repositories.

A real-world example of this is SeaMonkey [mozilla.org]. How long will it be until Debian users can install the software easily? Windows users can have the latest version as soon as we ship it. Linux users generally have to wait for their distro to provide an updated package.

That's odd. pbone.net has Seamonkey in their repository. If I want it, I can get it here ...snip

but the vast majority of people just want to install a binary using whatever method they normally use (e.g. google for the website, download an installer, or search Synaptic, etc).

See comments above about third party repositories. If you want to be bleeding edge, that's your problem, not the distro's.