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Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive?
An anonymous reader asks: "Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore." Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive, and what would need to happen before they could be competitive in the future?
I mean, you want to sell a product that a community developed. Which means its quality could be variable. On top of that, you want to support it. The depends on excellent documentation which isn't enforced in the open source community. There's probably a lot of dead OSS projects for every one successful OSS project. You'll notice that the software itself is very very free
This particular user seems to be looking for portable technologies. The commercial versions of these technologies are still in their infancy which does not bode well for the OSS alternatives. I would suggest that you're paying the early adopter fees on a few of these things. Afterall, Google uses a stripped down version of Red Hat. My company of tens of thousands employees uses Red Hat company wide. They find the free cost to be quite lucrative--just buying support whenever it's needed.
The OSS business model works well for the individual user who isn't looking for support because the free end product is out there for them and they use it if it works. The enterprise consumers looking for support year after year must pay quite a bit.
The software itself is not expensive, nor is it necessarily harder to support--it's just very difficult to create this support out of nothing.
In my opinion, you're going about OSS all wrong. You should stick with what is working and slowly move to a new OSS tool one at a time. You will encounter learning curves. But there is a lot of information online and, worse comes to worse, you can look at the source/documentation yourself.
I imagine there's something about the product you aren't telling us about that is quite constraining
My work here is dung.
Let's draw an extremely fine line here: commercial parts/versions of OSS products, and products built on OSS.
Commercial versions of OSS products aren't worth it, anywhere, almost ever. Just look at the prices above. In almost every case, go with the closed soruce version, and you'll save yourself a hell of a lot of money.
Now, look at two highly successful products built on open source: Fonality PBX (Asterisk) and Barracuda Spam firewall (Spamassassin). We use 'em both. I'm our entire IT department - just me. I already have too much on my plate, and when we were in the market for a new antispam solution, the natural pick was a Linux-Exim-Spamassassin/RBL frontend to our Exchange 2003 server. Powerful, effective, free (aside from hardware).
Problem: I'm already working tons of overtime - do we pay a contractor $120/hour to come in and try to set a system up, then rely on me to support it when I already don't have time? Or, do we pay a company like Barracuda Networks $1300 for their itty bitty model of the spam firewall and get a system that's guaranteed, backed up by all the time they've spent developing their hardware and frontends, 24/7 support, automatic updates, and license-free monitoring and filtering? I don't have the numbers with me, but the cost in staff + contractor time + hardware vs. the Barracuda system (which is overkill for our little network) was something like 3:1.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Three reasons come to mind:
Of course, these are all hypothetical and general. YMMV.
Red Hat is competing with the big iron Unices like HPUX and crap like that which costs in the thousands. It's cheap for its niche.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
you want to be cheap but want everything done for you so that you don't have to do any work yourself. good luck!
buy one seat for anything support wise and when you have a problem reproduce it there and go thru that seat for the support.
Hire people to make the software (even open source) = Wages to pay
Hire people to make the software but not pay them = slavery
Charge more for the product than the wages you pay = PROFIT
Ok that was way too simple but the bottom line is no one ever said OSS was non-profit or even small profit. In fact by driving down costs these providers can get richer than with proprietary software. The model is buy low and sell high. Economics 101
But you say you want support, that's why you're paying. Hate to break it to you, but an OEM license of XP doesn't buy you any useful support. Neither does a $700 VS license. Microsoft, like everyone else, charges for support contracts.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
How much support do you get from Red Hat for your $299?
How much from Microsoft for your $140?
Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140.
And the OEM version of Windows XP Pro is supported by whom?
I don't know what support Red Hat provides with the $299 version but I know supposrt is primarily what you're paying for or everyone would be using Fedora Core.. Please compare apples to apples - last I heard OEM versions including zero vendor support.
--Aaron Greenberg
You might want to consider your business model - can your product be FOSS too, and then YOU charge the big bucks for support, etc.?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140.
And the virus you get is FREE, but ends up costing you a little more than $140.
joking and MS-flaming aside...
OSS support for specific products that you mention is outrageous.
but for the MAJORITY of OSS products the support is much less.
But it all comes down to simple economics:
Supply vs. Demand if all of those OSS products you mentioned have viable competitors the price would be lower
in the closed source realm there are TONS of players and the costs need to be lower to get a good chuck of the market.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Open Source can be about allowing your company to utilise free software on your desktops.
When it comes to utilising some open source products in your CLOSED SOURCE PROPRIETARY FOR PROFIT SOFTWARE then the licensing terms change. Be fucking thankful that there are some systems out there that you can (1) license for use in your application under a license that is closed source commercial software friendly, such as QT (which is an entire platform without the overhead of C#, which also only runs on Windows, FreeBSD and Linux (mono) be damned, they're unsupported) and (2) where you can also view their source code instead of them giving you an API that does 'magic' but you'll never know if it is secure or not.
What if using QT would have saved you even half a man month of development per user. That makes up the licensing differential.
When you're running a company, you should prioritise the costs effectively. Being cheap up front very often costs you dearly down the line.
seems like you could get all the support you need for free, and from the sound of it the free support would be better than what you've already purchased. Don't use QT if it's so expensive, I think that one is more for cross-platform use. Also, use CentOS instead of RedHat if you're looking to save a buck. You'll never use RedHat support and you only need it if you're running Oracle. Anyway, OSS was meant to be community supported, check out the community around the technology you use.. Become a part of that community and help support yourself, after all you've got the code!
Qt does not cost $3300 per seat. You can download it and use it for Free. Oh wait, you meant "proprietary licensing". Right.
Aanyway, maybe expensive because it's good? I haven't used it myself, but I've heard it's rather good stuff.
We run Jboss, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, Asterisk, etc. Do we pay for support? Hell no. We have a knowledgable and competent staff. You only need to pay for support and commercial products if you DON"T have a knowledgable and competent staff. You are basically paying someone else to be that staff. That's why you are paying the high price. That and the re-assurance that someone is responsible for the product you are paying for so that you have someone to bitch and whine to when it breaks. With an unsupported open source product, you are the only person responsible for maintaining everything. These are the reasons why you pay the high price. But you always have the option NOT to pay and just support it yourself. Plus you are comparing HIGH END support contracts and their are low end support contracts that are a LOT less. It all depends on what you want.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Seems to me like you are searching out the most expensive commercial OSS on the planet, then asking why wouldn't you just buy the MS product instead.
Why would you want the $10,000 version of Cygwin when you can download and use it for free? Likewise, there are plenty of reputable free Linux distributions out there, many suitable for use in embedded systems.
If you want a commercial Linux, why not look at Redhat? Its comparable in price to Windows. There are plenty of embedded applications.
Someone's gotta pay the bill for all those torrents. Speaking of which, my fedora dl is almost done. Thanks, d00d!
Most of very few people who would use OSS will use it for free without paying a dime, a small minority of them will actually need proper business support - but businesses have fixed costs and if sales are low this means unit price will be high. Naturally this is a catch 22 as the high price puts people off and they either use same software for free or buy into non-OSS.
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
or am I missing something?
I comment on embedded Linux/Windows or the QT/C# thing, but at least two of the examples are apples to oranges comparisons.
Cygwin vs SFU, surely with one you're paying for support and one you're not? I mean Cygwin was free without support last time I checked.
Again, "Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140.", well if you want RedHat for free you can have it for free, just recompiled by a 3rd party (CentOS). What's that, you want support? Does that XP Pro OEM disk include support? It doesn't? You surprise me!
OSS Commercial Software -> Open Source Software Commercial Software
Grrr... Worse than ATM machine and PIN number.
you act as if Qt were the only option around. What about GTK+ and wxWindows?
That's fine. Next time, pick a different vendor. How much research did you do before picking this vendor?
If you need support for every Linux desktop in your organization, you have bigger problems than how much you're paying for licensing. Also, that Windows XP Pro only comes with installation support. ALL support after installation is either hourly or on contract. So basically, instead of using white box linux so that you get a free redhat with free updates, you spent $140 to be locked into a Microsoft platform. How is this a win again?
I hate to break this to you, but "Windows Services for Unix" is crap. Also, you only need a license for cygwin if you want to distribute non-GPL software. Why go so balls-out for open source if you're not going to distribute open source? Your "do-good" ideas are half-assed and do not impress us under these circumstances.
Congratulations. Sounds to me like you wanted to use all the FoSS tools to create a non-Open product (let alone Free.) We don't need ya! Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, kthx.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Try supporting them yourself. Or getting non-OSS software that you a) pay for the software and b) pay the same price for support.
If you think the prices are expensive then you should go into business supporting the software. Oh wait you're not, mainly as people like yourself balk at paying for support.
What do you think a reasonable price would be?
"I comment on embedded Linux/Windows" = "I *can't* comment on embedded Linux/Windows"
...seem to be "consumer" closed-source software to commercially-supported OSS, which probably isn't a fair comparison. Consumer closed source software often has support that compares (sometimes poorly) with free (as in beer) open-source software, rather than OSS with a commercial support contract.
I'm not sure that its generally the case that commercial OSS is more expensive than feature-comparable closed-source software with a parallel support contract, but if one believes that OSS offers an advantage in quality (from the review of the code enable) and/or security against future vendor policy changes (as, support aside, licensing for the code itself and its redistribution will never be an issue), then a premium for that quality may be justified, all other things being equal.
You have just demonstrated the degree to which your own incompetence indicates that your startup is likely to fail. First off, you don't need to buy any of the fancy toolkits to get an "embedded Linux" that works. Most hardware vendors will actually provide you with something that works on development boards. Can't find something that is exactly what you need? Well, adapt something is close; that's why it's called work.
As for comparing Windows XP and Red Hat WS, please take your head out of the sand and compare what you're getting. Windows XP doesn't give you: a) a full email client b) an office suite c) engineering tools d) compilers for several languages.... Do I really have to go on?
I think you've merely demonstrated that you are an idiot.
1. Any comparable to QT commercial package costs as much or even more. Use wxWindows or GTK 2. There are many Embedded Linux vendors and the prices vary a lot. Timesys charges much less for a subscription, for example. It helps to research a market before making a decision. 3. VxWorks ? you make me laugh... Have you ever considered the price of the beast ? And good support from Windriver ? you must be joking , right ? 4. Yeah for 140$ you pay to Microsoft you get 24/7 free support hotline... Not ? Seriously there are plenty support houses that can support Debian and other distros for a fraction of RedHat/Suse enterprize support contracts. Again, it does help to research a market. 5. Why on earth, you need Cygwin commercial license ? Well in any case, OSS products may be free as in freedom of beer, but the support is not. If you are not capable in supporting yourself, prepare to pay. What did you expect, that someone is going to invest his time to support you for free ?
Pretty clearly. That bit's available for free.
You're paying for official support and services. Presumably 24/7 telephone, onsite if necessary. You're paying for people and their expertise not software.
However, there is a good point. Support is expensive, there's a market out there for lower cost support services.
Deleted
Those two can do what redhat ES and QT do.
Then replace the commercial load balancers with LVS.
Not sure of the others.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
If you're a startup or other relatively small company, Trolltech makes Qt available at a 70% discount. For one platform, Desktop Light, it's only about $1000 per seat. Still pricy, I agree, but you could pay that much in equivalent Windows tools pretty easily.
...is very very hard. ;)
This is just my experience from the little time I've had out of college to see both sides. When you go to a big, known enterprise company like Oracle for support, they send out a person to help you and that person works like a slave for you until your needs have been met to the specifications of the contract. Yes, I'm exaggerating, and spare me the details of your case where it didn't work like this. I'm not trying to make a universal rule here.
The "community response?" RTFM you n00b. That's ok, that's where Red Hat and others come in.
Oh wait, they can't make a killing off of the sales of their products, so the majority of the company is taken care of by the support people. Ok... so they have less incentive to invest in R&D than say, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, etc. because they can't make a large amount of cash off the product itself since it has to go out to the public, and support is something that others can come in and provide. There really is no reason why IBM consulting cannot provide Red Hat support, and that's true of many other companies.
The bottom line is that the freedom to write OSS is one thing. An expectation that you'll get rich off it is quite another.
You can compare QT to GDI+ all you like, but GDI+ works on one platform, and QT works on many. Expect to pay more for an increased feature set. Law of the land, open versus closed never has and likely never will have any effect on that.
They already are. You can tell because Microsoft shills like yourself are pretending to have questions about them not being competitive on slashdot.
RedHat does charge $299 per year for one license. With Microsoft, you're getting $140 for a copy forever (and if you order from a major vender, it's basically free). I know, I know, the argument is that you're getting perpetual support for the RedHat license- but have any of you tried to use it? It's generally pretty terrible. We've ended up switching everything to Ubuntu or CentOS b/c it's just as easy to find support by googling, rather than getting re-routed through RedHat. It doesn't make sense to me. Over the lifetime of XP, you've paid $140, and gotten free updates. For the lifetime of RedHat (let's assume XP's ungodly 6-7 year lifespan so far) you're paying almost $2000! You can also argue that "you don't need to get support for all the machines" but RedHat complains incessantly, and you won't get any updates, which isn't really safe for a corporate world. Additionally, a significant Linux deployment usually requires someone with significant knowledge. Last I checked, it's cheaper to hire someone to manage a windows deployment than a RedHat one. I wouldn't mind paying the $299 as a one time fee...but $2100?? Almost 10 times the value of a Windows license? Is the support your paying for really worth that much?
You say you want official support. Then you proceed to compare an officially-supported copy of RedHat Enterprise Linux to an OEM copy of Windows XP. Well, I hate to break it to you, but that OEM copy of XP comes with no support. If you read the agreement, it says you as the system builder are responsible for supporting that copy once installed. You don't even get the installation support that comes with the $300 retail XP box. All you get is Windows Update, and the opportunity to hear the Microsoft rep tell you to call the company you bought your computer from. The same with Visual Studio. The commercial software isn't cheaper as far as support goes, they just aren't quoting you the real price until after you're committed.
On thing that a lot of comercial Open Source shops are guilty of is providing to high of quality support. Sure, RHEL is more expensive with an update/support contract than Windows, but have you ever called Microsoft before? Not only do you get friendly folks from india on the line but usually leave (afte ~ 6 hours of calls) with no real answer. If you tally up the time spend on the phone and then running diag yourself on the Win box you end up with much higher costs.
... on an intel mac mini. Not only is it really stable, bugs are fixed without me lifting a finger (well, ok, so I run yum -y update).
Don't get me wrong, there are some comercial OSS companies out there who over price and under serve, but the majority I've delt with have been really, really good compared to the traditional competition.
On the same token, not everyone needs a comercial version of XYZ app. I run Fedora 6 BETA as my production workstation at home
The use of software should be gauged by the return on investement that the software and support provides. Have an internal IT Helpdesk team? Do they know XYZ app well? Why pay to double your support? Double support is something a lot of shops do so they can 'find a neck to choke' externally? The news is that choking doesn't fix the issue!
I've spent a decent amount of time working for Open and Closed companies and shops. The quality of code and support from the Open (or more Open) shops were much higher than the Closed source/black box shops.
As said before there are a dozen OSS projects out there and when it comes to OS there's one thing you can't expect: reliability. Note that I'm not claiming that this is no where to be found, but you can't approach a project with "I demand...", etc. Got that part so far?
When looking Enterprise business this is exactly what is happening. Your customer is paying you and as such can't be told "We know you liked the product as it was but there were some bugs and so here's the new version. Unfortunatly it reacts a little bit different than the previous release." When your whole business is build upon such a product then this approach is not going to work. This would mean that OSS would be an absolute no no when it comes to Enterprise based computing. Which would be a shame IMO since there are some very good products out there, which over the years have already demonstrated that this doesn't have to be an issue perse. But the secret here?
Control. You will have to have someone (or a group) in control who are calling the shots, which also means that the person shouldn't be too afraid to simply cancel certain developments because of the reasons already mentioned above. However, in many cases companies fully rely on the OSS "market" by grabbing software together and neatly packaging it all up and when changes do happen they simply set their own staff to work to either "undo" those changes or merely port them back into their maintained version of the problem. That may look like OSS on the Enterprise, but its more like playing Enterprise-based business with an awfully weak and riskfull model. Resuling in what you experienced.
Finally, why I like Sun? Because they do things differently and don't pay much attention to the whiners ("it has to be FREE") but try to walk on that golden (middle) road to both please their customers and the developers. They simply came up with an already existing business model and started looking how OSS could fit into this. You see this happening right now with Solaris. People can build on Solaris all they want, fork it, whatever, but Sun keeps control over what does and doesn't get into the OS. Thus resulting in OSS developers who can make a difference while protecting their options to fully support the software they're releasing. I'm really surprised that RH or SuSE (now Novell) never seemed to use such an approach but more or less "winged" it, at least thats how it looks to me. You're basicly paying for support and some "insurance".
What is it about OSS that makes it so expensive to support? Most of the comments in this thread say the OSS license expense is all about support costs. What's the deal? Is this stuff so difficult to install, configure, and keep running that lots of expert support is required? Funny, from everything else I've read on these boards you pretty much wave an OSS CD by your machine and it installs and configures itself to perfection, anticipating your every need and whim. Which is it? Is OSS finicky and hence hard to maintain, thereby justifying the high support costs, or are these OSS vendors fleecing their customers?
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
What a Windows license buys you in terms of support is two major things:
1) Patches. MS releases patches for Windows and everything associated with it, and tests those patches to make sure they work. If an incompatibility is found (it's rare one survives the initial testing) it gets fixed. Now of course there is OSS that does that, but there's no guarantee. With MS it's not really a question of if the software will be patched during it's supported life. Same deal with supported OSS software like RHEL. Sure, Fedora also does patches, but they aren't tested like the RHEL ones are, and if the developers of the component don't release a patch, they aren't likely to patch it for them.
2) The knowledge base. MS has a massive knowledge base that is really very good. I use it all the time at work. When a Windows system bluescreens do I start a debugger? Hell no, I'm not a programmer. I write down the details and look it up in the knowledge base. The answers tend to be just want I needed. If some weird problems comes up, again I go looking in the knowledge base. It is a central, easy to search, repository of solutions tested by MS themselves. You don't get that with a no-charge OSS product. Sure there are news group posts, and IRC logs and such out there but man, tracking down the answer can be hell, if anyone has found an answer at all.
3) Vendor support. When a vendor sells you a system with Windows, they are guaranteeing hardware support (at least if they aren't shady). When Gateway sells me a rackmount server with Windows installed, I know that it will be working, and I know that it will have drivers for all it's hardware. However when I try and install FC4 on it, maybe it doesn't work. In fact what does happen is it kernel panics on install (we still have never figured out why). Should it not work, I can call them and get it fixed, if it's a Windows problem they'll call MS and get it fixed. You can get the same thing with Linux, but only buying a system with a supported Linux distro on it, which is usually an enterprise Linux.
Those are not at all worthless support resources. Support doesn't necessarily mean holding your hand through configuration, it just means ensuring that all the resources you need are available. You get that with commercial solutions, be they OSS based or not. It's not the same as a support contract, but often is what people need.
Open source software is either affordable like your run of the mill BSD operating system or linux distribution, because its just to support the development. Or its outrageously expensive like RHEL and commercial mysql licenses because the cost is based on managermind. A manager thinks "more expensive = better", and since only a manager would be dumb enough to pay for something that is free, they price it accordingly.
The other alternative is QT and others like them where they already tricked you into using their GPL or worse licensed libraries, and now that you want to make a commercial product out of your previously internal only software, you are screwed. Either rewrite it without QT, or shell out big bucks for the commercial license. Stay away from companies like this.
There are degrees of support, and I think you aren't making an apples to apples comparison here.
Point #1: When you talk about support on the scale of the contracts you are describing, the scale is MASSIVE. These are the juicy contracts - provide broad support for systems which are relatively uniform and well maintained. The level of support these setups need is much greater than that available or possible to home users, and since downtime is so expensive they can (and do) pay $$$$ to be very sure and avoid it.
Point #2: OEM licensing for Windows and other consumer products does not have support anything close to the situation described above. The user base is as diverse as you can get, there may be a thousand unanticipiated and unknown combinations that could be installed on any given customer's machine, and you are supposed to make sense out of it. Oh, and there is no incremental reward for dealing with ever more difficult problems - just that same initial flat fee, or perhaps a $/minute phone charge. Yay. That's not what big companies need - they need someone out to fix the problem, NOW. They shell out big bucks for that service, and for good reason. That level of support is not easy.
Why do you think OSS support is so often held up as a big advantage? Because FOR MOST USERS the level of support and help that can be found in the community is far beyond anything they will ever be able to afford in the commercial marketplace. The high end support contracts you are seeing are designed for corporate customers with uniform needs and deep pockets. Buying home or even "Pro" versions of software and not paying a big chunk of cash means you quite simply won't get the kind of support you would get with the big $$. Very, very small vendors MIGHT provide it, but people need to eat if they are doing software as a business and believe me good people aren't cheap. Open source short circuits this with a completely different model, and it just so happens that the benefits trickle down to those who don't pay large $$ too (because $$ aren't the motivator). But you won't get guarantees. Guarantees are EXTREMELY expensive, because they are incredibly hard to support and make real.
Commercial or OS, you get what you pay for in support because in-person help cannot be duplicated at close to zero cost.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
Survival of your business model depends on customers who want to purchase your services.
OSS is about freedom of choice. All your other points are null and void because there are several OSS alternatives to choose from. To complain that Red Hat charges $299 where SuSE charges $70 (with support) is just plain dis-information.
This Ask Slashdot reads like a Microsoft marketing campaign. OSS doesn't work for us, Microsoft has all the solutions. Hey Taco, how about a rule against anonymous Ask Slashdot submissions (except in the case of whistle blowers and torrid sex tales)?
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
OSS software and support is so expensive because it's a niche market.
first, a startup/small company gets a 65% discount off $3300 or $1155.
And if some of the developers work on tools you plan to share source for that development station is free!
Thats pretty reasonable. Actually quite cheap.
M$ MDSN pricing is $10,939 for the MSDN team suite. That includes up to 5 developers.
Trying to develop anything with windows without this is just stupid.
If you add the test facility with another 30 computers for running tests etc,
M$ will be much more expensive.
I have tried both for actual products. In addition to much higher cost for M$, it is also alway a hassle with all the "Genuine advantage" crap. Reinstalling XP for testing various languages and new hardware configurations and having to call MS is just a huge hassle.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Simple solutions:
The same thing happened to me in my last job, a mixed Sun/Linux shop: people complaining about the price of Linux. Why? Because (a) only SuSE Linux was approved for a certain tool, and that tool was considered as critical by the company and (b) because company's policies and bean counters demanded official support from a reputable vendor for everything that was bought. The result? Thousands of Euros spent on buying expensive, gold-plated, 24/7 support contracts. That were almost never used, since both the programming and sysadmin teams had plenty of experience using Linux servers.
Which makes perfect sense really: Sun support is sometimes cheaper than some Linux vendors, because Sun understands that software support also means hardware lock-in. Microsoft can be cheaper than Linux because, let's face it, all the OEM Windows installed on brand-new computers subsidize the dev tools (C# and Visual what-have-you) while support is essential to the survival of many Linux distributions. Heck, giving the software away for free and selling support contracts is the entire business plan of many Linux distributors! Also, Microsoft understands that, if you, as a developer, buy Visual Thingamajig 2006, you are locked into their platforms, and so are your clients. And that means more money, in the long run, for Microsoft. Why do you think they have recently started to offer programming tools for free? Not out of the goodness of their hearts, that's for sure.
So, Linux, cheaper? Only if you solid in-house experience. I have also seen companies replacing hundreds of Sun and Windows 2000 R&D workstations by Linux/AMD machines. Why? The official reason was: "Linux is cheaper and good enough to provide the 90% functionalities we need, AMD is cheaper AND more powerful than SPARC CPUs, and everyone here likes (and knows) UNIX systems better anyway"... And that was the VP of R&D speaking.
So, back to the point above: Linux is cheaper... as long as you have enough experience in-house not to need expensive support contracts.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
you could just download the OSS software and post your problems on slashdot
One important point to remember here is that software costs at all levels* are invariably much, much smaller than the salary costs of the developers who use them. (With the obvious exception of software that requires a royalty agreement instead of a single license purchase). Changing platforms just to save a few $K on software licenses is, frankly, shortsighted and dumb.
That said, these prices are very high to my eyes -- much higher than I was expecting to see. Like it or not, open source products are perceived as a value choice by the corporate world. I have to believe that our vendors are only doing harm to the market by charging more for their products than the equivalent proprietary products...
I think a big part of the problem is that you're comparing different things and wondering why they have different prices.
Qt vs C#: Sure, C# is cheaper, but the price you quoted for Qt is for triple-platform licenses, and C# doesn't get you that much cross-platform support. Yes, Mono gives you support for other platforms, but it differs in many respects from the Windows version, whereas Qt is very consistent across all of them. Documentation and support for Qt is vastly better than the comparable C# support for non-Windows environments, (and somewhat better than for Windows as well).
Red Hat vs XP: Red Hat contains far more functionality than XP. Depending on exactly what you're doing, you very likely have to buy additional software for XP. Also, how much support does that $140 XP license get you? Assistance with installation, and that's about it. Red Hat provides a lot more, and it costs a lot more. If you don't think you'll need the extra support, then don't buy it, and Red Hat will be a lot cheaper than XP.
RT Linux vs WinCE/VxWorks: I can't argue here, not at the prices you quoted, and since you said you got lousy support from the Linux vendor (who was it, BTW?). Perhaps you just needed a different vendor? How about Wind River (makers of VxWorks, for those who don't know).
Cygwin vs Windows Services for Unix: Depending on what you need, SFU may be fine. As long as you're just using the stuff provided by Microsoft, SFU is pretty good. If you want to be able to download any random Linux/Unix package off the net and have good odds that it will build and run, though, forget it, SFU is completely inadequate while Cygwin will do a good job. Note also that SFU comes with no support, unlike that commercial Cygwin.
In nearly all cases, I think the core issue is that the prices quoted for OSS support (a) buy you better support than what you'll get in the closed-source case, (b) give you more in functionality, flexibility, or both and (c) are really intended for bigger companies who are less strapped for cash and who have a bigger need of the security blanket the support contracts provide.
Your company would probably have been better off skipping the support contracts, using the software for no cost, and putting the cash aside to pay an independent consultant or two in case you get in a jam. You can get extremely high-quality support for most OSS for small consulting fees, just by hopping onto the project mailing list, identifying a handful of heavy contributors who know the area you're concerned with, and then privately offering them money for their time.
Of course, if your management is too uptight to take that approach, and too tight to buy the OSS support, you should go with the closed-source offerings -- and then keep your fingers crossed that you don't have to rely on Microsoft's support. Wind River's support is good, in my experience, but the rest of the stuff you mentioned is from Microsoft.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you start to factor networking in and then the back office applications and what have you. I think Tivoli at its cheapest is like $35 an IP address. Various switches and other network devices are doing per port and per IP licensing for various functions. Throw some IT flunkies in to the mix a network guy or two and the cost of owning and operating a PC per year starts to climb. To be honest, now a days, I wouldn't be that shocked if the TCO had gone up some.
So then when you factor in a $3500 a seat license for something, I think it can start to look kind of cheap, especially if it's a one time fee or a one major version fee (presumbaly upgrades are cheaper) and it's royalty free. How much are you selling your product for and how many people will actually be working on the GUI? Say 2 developers and a spare copy (for the build machine or something) $10500.00 for a pretty killer piece of software like QT? That doesn't seem horrible. What MSDN cost per year? That's supposed to be per seat.
... runnin' on ATM machines that need PIN numbers and talk to home with the TCP protocol. I mean, what the WTF is this all about? Read the RTFM on what these acronyms expand to! =P
I don't really understand why a server operating system is being compared with a home computer operating system here - wouldn't Server 2003 be better compared with RHEL WS and Fedora better compared with XP?.
One thing I do heartily agree on is that *nix commercial software is expensive, open or not - but what can you do if you can't sell a million copies and everyone needs to get paid? If it is commercial software on *nix it is a specialised product.
Qt comes in a range of versions. They're mostly freely available for open source products. For closed source products, the most sophisticated single-platform version, incuding a years worth of support, is $1100 / seat for small business and startups for up to 3 seats. The original poster wanted 3 seats.
The only reason he'd have to pay $3300 / seat would be if he had more than $200,000 cash on hand. Not as available credit, but cash in the bank. Or if he was already bringing in more than $200,000 a year in revenue.
I don't have much sympathy for well-funded startups that decide to choose bad technology rather than good technology because it's a grand or two cheaper. I expect this one will burn through its VC and crash and burn fairly quickly.
It seems this business decision was actually wrong for you. It might not be for many others, but it seems it was for you. Businesses that are in the business of doing something other than computer related work (for example, a law firm), such a decision to outsource all the support would usually be a good one. But in your case, I think that is not so. The behaviour of the core system is actually a critical element of your business model, and by outsourcing that, you will be paying premium.
Why not call a meeting together with both technical staff and business staff, and raise the issue of what you (your business) would have to charge if you (your business) were to offer support to other companies for the very thing you wanted to outsource. See if you can come up with a price. If that price is similar to what you've found in the market, then apparently you already understand why the price is that high. But if the pricing you come up with is significantly lower, then you have identified a new business model to expand into.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You could normally take a GPL licensed product (that you have the full copyright to) and re-release it under a different license. However, you'll have to get licenses for any libraries you link to, and Trolltech is fully within their rights to decline to sell you one.
You can get plenty of OSS products for free, and then go to similar knowledge bases online for free support.
Patches? Far faster than MicroSoft.
ESPECIALLY RedHat.
I am quite intimately aware of this particular fact.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
For $100 that I paid for XP Home I got an OS. I can get support on a per incident basis for something lik $25 a shot if it's a simple thing.
For $0 I can get a full version of Fedora Core 5 plus kdevelop, C/C++/Fortran/Perl/Ruby compilers, some very good math software (R, maxima, octave), some games, CD/DVD burning software, backup software, word processors, PHP, web design software, graphics tools, etc..
For $349 RHEL4 license I can get support, one-stop updates, all of the above, etc..
Now what do you get for your $149?
To me this seems self-evident. Typical commercial software sells 100% of their products *and* sell services to cover their overhead and make a profit. OSS companies often rely largely (or entirely) on the "services" model for their profit motive on services.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, good for the environment and all that, but c'mon--you'll never make as much money being a good person and responsible corporate citizen as you will make as a cash-greedy monopolist. (If your software is good you very well might establish a much larger user base though.)
So if you can't quite make your OSS company pay off with services alone what'ya gonna do? Juice up prices for "enterprise editions" of your software. As another poster mentioned at that level you're not competing against Microsoft so much as Sun and IBM and their super-inflated fees and professional services organizations.
I'm an IT director and make software buy decisions. To me as long as the price point is equal or less (ok, even a little bit more) I'll favor OSS for the open-ness of the sofware. That way I can judge for myself (for free) the quality of the software before I buy the commercial edition. Compare that to closed commercial software. I've got to go on blind faith that that software isn't a pile of steamy hot crap written by guys who's primary job initiative is cruising Craigslist for new jobs. No thanks. I'll use and abuse an OSS package so if, by the time I decide I want a paid license, I know exactly where the strengths and weakness are, and can negotiate specific support.
...Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000...
Before anyone spends money on "RT", carefully consider if you have a clue as to what you need.
Real time (RT) might be neccesary if you have a 4.77MHz processor and a huge strange operating system, and try to implement a soft modem. For most other applications it is not.
With a 2GHz processor it's no issue.
Example of "realtime" software running just fine on a Windows XP box
802.11b wifi stack with L2 and up in software! The interrupt handler triggered by the radio on packet receive has a max delay of about 800ns or 800. That's good enought.
It actually varies from a few ns to 800ns
Can you come up with a scenario where this variation is unacceptable?
Seems like XP is a pretty good RT OS.
Almost any Linux distro is a lot better (and controllable) than XP.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The reason why these things are expensive is that they are real businesses, needing to make a profit to stay in business. It costs a lot of money to staff developer support people, developers, QA, and all the ancillary staff for any business. Consider the relatively small number of companies using their products/services (it's not a consumer product with millions of sales, after all), and you can see why their services are expensive.
Like all things OSS, you have a choice.. If a supported embedded linux platform is not worth $25K to you, you're free to 'roll your own'. But, when you compare it to the cost and time of doing your own development, QA, etc, $25K doesn't seem like so much.
Define a unit of work to be x amount of man-hours required to complete the job, in this case, to develop a piece of software.
R&D Cost = The cost of producing that unit of work includes your workers' salaries plus the cost of the equipment needed to produce that work.
Your startup and Microsoft have competing products that have identical functionality. Even if both companies spend the same amount on R&D, since Microsoft's user base is greater (i.e. more units sold), Microsoft is able to charge less per unit in order to recoup costs.
Therefore, a larger user base is needed to equalize the cost differential between your product and theirs.
Does this answer your question?
When you get 'official support' by buying windows XP that means you can call someone up who will run through a basic checklist of steps you could have found on google. It sounds like the services you are talking about purport to be offering serious technical support, i.e., they would good in and fix the code for you if you find a bug that gives you problems.
I suspect your comparing apples to oranges. The 'get updates and a dumb tech' type of support is better comparable to the type of support one gets for free using google and OSS software.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
If Linux were as imbedded into our lives as M$ Products, we would not need the support at all. Learn to use the OS with a free version, and if you then need the functionality of the NON-Free version, you are not stuck paying for support you do not need. I use Linux, and not a free version, but I have been using Linux for about 8 years, so I know it well enough to NOT need the support. If I were to install a OEM version of Windows, say I bought it at Fry's Electronics with the new hardware to build my new peecee, I get absolutely NO support, Not on installation, not on any viruses, and for sure not on using it. 2 cents for ya!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
When you purchase a license for C#, do you get the same Service Level Agreement that you get with one of those expensive OSS outfits? It's always been my experience that once I purchase a closed source solution I have no more support than some monkey telling me to reboot the machine and reinstall the software. I don't consider that to be support.
I think you have to consider the bigger picture and more difficult issue of Total Cost of Ownership. Right now there's a million websites that will tell you any answer you want to hear, so I won't pretend to know the answer for you.
Your own experience will be different from the person sitting next to you.
My experience has been that the initial investment in time for OSS is high but over time that investment is amoritized to become very inexpensive indeed. I am not more afflicted by hardware issues than software issues since I set up shop about 5 years ago. However, I'm also 99% of my own support, which is another TCO issue you must address. Do you have, or want to have, the knowledge in-house to do all your support or are you willing to pay someone (through the nose) for the real support to really get things going when they break?
I think most companies, even with 3 seats, will make this decision and either pay someone "too much" money to sit around and wait for the computers to break, meanwhile coming up with better ways of doing things or have no one in-house but pay to be able to bring someone in.
I think the more interesting question might be. How much would it cost you if you simply hired someone at $60,000 to come in every day and make the whole IT picture work and work better every day. The idea here is that you have a guy who just makes stuff up that makes your company work better, faster, cheaper, and also does all the support. What's that worth to your company?
Does saying "e.g." a lot make you feel smart?
let me compare:
XP $140, MSOffice $300, Photoshop $500, Illustrator $500, etc. etc. etc. ~ $5.000 without support. + $500 / seat average support for the whole company
vs.
RedHat, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, Web-Server, FTP-Server, Firewall, Application-Server, IDE, etc. etc. etc. incl. support = $299
Please go back to school and ask somebody why '5000 299' might be wrong.
"There's this tremendous myth that OSS is all written by good Samaritans in their spare time, and companies that sell it commercially simply rebrand it, box it, and ship it."
Information wants to be free.
"It's like people think that Linux is free, so why can't Redhat distribute it for almost nothing?"
Hey, the argument works for other IP. Why should RH be an exception?
Qt pricing is through the roof. Since they're facing more cross platform competition than they had in the past it's interesting they keep on raising their prices. I guess they feel they have enough already locked in customers so they cay do that.
Look fox toolkit or fltk2 for alternatives.
You should have looked more seriously at 'D' instead of C#. I'd say 'D' will continue to become a bigger playing in the language arena as the language nears v1.0 and the toolkits available mature. At this point it's very clear that the library fragmentation issues that c++ has had won't be an issue with 'D'.
You maybe should have looked more closely at the *ubuntu family. I've been hearing good things about this distro family.
It costs as much to develop a decent tech support system for OSS as it does for commercial stuff - only difference being that you have fewer customers to recoup against.
Also, it's all very well having thousands of people feeding in their little bug-fixes and patches into something to make it better, it makes it much cheaper than a commercial offering to produce fixes and allows a more rapid response to need - BUT there's a reason commercial software companies don't just churn out patches and upgrades like this - and that's because it's a complete bugger to keep track of and support.
Possibly a third reason is that people want to pay for stuff that's important to them. We've paid Oracle huge piles of cash as it's very important to us, we don't understand how it works under the hood and don't particularly want to - we DO want to make damn sure if something goes wrong with it somebody will pick up the phone when we call and give us a good answer though. Same with Linux, I'm sure some kind and intelligent chap on a random forum I hit on google will be able to provide me with an answer - but on the off-chance he doesn't reply, or gives me the wrong answer, I'd quite like to know there's a certified person somewhere who I've paid to help me (and if he doesn't I can sue his/her ass).
You toss out a lot of prices in your post, but you don't really indicate what the price is for.
One example you use is a comparison of RedHat Workstation for $299 versus Windows XP Professional for $140. That RedHat Workstation you're buying comes with a fairly nice support contract... According to the website you get unlimited incidents and a 4 hour response time. That Windows price is just the license to use their software, no implied support contract at all...and Microsoft charges $245 per incident if you don't have a support contract...
A more accurate comparison of prices might be Fedora Core for $0 (just the license to use the software, no implied support contract) versus $140 for Windows XP Professional. Or Redhat Workstation for $299 (with unlimited support) versus $8,299 for "up to 10 hours of proactive support assistance" from Microsoft.
Software is cheap, support is expensive - and with OSS products you are generally buying support, since the software is usually available for free.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
When you pay a bucket of bucks to TrollTech, you're not paying for something that's open source. You're paying for the right to use their code in a product that you will distribute as proprietary. When you license code like that, it can be very expensive. There are lots of cases where you pay a license based on each individual embedded gizmo that ships out your door. Depending on how much product you sell, QT might be a huge bargain.e nsing
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/lic
Bottom line: 1 - What you're talking about isn't really FOSS. 2 - Contrary to the misconception that most posters seem to have, support isn't the expensive part of what you're paying (leaving Red Hat aside). You're mostly paying for a license to use someone's code in your product in a proprietary way.
You conveniently forgot about royalties.
Make 10 million widgets and pay $5 royalty per widget for your proprietary tools and suddenly your figures look very different.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
After all this time there's still no OSS debugger that actually works even a tenth as well as the *other* one..
.no sig
Really.. all the guys who cashed out and have a couple of years gentle work to spare on making a real debugger to go with a real kdevelop or (better still) anjuta for penguins can still make another million each out of that.. it's such a golden apple of a project still after all these years..
--
t o b e
"Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-."
Great. Good Idea.
"MSVS 2005 is ~$700... VxWorks or WinCE in our next product... An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140... Windows Unix services are free."
None of the above chosen solutions, at the prices cited, include "official support" None of them. I am an embedded developer and the one solution for which you don't cite a price, VxWorks or WinCE, will cost many thousands of dollars, per seat, if you want full, "official support."
From this I conclude that you were requiring full "official support" for OSS solutions but do not require "official support" for closed source solutions. Why are you surprised at the significant price difference in that case?
If you are attempting to build a embedded system that runs on RT linux of some flavor and cannot even support your own desktops your chances for failure are close if not certainly 100%. Furthermore switching to xp embedded, vxworks, whatever and C# you will still fail with nearly 100% certainty. Before you start picking tools you had better start picking resume's because it is extremely evident that you have a expertise problem.
Bottom line is not amount of splattering money around is gonna help unless someone has the grey
matter to be able to do something with it.
I have had commercial support contracts with oss vendors and I can tell you one thing. If it gets
so bad that I have to pick up a phone and call for help it cannot be fixed anyway.
Got Code?
Qt is only $3300 if you get the full package for all three platforms. If you don't need the database or OpenGL parts of it, it's significantly cheaper. They also have a small business license for those entrepeneurs that are just getting started and find even that cost prohibitive. You can get a single user, single platform small business license for somewhere around $800, I think.
And keep in mind that it is a tool for developing commercial software, if you don't think you can recover $3300 in profit for each developer, you've got some serious holes in your business model.
If you're developing OSS, of course, Qt is free.
Embedded RT Linux.
Good Embedded OSes are Expensive. With Linux you have the choice of doing it for free and figuring it all out for yourself, or getting the support of someone... good proper, talk direct with the developers support... and paying lots of money.
With WinCe, you sort of have a similar situation. You can pay a small sum for the OS and godspeed and good luck, or you can pay MS more money for more assistance.
The piddling sums of a couple of hundered dollars should be irrelevent to your business. Even the occasional 10 grad for the dev system and support isn't that important. More important is which dev system and OS gives you what you need, and the Licencing fees for each gadget you stick the OS into.
1) Because OSS is not about business, but about Hobbys that are Impotant. If you talk to engineers and scientists in their 70s,many of these guys (and they are all guys) grew up making crystal radios and things like that, and they all say, those hobbys helped make me an engineer, and what are kids today going to do, since you can't really take apart a chip.
The answer is LINUX kids can do what ever they want, and the nerdy dispised socially awkward loosers using linux will be the people who drive the NASA equivalent of hte 21st century
2) Its about features and volume. If you learn anything about the pc midi mainframe history, it is tht volume trumps all. But you don't get volume without features.
This is seen clearly in firefox. People, on the whole, use firefox and don't use thunderbird or open office because firefox does something that they want to do and can't get anywhere else. thunderbird and oo don't.
As for this stuff about "better" give me a break - since when in the real world does better trump cheaper ????
PS: the answer is for the oss community to patent imp new ideas; then oss will have features that people want, you will get volume, volume begets low cost.....
... responsibility! Many commerical applications are time-critical and service contracts must include fines if there is something not working as guaranteed. Do you know any company that gives such guarantees for OSS service contracts? I don't because there isn't any.
If you want to become the next billionaire (after Gates, Jobs etc.), create one such company by getting all Gurus together into one boat: provide guarantees to fix problems instantly by acquiring MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Firefox, OpenOffice, Perl, PHP etc.etc. specialists who do nothing else than to maintain and learn the code bases of these programs. If you can do that, you will be able to push all commercial apps out of the market. But not a single minute before that.
To say it short: running commercial applications does not allow to fix bugs when there is time to do it. It must be done instantly.
I want to share a bit with my personal embedded software development experience.
Disclaimer: At work I develop for VxWorks (5.4 through 6.2), RTEMS, Linux and OS X. VxWorks and RTEMS for real time work and Linux and OS X for testing.
I would not go with VxWorks if you don't want to pay a ton of money. Also, with VxWorks, the support is not good at all. The support website is written horribly and is very slow. It takes a long time to get a patch for anything wrong in VxWorks, and the next iterations don't include the patch.
Besides, right now VxWorks is going through a transitional phase where it is migrating away from its traditional schema and moving more toward a Linux implementation. Wind River even has a separate Linux OS which they market now too.
Another thing is: do you really have a hard real-time requirement? If the product doesn't need to have an answer in X milliseconds, and just needs to be fast, then that isn't real time, and you can save yourself a lot of money.
As far as other vendors go: LynuxWorks has a real time OS called LynxOS. It is extremely compatible with Linux binaries. They also have a linux product called BlueCat Linux that is even cheaper. They even have a DO-178B certifiable version, if you really need it.
Nucleus also produces a similar OS.
RTEMS is an open source real time OS. I'm guessing you would have no interest in it.
Even though they add a little bit more compatibility each iteration, VxWorks is still the least posix compliant OS listed.
But, please, watch what you say. The only reason we use VxWorks around here is because people here are resistant to change. If you have to start out on something from scratch, don't make it VxWorks.
PS: All of the above are my own thoughts and do not necessarily represent anyone else's views, including my employer.
Support is the critical thing here. If I buy Win XP Pro I don't expect support. I expect little more than the support I get if I download Fedora off a website. On the other hand if I'm going out of my way to pay for a supported license, odds are I'm going to use the support. If I pay money for real support, the software will always cost more.
When I worked at one of the largest insurance companies in the world, we had an amazing support contract for DB/2. Like we'd call them and they'd have overnight turnaround on patches. They'd fly people out to our office and help fix things. All "free" in exchange for the fact that they paid out the ass for a massive support contract.
Oh, one other thing to keep in mind. When we're talking about VS costing less, that's a major deception. Yes, VS costs less. Why? Because it's a hook. You buy VS, develop a windows app, then Microsoft sells more copies of Windows and Office. Eventually if you're lucky they'll write a product that competes with you and give it away for free in the next release of Windows.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Software systems are more complex than the components that they just run upon that it is usually cheaper to buy support than to staff up for every potential issue you may run across.
You obviously haven't worked for large environments that support 10s of thousands of internal customers before it even reaches the millions or billions of external customers. There is no way you could staff yet alone augment your knowledge base by hirring a bunch of know it alls. You need process, you need documentation, you need vendor support and you need relationships you can depend upon so you can focus on running your business rather than pushing some OSS or even off the shelf product that your vendor should be doing for its own well being.
Business are here to make money.
If you are willing to hire the staff you need for in-house support, you may also be able to farm them out for other support jobs for all the people who have issues similar to yours. Now there's a potentially very profitable sideline for you.
...that an effective business model for Free Software would be to charge $5000/program. That way, teenagers won't buy one copy and put it up for download. True, it only takes one re-distributor to spoil this model, but at a certain price, which I figured to be about $5000, nobody would want to give away something they had spent that much money for, and by the time there was enough cooperation among a group of people to buy a copy and put it up, the next version would come along. The formation of a group that took donations for that express purpose would never happen, because it would be regarded as detrimental to Free Software. It looks like my little joke maybe, just maybe, might not have been such so much of a joke after all. I was a little high on the price. Surely these packages must be available for free download somwhere, although without the support contract. I doubt that Red Hat is really putting my hypothetical model to the test. I also joked that I'd be willing to write under GPL, and sell the program for $1 million. Just one customer would be enough, and I wouldn't even care if they redistributed it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You're supposed to do your homework before you start your business. The question should be why didn't you ahve a clue before going into this. And I'm half inclined to believe that the real answer involves trolling and/or astroturfing. Your apples to oranges comparison (i.e. cost of OSS based software includes support while cost of Microsoft software does not) seems to support that theory.
-- Argel
Your confusing two different issues. Outsourcing is the "outside providing" of services that your business provides. For example if your a developer and you higher outsourced help your hirring developers outside of your business as if they were part of your business.
If i run an app server to build a b2b system on, my business is the b2b system not the actual coding of the app server. I will hire people who KNOW the app server, i will hire developers that know the framework and can build apps within the app server but i'm not going to hire people who wrote the app server.
That is where "support" comes in. When you buy an app server that is selling 10,000 widgets a minute can you afford to staff yourself with people who sit idle until you reach that 10 minutes a year where your system is down and costing you millions or should you take the more affordable route and hire the people that wrote the app server and actually have more consistent, thorough and broad range of experiences within that product?
Your obviously not going to hit every scenerio or have the knowledgebase of the people who write the app server and being that my business is the b2b process and not the darn server code why should i pay to suppor that internally (more than hirring competant administrative staff and even then you would be retarded to not supplement that with people whos focus and business is to support you and deliver a service to begin with)???
You completely missed the point of the question. The question is why does running "supportef" FOSS systems cost more than "supported" commercial systems. Its not about offshoring your core business but supporting your core business with vendors you can rely upon at a cost you can afford.
The gentoo newsgroups, web forums, mailing lists, wiki's and irc channels have ALWAYS been free... and you know what? In over three years of using gentoo *exclusivly*, with 1-2 days between complete system-wide upgrades (emerge --update --newuse --deep world), I have never ONCE had a problem that took more than 15 minutes to solve using those forums.
The problem you seem to have is that you think that you HAVE to pay to get good support. You are as wrong as you can be.
If you think providing equivalent service for less $$$ is possible, why not start that business?
Simpy
Having dealt with both VxWorks and a commercial embedded Linux I would recommend against VxWorks. My experience with their support is it's almost non-existant and it's missing a ton of functionality and has had a lot of bugs.
For our new project we are using buildroot, which is free. It will automatically download all the various tools and libraries, build the cross compiler and everything else.
If you need help setting this up, I suggest contacting one of the many consultants available to get you up and running. Once you're up and running, just go with a consultant when you're stuck. Our experience with a commercial embedded Linux vendor has been pretty bad with respect to support and I've heard similar complaints about other vendors as well.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Ok..first my main issue is this. Redhat costs X, OEM Windows costs Y. Well my friend...you need to compare the cost of RETAIL Windows to RETAIL Redhat because unless you are doing something illegal, or giving unfair advantage due to draconian pc mfg deals, you can't typically buy OEM legally.
That said, I'm a little sketchy on the whole OSS business model, and I imagine a great number of big companies are still trying to figure out how to play the game and not lose a ton. I have always questioned the support costs because the IT department of a Windows shop and the IT department of a *nix shop are also an apples and oranges kind of deal. You don't need the same kind of people in those shops, and if you are hiring the same kind of people you are probably suffering. I have met alot of really smart windows admin types, but comparing the really good windows admin types to the really good *nix admin types, the *nix admins typically have a MUCH better understanding of the underlying concepts involved in networking and computing. I have gotten into many an argument with otherwise very intelligent Win admins that just do not get the lower level workings and interactions of things like SMTP and DNS and other stuff. It has been my experience that solid *nix admins do things MUCH cleaner on the network, the reliance on pretty GUI stuff just isn't as strong and the understanding of lower level concepts tends to be much more rounded. Win networks tend to have dozens of different software packages floating around that are all duplicating functionality and chewing through bandwidth for no particular reason. I spent a bit of time with MRTG and some scripting and was able to provide more information about the network in an easier to read format at $0 cost, while CiscoWorks, HP OV, and some other monitoring software were all running, barely utilized because they are all everything and the kitchen sink type applications, and chewing through bandwidth like there was no tommorow, and require a considerable amount of training just to make good use of them, and a great deal of training to properly set them up and operate them.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
"you act as if Qt were the only option around. What about GTK+ and wxWindows?"
.NET, since 1. Mono is not 100% compatible and you may not support it after you've developed a complex .NET application and 2. Mono can get some patent issues sometime in the future 3. you won't port it to Linux (Mono/C/C++) and Mac OS X (Objective C) once you reach 95% of the market, if safing money is what you want.
;-).
;-): It is not right that you get good support by Microsoft. Most patches take way to long until they end up on your system. Have you ever tried Metasploit? There's no easier way to install a VNC-Server on your Windows XP box...
Well, you may not forget that the next KDE version ( 4.0 ) will ship Windows and Mac OS X versions of kdelibs and kdepimlibs ( both LGPL, which means you can link against them even in closed source products ), too. This gives you most likely the biggest open source desktop software package on the planet. Qt itself has many more features than only simple widget drawing and has more advanced features like signals and slots. The comparison to wxWidgets is rather improper, unless you program some light-weight basic application.
Please DO NOT DEVELOP Microsoft Windows versions only. This is what you do when you use
Supporting only Windows is no more about 'do good', this is definitly bad.
And as already mentioned above, why not develop open source!? If you are a rather small company, then you should consider using opensource licenses to push your product on the market and sell the best support for it. You've already found out how much it can be worth
By the way, finding information about most common opensource product problems on the net is not that hard, is it? It shouldn't be too difficult to set some standard RedHat environment up and keep it up to date via yum.
"1) Patches. MS releases patches for Windows and everything associated with it, and tests those patches to make sure they work. If an incompatibility is found (it's rare one survives the initial testing) it gets fixed."
In the end may I add some flaming
Because a key requirement was commercial support == you call someone to fix bugs for you, not fix them your self. I think the main problem was not shopping around for the required support.
I would go further and say that this article is a troll submitted (*cough* *cough*) anonymous coward and posted, no doubt, to inflate page hits.
The article starts out with a ridiculous premise that you need a "license" to use open source products. Wrong. The only time you need a license is if you want to *distribute* them. So yes, if you are using QT in a proprietary product, you need to pay Trolltech for proprietary license, but you do not need to pay anyone to run Cygwin on your machine!
The second ridiculous premise is equating support contracts for open source products to OEM costs of proprietary software. Uhhm hello? The only thing you get with OEM proprietary software is installation support, and not a good one at that. For anything else, you have to pay per incident and expect to get this response.
Of all the products the AC listed, the only one you have to pay for is QT. Is it worth $3300 when you can get VS.net for $700? Well, QT is an excellent widget library that runs on Windows, OSX, and all flavours of Unix. How many platforms does C# run on? That's right, *one* (no, mono is not a viable alternative). How much money will this save you in the long run? Besides, there are alternatives to QT (GTK, Swing, etc.) so you can use something else if you don't want to pay.
So in summary, AC is comparing apples and oranges. Notice that he/she doesn't even ask for advice but simply states "we are not OSS shop anymore" as a matter of fact. What was the point of the article then? A rant by some AC who doesn't know what he is doing? Or a planted article by Microsoft shill? Hmmm....
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
- Write an app which conforms to, at most, one platforms HIGs and looks/feels wrong on every other platform.
- Write a UI for each platform.
If you choose option one, then I will most likely install your app, poke at it briefly, and then delete it.one in Objective-C for Mac and one in C for Linux.
You can save some effort here by using GNUstep on *NIX. The latest version can read OS X .nib files, and so you can import your UI from the Mac and tweak it slightly for *NIX. You can even put the OS X and Linux (and FreeBSD, etc) application into the same .app bundle if you really want a cross-platform app...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You're getting more choice with OSS, that's why.
If you stick with a proprietary solution, you line yourself up to get screwed. Raise your hand if you've ever encountered a problem with microsoft tools that is _completely unsolvable_ on your end? What do you do? Wait for a patch? Don't hold your breath. If you go QT _you_ can fix it if it comes to that, or at least you have more information (ie source) to enable you to work around the issue.
With platform choices (like the RHWS), you CAN'T get screwed (to a limit). If you get the raw end of a deal you can switch with relative ease to another distro. Of course this will be a headache on its own, but not nearly the headache of getting screwed my MS and having to weigh the decision of staying screwed or porting over to another platform.
Proprietary vendors can charge less because they lock you in and you're not going anywhere (among other reasons brought up by others in this thread).
You might want to carefully consider the motivations behind your choice in operating systems. Usually, you don't decide on Windows CE, VxWorks, or Embedded Linux because you like open source. Often, embedded applications have very specific requirements. Decisions are made on those requirements.
For instance, what kind of user interface do you want? If a Windows like interface is required, then Windows CE has a definite advantage. Windows CE lets you develop a UI in the same manner as a regular Windows application. Alternatively, some embedded applications have very primitive user interfaces requirements, and don't have built-in displays . For these applications, the operating system should support an RS-232 console connection. Linux is preferable in this environment.
Is this application interrupt driven? Sometimes the number of interrupts per second and interrupt latency become the dominant factors affecting project success. In this case, the operating system must permit complete access to hardware. RTAI Linux is useful in this application. In very demanding applications, the I/O latency of the IA-32 processor family is excessive. It may be necessary to use a specialized embedded processor (or an FPGA).
Will reduced software development time increase the likelihood of project success? If the application is about software, pick a platform with very good 32-bit development tools. Nothing beats a proven development environment when you need to develop a significant amount of software quickly.
Will reduced debug time increase the likelihood of project success? Pick an application environment with very good debugging support. In practice, this means either the gcc tool chain or Visual C++. The gcc tool chain has the advantage of being able to debug a remote target under linux via a serial port. Being able to debug over a serial port is essential for some types of embedded applications. The Visual C++ debugger is very nice, but it is limited. Visual C++ is only useful if you are writing an application that can be debugged as a non-realtime Windows application.
Do you need a prototyping platform? My current approach is to prototype the real-time code under Visual C++ (great debug support), and test it thoroughly for execution speed and bugs. The code is then ported to the embedded target. With a real-time application, the embedded target will often have limited debugging support. As such, the trick is to minimize the debug time on the embedded platform. Visual C++ lets me find the bugs before the software is run on the embedded target.
Finally, watch out for the "any development environment is better than this" effect. After having used many embedded development environments, I have concluded they all suck. The hard truth is that embedded real-time applications are tough to develop. You have to debug both hardware and software. This makes debugging a real-time application 5 to 10 times more difficult than debugging a simple software application.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In general, when you buy a copy of a Microsoft product, with all due respect to Microsoft, what you are getting is exactly the same level of support that you get when you download a copy of Ubuntu Linux. Actually, you're getting better support, because a lot of times you can actually get a question answered by someone knowledgeable if it's about an FOSS product, whereas you will _never_ get to talk to a Microsoft engineer. So if the Microsoft product works, great, but if it doesn't, you're SOL, because you can't get support for it, and you can't support it yourself. The same thing from an FOSS vendor gets you the source code, which you can fix yourself if you have to.
I don't really get the business model of a company like Redhat, but I don't use their software anyway. I run Ubuntu, and there just aren't any issues.
Now, you used the example of Qt. Qt isn't actually strictly speaking FOSS. You can get it as FOSS if you are an FOSS developer. But if you are not, as you've discovered, you have to pay a license fee. The license fee is for proprietary software, not for FOSS software. The very same software, under an FOSS license, is free.
Embedded Linux? Why are you using it, if your business model isn't FOSS? If it's so that you can have the source and hack on it, then get the source and hack on it. If it's because you want service, make your purchasing decision based on who provides the best service. If there is no FOSS vendor that's competitive, run VxWorks. Don't come crying to me, though, if you decide later on that you don't like the feature set. You could always run WinCE, you know...
> Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat.
It appears that your company has completely missed the point of open source:
If you want to get it free, you have to BE free.
Simply distribute your software under a free license, and that automatically eliminates the need for you to pay $3300 per seat for QT.
It's just that simple. Does your company not understand how open source works?
Here's the deal: I'll give you support for Linux with KDE without Apps (besides KMail and Konqueror) but a totally bugged up version of Noatun and the KDE Clock. With nothing but Korn-Shell and ls as CLI tool. Which is about the equivalent of Win XP. For 10$ dollars including money-back guarantee if it doesn't work as advertised - that's more than you get from MS. Plus I'll charge you $2000 for Exim + Kollab and another $15000 for Zope when need arises. How does that sound for a good deal?
Anyway, to me it sounds like you're a troll. Go download Debian and call Progeny when you start scaling business into some strange requirements that standard Linux can't meet anymore. Whatever that's supposed to be. Dollars to Doughnuts you'll go cheaper by margins of magnatude than with MS or some Systemhouse. Good luck with running your business with the hodgepodge of solutions you named anyway. You sure you're into IT related stuff?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So: I wanted to eat some fish.
There's two ways. Either I go buy it from the shop, or, I take it free from the ocean.
"Shops are evil corporation that want me to pay for something that's freely available", I thought, so I turned on the engine and to the ocean I go.
I arrive at the ocean, you see, and noone prevents any access to me, to it. It's totally open, I can go in and do what I need to do: and it's free. That's cool, right?
So I tried swimming around and catching fish, like the gurus do, but I caught nothing, so I tried to see how enterprise do it.
They say, they buy a boat and crew.
Screw that, I want fish supper, I don't need all that extra expenses and all that extra fish. But, I wanna go the ocean way, so after some time I went & bought boat and crew and went to fish.
In a shop, 3 kg of fish would be like 10-15 bucks.
My open ocean method costed me more like $100'000 bucks, but at least I get to pick exactly what fish I want, from the free fish.
Except it wasn't that free after all. Now I have all this fish stinking up my backyard, kids are crying, and wife wants divorce. and I have a huge mortgage to pay for the boat.
You know? I tried really hard to use the free fish, but the bottom line is, next time I'm going to the shop.
Part of the MSDN support contract is unlimited newsgroup support in addition to formal support incidents. Meaning, that you can post to USENET, and Microsoft guarantees that someone will answer your question in (I think) 24 hours. Microsoft hires engineers and other folks to patrol for questions from MSDN subscribers, and the answers that they tend to give you are exceptional. I've received code samples, compiled projects, analyses of logs, and many other kinds of help from the support folks. This assistance helps me to plan project timeframes a lot more accurately: you don't get "stuck."
Even purely as an educational and training thing, MSDN is worth the money, and I'll buy it as long as I'm in my current line of work.
Another atypical form of support that's extremely valuable is MSFT's relentless stream of conferences and training events, especially Tech Ed. Tech ed is insane: 5+ days of dawn-to-dusk training, and they end up putting the entirity of the conference on streamable audio/video DVDs. One of the Microsofties from the 2006 event in Boston told me that they flew close to a thousand employees out to Tech Ed to staff the booths, train, present, etc. Even at $1600/head for registration, they cannot be making money off of this sort of monster event. But that's not the point. Microsoft is able to train a lot of people quickly, and show attendees a bunch of stuff that might be useful to their problem spaces. Developers of modest talents get free reign to pick the brains of developers of exceptional talents, and a little of that rubs off. And that's how Microsoft wins.
Microsoft targets the needs of brilliant developers and it targets the needs of really mediocre developers and puts enough training out there in enough different forms that everyone is served. It has been a successful strategy, and IMHO deserves respect. Everyone wins.
And not live in their cars. Life is expensive.
The reason for the price point of commercial open source software packages is basic microeconomics, and has nothing to do with the better/worse quality of the software.
The supported product has a close substitute, in the form of an absolutely free (and Free/Open Source) but unsupported product. So the lower end user base, on the bottom portion of the demand curve, will generally opt for the free alternative. Hobbyist developers and shops building internal-use applications only, for example, will use the GPL version of Qt. Many of these users might have been buyers at 500 dollars if there were no free alternative, but with an essentially identical free alternative, the support, on the margin, isn't worth 500 dollars to them.
Thus if you price at 500 dollars you get a smaller portion of the market. To make things worse, adverse selection effects are likely, just like with individual health care plans - the people who pay for the supported product are actually paying because they want to USE the support! With many or most commercial software products, people buy the product but only use the support very occasionally or never. As a result, the cost of support *per copy sold* is much lower and margins are generally going to be higher for the commercial (non-OSS) software company.
I think this is why Red Hat ultimately dropped their lower priced products - they realized they shouldn't be trying to compete with their free products, and that too many sales of their "Enterprise" products were getting cannibalized by lower end paid, supported products. Even though they lost a large number of paying customers in this move, the people who actually need support are much more price-inelastic and are willing to pay the higher price for Enterprise support if the only other option is no support.
I could go for a nice hardboiled e.g.g.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
It just means in my haste to post, post haste (but not first post) my redactions left unaesthetic, but not incorrect multiple instances of "e.g."
Usually I feel quite stupid, but something always comes up to remind me that is not the case. Thank you AC for reminding me how petty and pedantic posters can be, nit-picking the tiniest imperfection. So "pfffft", in your general direction.
Replying to the AC afforded me the alluring opportunity to use alliteration whilst replying with alacrity. (Well, it is a couple of hours later, so maybe "alacrity" is not entirely apropos, but a man's gotta eat... and schlep kids around, etc.)
e.g. I have a life.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Adding up all the licensing costs, it seems to me that you could have hired some one with sufficient OSS experience to manage the applications and servers for you for far less than your 'per seat' costs would have been. There is a great deal of community support, which is often far better than the support you pay for from commercial vendors. Aside from that, your company would be creating a job for someone who may not have one otherwise.
srsly
The GPL requires all linked code be released under the GPL. That wouldn't apply to your Photoshop example, because Photoshop would not be linked to the GPL plugin.
While you do retain the copyright to code linked to QT under the GPL, it doesn't help you any. You can never release under any other license without either Trolltech's permission, or removing the QT dependencies.
You ask why OSS itself is expensive.
It isn't. Go to kde.org or trolltech.com. You can download the source for either KDE or the QT library, and the only thing you'll pay for is your bandwidth.
When you cough up however much Red Hat want for a copy of RHEL, the OSS itself isn't what you're paying for. What you're paying for is integration of said software as a service. A person *can* learn to compile both QT and KDE, and build a system around it, the Linux kernel, and all the other disparate elements...but it takes time and gaining that knowledge can be an enormous headache...just like to use another analogy, you can go to a supermarket and buy mince, buns, eggs, sauce, and vegetables, and go home and make yourself a hamburger...or you can go to McDonald's and have a burger handed to you on a tray, with a near-zero investment of time and effort.
Red Hat gather up all of the above-mentioned disparate elements, and do all of the work required to get them to play nicely together. They incorporate all of said elements with a package manager, a shiny covered manual, and a nice solid substantial box that you can hold in your hands, so that you know you've bought something real, rather than just bits of data. In addition, they also give you a support contract so that if something goes wrong, you can ring them up and have them help you solve the problem. There are also those of us who feel that in more ways than one, Red Hat is to Linux what McDonald's is to food, (and interpret that statement however you will) but the point is that it is extremely convenient.
So yeah...that's what you're paying for. You're not paying for OSS. You're paying for OSS delivered in such a way that a) conforms entirely to your expectations, and b) doesn't require you to engage in any effort of your own whatsoever to get it. In such a scenario, a company prepared to satisfy those two criteria absolutely has the right to name their price.
If you don't want to have a company economically holding you over a barrel, you do have options...although said options probably include doing things you aren't going to like.
I realise that the entire tone of this post is deeply obnoxious...there isn't really any way that I can avoid that. The bottom line however is that you do *not* have to pay for OSS at all...it's entirely a choice.
Anyway so QT costs a lot of money, why not use wxwindows, FOX, FLTK, or a dozen other perfectly fine open source toolkits.
He required support. Guess you missed that or were "cherry picking" as you say for your own arguments. FOX and FLTK (I know from personal experiance, I have developed with both) do not offer commercial support.
If you think that $25,000 per 5 seats per year is expensive for embedded linux - just wait until you get a quote from Wind River for VxWorks - and then hold on as they give you the additional charge per unit sold.
When it is found out that a successful company used open source tools to make a viable commercial product, open source gains recognition and credibility and another success story is added to the stack. Pretty soon another company thinks "ya know, I've heard a number of good success stories about people using those open source thingies..." and your user base grows.
it is all about growing the user base.
We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support
Is that cheaper closed source stuff is bug free or "supported"? I don't think so. The biggest benefit of free software is not having to worry about such costs. If you want to distribute non free software, you are back in the non free world and I'm not sure that's a viable place to be in any case. We can look at each of your issues, but it's impossible to go to far because we don't really know what your business model is or what you want to do other than have bug free software.
QT, $3,000 per seat vrs M$VC at $700. How many M$VC's can you get at no cost for free software distribution? Is the difference in price worth the platform you will have to force on your customers? No version of Windows has ever worked as well as any Linux distribution I've used.
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Once again, why don't you just write free software and what do think your users will think of WinCE?
Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. But Debian costs nothing and I never run into bugs. Fedora and a host of others are also available at no cost, why would you ever pay $140 for a Windoze seat?
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. Ugh, why not just sell your customer a box that is *nix, like GE and other big equipment makers are doing? Once again, consider your user's experience and the cost of "supporting" all of their calls back to you when M$ does something else nasty to Unix Services.
The cheapest place to be is free. You are going to have "bugs" wherever you go but there are fewer in the free world and you might be able to fix them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I was going to say "support is for wimps", but my more considered answer is that any significant piece of software used by a real "enterprise" (i.e. not a basement shop but 100's or 1,000's or 10,000's of users) generally needs a fair amount of expertise in-house.
When I look around at my corporate clients I tend to see IT staffs which include subject / software experts for every major piece of software that they use. A big shop is going to have quite a lot of, say, Windows experience, Active Directory, IP networking and such.
They'd need to do the same with OSS, and their external support costs are likely to be somewhat lower (levering the community which tends to surround big pieces of OSS).
For example, if I run into a bizzare driver level issue with NT / XP, its going to take a lot of searching, then $$ and patience before I'm likely to hunt down the answer. With FreeBSD or Linux, its at least fairly likely that a post to a mailing list will result in an answer.
Personally I think big vendor support isn't as valuable as many make it out to be, but perhaps that's my own experience with same talking rather than a broad representation.
If you use Linux or other OSS in a commercial environment, you sometimes need to buy software. I'm not talking about stuff like Oracle, but components like imaging SDKs (one example).
The reality is: it costs more, and the costs for implementation are horrid. I can understand the extra cost to some degree, but at least give me some kind of parity with the cheaper Windows version, OK?
Case in point - my company was looking to incorporate an OCR engine into an internal system a couple of years ago. Abbyy made a nice one, at least for some stuffs. So we called Abbyy and got a time-locked eval.
This thing was pretty much a rough port from their Windows stuff, and it was a Red Hat only install. Not only that, but in porting it they had done something that made trying to wrap it with SWIG or somesuch out of the question. So, my developers tell me, if we want to use it, we do so with C++, and write any scripting bindings by hand. Integrating in any other way is out of the question. Well, that makes trying the SDK a bit too expensive - too many hours screwing around, especially when our codebase is decidely not written in C++.
I called Abbyy - yup, we only support C++ - aren't all Linux programmers using C++? When it became apparent that they had not heard of Perl or Python and that they decided to also ignore C - that was pretty much it for us. Shame, they can do some cool stuffs, even if their Linux stuff is two generations behind the Win version.
Using the Qt Open Source Edition, can I make non-opensource software for internal use in my company/organization?
Yes, that's right, they actually refer the GPL as "viral" and they're not trolling (pardon the irony). It's their FAQ, so fair enough that they're gunna try to encourage people to buy as many commercial licenses as possible, but this is just out and out lying.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Your comparing two entirely different products with each other:
Retail Windows XP Pro to a full-blown Workstation/Server Suite with e-mail and phone support. Try calling Microsoft with your Windows issue. You pay $55 for the initial call, they'll try to upsell you a support plan of course and then say that the issue is something to do with 3rd party software. You could compare SBS to RHWS please, pricing starts somewhere close to $1000 for 5 clients.
Next up QT compared to C#. Here you are comparing a multi-platform GUI-toolkit to a general programming framework. Compare GCC to C# or that IBM software for programming to Visual Studio. Also take in comparison the portability you get.
Cygwin to Unix services? Come on, you gotta be kidding me. They have nothing to do with each other.
I think you have poor product planning in your company and maybe someone with a MCP in your ordering department. Next to that, if you would open-source your software and share it, all those suites wouldn't cost you a dime. If you are a small company, your programmers should be capable enough of maintaining their own environment without support (it's been years since I called Microsoft, Apple, IBM's or RedHat's support line and we do have contracts with them) and if you're a bit bigger you might consider hiring a dedicated support guy. I have dealt with Dell and other companies before and before they handle your case and management gives permission for the guy to mess with the workstations/servers you will be 3 days out of production except if you give them half your paycheck.
This article looks more like a shameless plug for Microsoft FUD and a smart move by their marketing department towards their latest get-thee-f*cked campaign
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
Saying "OSS Commercial Software" is like saying "ATM Machine" or "PIN Number" -- the final word in the phrase is already represented in the original acronym.
- Automated Teller Machine Machine
- Personal Identification Number Number
- Open Source Software Commercial Software
How about this instead:
- Commercial OSS
People already look down at us for being nerds. Let's at least try not to sound like nincompoops to boot.
It's pretty easy to be sucked into these discussions, but I think it's a mistake for several reasons:
... you want more..., show me you're listening,... ask a question that makes sense
1) I doubt the sincerity of original questioner.
2) You're/we're showing your/our cards,... when you should be fixing the deck for your/our next deal.
3)
regards,
jaac - just another ac
I trust when your physics teacher said, "Water seeks its own level," you got equally bent out of shape, pointing out that water doesn't "seek" anything.
Now the grandparent was indeed trolling. "Information wants to be free" isn't a moral justification for copyright infringement. Like "water seeks its own level," it's description, not prescription. It's a short reminder that information tends to be distributed. It's inherent to our nature as humans, we like sharing information. We invented speech, pictograms, writing, printing, telegraphs, telephones, film, television, fax machines, email, the web, and more because we love sharing information so much. All it takes for information to escape is for a single small leak. Once it's happened, you're done. To try and stop information from being free, we set up expensive technological measures like DRM and legal measures like confidentiality agreements and top secret clearance. And yet the information escapes.
"Information wants to be free" has gotten a bad rap because some idiots decided it mean that information should be free. No, it's just a description of human nature. Information is going to tend to be reproduce and distributed. For people who rely on suppressing the spread of information it's a reminder of what they're up against, just like someone building dams needs to keep in mind that water seeks its own level.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Mac Pro
-m10
So, you're comparing the most expensive, fully featured, fully supported commercial versions of dual-licensed FOSS products with the cheapest, least featured, least supported versions of Windows products, and wonder why there's such a difference.
This has a familiar ring to it... you been reading Get The Facts recently???
John.
Why is OSS commercial software so expensive?
Let me rephrase the question: Why is OSS commercial software so expensive?
Gosh, I can't imagine why. Next, let's tackle the question of why free OSS is so cheap.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If this guy really runs software company and difference of say 50K in total software costs, really matters, then the company won't do well. Clearly the switch was base on accounting numbers not on logistics of entire development process. Digging deeper, it went something like that:
.... are you interesting in subscribing to our software distribution network? it is only 2500$ a year..." etc etc.
1. we have potential great customer, lets hire developers.
2. developers say lets do linux. ok.
3. hire middle managers. the say: where are our support licences for the software we are going to use and bundle?
4. about the same time, customers, we are microsoft branded customer.
5. accountant we are paying 100K in licencing to costs to redhat.
mba-ish cto looks at 3,4,5. Calls around looking for cheaper stuff. he slashes cost
by 50K. Bonus! thinks: i get a new sports car for that much.
I would think it went in same vein, after making a post like that.
indeed support for close software is more expensive, minus redhat, is because things have to be fixed. Installed base is smaller bad news and reviews will get around fast. So you have to have competent staff. In spirit of OSS you get access to internal bug tracking system. You get to have your own bug tickets and have meaningful support. With proprietary stuff, you get, if you're large enough: " we will see if the feature/bugfix conflicts with our larger clients and possibly we will ship with our new version
That is the problem of the upper management to be able to balance multitude of variables over choosing a direction, and being able to listen to lower ranks and external sources, to make the best view the way company would go forward. I mean if you work for a bank and they run all windows software, you have little choice but to go microsoft way. If you have whole load of windows developers but your contract stipulates that code must run in 64k of ram and on 15Mhz processor you can't really use your windows developers or their windows skillset and windows software.
Looks like the guy makes a point, from high above purely on numbers and clearly he can't be an upper management or owner of the company since he takes only narrow set of data to decide upon. I mean unless he is running codeshop in third world country, he can convince people to open a partnership office there, and he'd stand to make money off of it. Selling cheaper copies, say with Hindi only support.
my 2c
"Microsoft targets the needs of brilliant developers and it targets the needs of really mediocre developers and puts enough training out there in enough different forms that everyone is served. It has been a successful strategy, and IMHO deserves respect. Everyone wins."
Agreed. Most outside the Microsoft world don't realize this, and a lot inside don't either for various reasons. e.g.not their job, can't afford the subscription, etc. Just look at the early history of MS. It's not their OS, or their applications that won. It's their wooing of developers and providing them with the tools that guarenteed continued success. Like FOSS likes to say, "it's the applications, stupid". But in MS's case "it's the developers, stupid". THEY create the stuff that takes "software FOSS likes to joke about" from discrete applications to linked and enhanced powerhouses. There's also something to add. The educational and training market outside of MS. From books, to training DVD's. From classes to one on one. FOSS can't match that scope and depth.
BTW if FOSS was half as clever as they think they are. Then they'd be keeping an eye on MS research.
Sorry, Grandparent is right; you're misinformed. (I'd blame your lack of reading comprehension skills, but that would probably be troll baiting, and troll baiting is wrong.)
The GPL is the heart of Stallman's concept of the "copyleft": a concept that uses existing copyright laws to undermine the copyright system altogether by requiring that derivative works not impose any copyright restrictions other than those in the GPL.
Stallman would prefer to remove all IP rights and restrictions altogether. Since that's not a possibility, he devised and implemented a system that, for GPL-affected works, effectively prohibits people from using the copyright system for anything other than prohibiting other people from using the copyright system. The GPL creates an island of copyright resistance.
In the absence of copyright restrictions, the GPL would be ineffectual but also unnecessary, since the overall experience would be the same with out with them.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
It's not. The title is just as misleading as the author's assertion, and he makes comparision between unlike products, ie Win XP Pro (desktop) comparing to RH Linux AS (server) or QT (widget library) with C# (language). MSVS, btw, is not $700 but more like $2000 for a commercial license for any business if they want the full optimizations. The examples cited in this claim are ill-considered and baseless. (There's a joke in this response if you can find it, a little nerd-play)
Unlike some, I confess to be no expert on what Stallman thinks about everything every moment of every day, but hasn't he softened his views on certain types of IP? Whereas all forms were initially taboo, aren't some deemed more or less "okay" now? For example, recently the FSF seems to spend a great deal of effort taking on software patents in lieu of software copyrights. Does this mean that Stallman has contemplated a future for the software industry in which patents are gone but (less restrictive) copyrights remain?
I think a big part of the problem is that you're comparing different things and wondering why they have different prices.
This article successfully trolled people into making pointless and futile semantic arguments.
No business pays the list price. Not for Microsoft products, not for RedHat products, not for almost *any* products. The more you buy, the less per unit/seat/support call you are going to pay, because the company has that much less overhead to recoup on your business, but even Joe Blow Inc. isn't paying full list on that single copy (even of Windows). Sure, they'll take your check if you are dumb enough not to negotiate before cutting the PO, but there isn't a chance in hell that when you call up SuSE, Microsoft, Montevista, etc.. that they are going to let you go with a competitor simply because they were slightly underbid.
These commercial oss companies say that they charge for their 'support'. I have realised that paying for this 'support' is a total waste of money and time. Whatever 'support' you want is freely available on newsgroups and websites. There are tons of tutorials for whatever you want to do.
Besides, if you use a free os instead of the commercial-'supported'-but-actually-free os, you can also be sure that there will be no propietary extensions/additions/tweaks in the os that can only be resolved by calling up their support.
So bottom line is DONT PAY. THINK FREE. THINK LINUX. Any version will do. I am a bigtime fan of Ubuntu. Very reliable. Loving it.
YHBT.
:-)
HTH. HAND!
-- Nathan
Not buying a service contract doesn't mean YOU have to fix bugs in OSS. The most popular OSS packages are already updated with bug fixes by a thriving community which includes those expensive support providers. A service contract is more important for set up, maintenance, and training if you don't have the skills in house.
The $3300 QT package is comparable to the MSDN Visual Studio subscription which can range in price from $1200 to over $10k. What you get for the $700 MSVS 2005 is not the same as the $3300 QT seat.
Is $5k per seat bad? How much are you going to pay for VxWorks or WinCE? The support is another issue but there are other vendors.
And Red Hat Linux WS comes complete with software packages that will cost several thousands of dollars on Windows XP Pro. the $140 for XP Pro is just for an OS which is pretty much useless by itself.
If you use linux you wont need Cygwin will you. Sounds like a good reason to choose OSS and avoid Windows.
Many businesses are utilizing OSS and they aren't doing it for "'do-good' ideas", they have found exactly the opposite of what you are claiming here.
If you see closed source software as a better proposition for your business then go for it, but don't expect everyone to follow your words as wisdom.
If you're tiny and poor, eating ramen and paying no salaries for now, then you don't need professional support for anything. You're better off saving that money and learning the skills needed to do it yourself.
If you have at least one programmer on salary, the cost of tools, licenses, etc. is tiny compared to payroll. Are you seriously making a decision that affects your chance of success based on a few percent of your annual budget?
Are you saying that you wrote the app to QT before checking the price? Seems to be implied by this "rewrote":
(3300-700) * 5 = $13k. You completely ported your app to save $13k? This certainly tilts the balance towards "tiny and poor" and away from buying pricy "support". But how do you justify the choice of C#? Surely your 'behold' moment with QT taught you some caution?
There are many factors in choosing a GUI toolkit. Price per development seat is a fairly minor one. The first question is, on what platforms must the GUI run? You haven't told us. You mentioned embedded Linux - is the GUI going to be part of the embedded product? Or running on PC's talking to the embedded product?
If it's the former, do you realize that C#/Linux is a fairly risky path? Who will support you there? And how will you later hop to VxWorks, if needed?
If it's the latter, have you asked an experienced Windows programmer about the tradeoffs between
I think a startup needs experienced team members to succeed. There is not much time for learning new skills, and not much money for buying support. When you talk about randomly hopping from embedded Linux to VxWorks to WinCE, I do not get the sense of a seasoned embedded developer. Each of these OS's brings its own set of tradeoffs, its own nightmarish traps, and its own steep learning curve. I'm far from an embedded expert, but I've looked over the shoulders of experts enough to make that observation.
I think you need to work as a professional programmer for about 10 more years before you're ready for a startup.
Uh... that's supposed to happen.
The Deny All on the alias is checked first (permissions on each level of alias redirection must succeed before the final directory check).
It never even attempts to look for the directory with Allow All since the Alias failed early.
So you get 403 instead of 404.
And if you think about it, it makes sense.
By creating an alias you are asserting you intend to service a virtual path. Whether or not what it points to exists is immaterial, since the contents of the path can be realized in many different ways (modules, further alias redirects, CGI, handlers, filesystem). A failure to access the alias via ACL should result in the 403... you don't want to leak the validity of the path (or existance of any real or virtual resources under that path) to a remote user.
404 is an indicator to an end user that a resource they _should_ be able to access is not available at the path specified... completely different.
It is not intended to directly reflect the presence or absence of an inode on the host filesystem.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Then maybe you should be removed form Windows support and reassigned or let go. Sorry but if you have these problems "all the time" then you are doing something wrong. Where I work we've got about 500 windows computers, give or take. Those run on a rather eclectic mix of hardware, some as old as P2s, some as new as Core 2 Duos. Servers, workstations, you name it. We run a pretty eclectic mix of software too. Off the top of my head some examples would be Matlab, HFSS, Photoshop, Office, Vegas, Visual Studio, Metrowerks, Miktek and so on. A fairly diverse Windows environment, in other words.
Wanna know how many patches ever came out that broke systems? One: SP2. How many broke? 2, both personal systems loaded to the gills with spyware. We wiped them to get rid of the spyware, they took the update and worked fine. That's a pretty good track record. Comparable to Solaris (which we also run a lot of)
Now let's compare that to, say, Fedora, which we also run. I won't go in to patching issues, let's talk about more basic ones. FC4 won't install on our Gateway blade servers period, which is primarily where the research group wants it. It kernel panics and reboots before hardware enumeration. Cannot figure out why. FC3 does install fine and has been running... Sometimes. The systems seem to unaccountably lock up and sometimes even turn off! Our Linux guys are stumped. They've run memtests, that's fine, run an mprime test, no heat problems, but let those things go and they just hang. There is no info at all available on what might be the cause.
Now I don't fault the Fedora group 100% for this, after it's not certified to work with this hardware, but then that's part of what a software license buys you. On all the systems we buy with Windows they have compatible hardware. All the drivers needed are provided, they are even all signed by MS. With a free Linux, well obviously there's some hardware compatibility problems, at least with FC4. No way to solve it, other than to buy a certified Linux solution. Nothing wrong with that, but then you can't argue the price advantage which is precisely what this whole thing was about.
So really, leave me alone with the tired zealot tripe of "Windows breaks all the time," or "Windows crashes every day." No, it doesn't. My full time job is supporting an environment that's largely Windows and really, it gives us very little troubles. My Windows desktop at work, well it never crashed before I moved it to the Vista beta. I mean never, in 3 years. Most of our systems just work, the patches go out automatically and there's just no problems. When something does get messed up, there are excellent resources to find out what's wrong.
At work I see time and time again the saying "Linux is only free if your time is worthless," demonstrated. Supported Linux solutions can be real easy, and solid, however then you are talking money. Free solutions have no upfront cost, but we seem to spend a ton of time making them work. When you have a situation like "Hmm, Fedora is busted, well try Debain, or Slack, or whatever," that's time intensive and thus not free.
The option of using opensolaris with zfs, dtrace, containers + performance + support from sun is worth exploring.
And by the time you get to have a usable contract with them, you'll wish you had not started.. they are called the "microsoft of real time" for a very good reason. Their tools are buggy, vxWorks fails at strange places, their QA is simply bad. I work for a very large company; We have independent people doing projects with WRS products across the world. We all say the same. The real question is, why embedded software tools so expensive for the quality.
to make MS users feel @ home.
---southpaw
If "free" doesn't come with a 24/7 support contract, it's not "free."
If the product is mature and well developed, you might not need support. I'm working with Delphi (non-free!) in my job and cannot remember one case where we actually called Borland because of problems.
Most of the time, we find the necessary answers on the internet. But that is something F/OSS is good at too.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Obviously you also recieve loads of tools such as wordprocessors, spreadsheets and countless useful other utilities with Microsoft Windows XP. I think not.
Is a tool that is very, very good for developing GUI apps. That's almost certainly the point of wanting to license QT. They are probably developing an app that they don't want to (or can't) release the source for that is GUI based. So they want to license QT so they don't have to build it from the ground up. However VS does the same thing, especially with the managed languages. It makes it real simple to make a GUI and provides tons of tools and documentation to that end.
Visual Studio is NOT comparable to GCC, it's not just a compiler. It is a very rich development environment, tool kit, and set of documentation. That makes development of many things a hell of a lot easier and faster, you aren't reinventing everything from the ground up all the time. Heck, why do you think things in Linux make use of QT or Gecko? Because it's much easier and faster to build on tools someone else has provided than roll your own solution from scratch.
Startups get up to 65% discount for Qt licenses, see http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/pric ing/licensing/smallbusiness .
So you either didn't even ask Trolltech for licensing options or you are just FUDding. *sigh*
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
> Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive...
One example given in the post is Qt and it is an unsuitable example. Qt was and is a commercial product. It was drawn kicking and screaming to a double licence after KDE encountered so much resistance because of their library. The final Qt step tp GPL only occurred when Gnome was launched. Trolltech is the main culprit for the Linux desktop divisions and disputes.
They certainly have the right to ask whatever they want for their products. Just do not mention them as FOSS. In this respect, they were and they are a fake.
I for one, don't give a flying fuck.
OSS has been HIJACKED by business, and it isn't a good thing.
And a major undertaking. So if I have a problem I am to spend my time, which I consider valuable tracking someone down who can fix it. Then I've got to pay for it. Now I don't know if you've ever had it done, but custom development isn't cheap. You don't give a guy $50 and get a bitchin program. For something like a driver, given that there aren't many people that know how to write them, I'd guess it would be at least $5000, maybe more.
Man, that buys a whole lot of Windows licenses.
It's a nice thought that whenever you need something with OSS you just hire a programmer to do it but even assuming you can easily find someone who's competent (harder than you'd think) it's not cheap. Same reason why you buy a mass production device instead of getting something custom made. You want a nice, mass production print of a painting? Run you a hundred at most. You want a custom work done? At least a grand, maybe 10 or more depending on the artist.
A lot of people here are commenting that with XP you don't get support, whereas with RHEL Workstation you do. This is true, to an extent.
The real difference though is that Red Hat really do cost A LOT more for support, and you are FORCED to pay for that support year after year just to get bugfixes and security patches to the software you are using.
With XP, you pay per incident for support, and that can add up quite quickly with just a few support calls. But at least you are eligible for every single patch for the lifetime of the product.
With Red Hat, you pay for support for your first year and you get patches. But if you don't cough up in the second year, not only can't you phone in for support anymore (for all the good that's ever done me tbh), but more importantly you can't get patches any more. So the product you choose can lock you into annual fees to a vendor and if you don't pay them, your system is exposed. Not nice at all!
Regarding the embedded Linux case where Wind River and Monta Vista want $$$$$ amounts of money, you might be better of with the T2 System Development Environment. It is GPL, costs nothing, is even more flexible and full-feature than the commercial RT Linux flavours and commercial support is available by open source addicted consultants around the globe at normal rates and from ExactCODE if you need a bigger company's backing.
Lets start by dealing with each example one-by-one:
Qt: To buy a "commercial" license for Qt gives you the right to use qt in non-free software. If you don't buy a "commercial" license, you can still use Qt but you'll have to comply to the GPL. This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with the question of getting support or not. As long as the GPL is ok for your business model, you can go to other companies than Trolltech in order to get a support contract for Qt, that's how Free Software works. Secondly, the "commercial" Qt license does give you more than simply the right to use the Qt libraries and entitlement to support, it also gives you the complete source code and the right to modify it as you see fit! MSVS won't give you that for any money in the world. Additionally, the renewal fees at Trolltech's webpage suggest that the yearly support comes at a price tag of about $1000 per seat, which is much closer to the price tag you've listed for MSVS.
Embedded Linux: I can't comment on that as you do not give enough data. However, my impression is that quite a number of Embedded Linux vendors violate the GPL anyway and that the pricing's dodgy. On the other hand, $250000 is a cheap price tag for a non-free OS license that gives you the right to integrate it into some piece of hardware and re-sell that piece of hardware as many times as you want. I doubt vxworks or WinCE will give you that, either. Again, the license will give you access to the complete source code, something windriver or ms won't give you unless you pay much more money.
RedHat: You've never heard of things like CentOS, Piebox Enterprise Linux etc. before, do you? Again, you're making the wrong assumption that one particular vendore has a monopoly on support. Get it, with Free Software and freely available source code, this is simply not the case. You can always go to another company in order to get support for a certain Free Software product. Again, ms won't give you no support and no source code for 140 bucks.
cygwin: I don't know what you want to use cygwin for, but I don't know why you'd need a "commercial" license again, either. You can get support for Free Software without paying for a "commercial" license (see above). Do you want to develop non-free software with cygwin? That'll be difficult, mate. cygwin itself is just a wee library, the biggest part of the software available in the cygwin package are GNU tools. These are not available for dual-licensing anyway, using them in non-free software would violate the GPL. You'd have to re-write GNU all yourself again...
Conclusion: You are either clueless or a fudder. You compare apples with oranges and you don't seem to know what you want to do with all that Free Software. It seems your business model is based on freeloading Free Software and converting it into something non-free to make quick money with going the old-fashioned non-free software way. D'oh, why don't you use BSD then? You don't understand how dual-licensing works. You don't realise that with Free Software, the imaginary "original vendor" doesn't have a monopoly on support. The source code is freely available, everyone can get it and maintain that piece of software for you, even you.
Tell me why you didn't consider Solaris 10 and all the stuff from Sun? A lot of their stuff is Open Source and free as in beer too. And it's good quality.
I just this summer engaged in two support sessions with Microsoft, which I have to day - brace yourselves - went very well. The price for a home user session *per incident* was something between $35 and $60 (memory fails me, either proves my point.)
One time I didn't like how QuickTime partially drive-by installs itself, and I had made a few registry mistakes trying to remove it. The other time I was innocently using Norton WinDoctor to clean up the registry and it also made some surprising mistakes of its own.
Using a remote-service process, the Microsoft reps spent a total of *seven* hours fixing stuff. Since all standard "IT Guy" rates are MINUMUM $35 an hour, clearly I got "more than my money's worth".
It was nice for me as an end-user, and it was "as little as 7 hours" because I knew a modest amount about computers, enough to help the Rep along the way. A poor helpless NeoPhyte could have burned two more hours.
Clearly, this support was subsidized somewhere else in the Microsoft Empire.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Mr. Stallman is not the FSF: he is its founder. This means that the organizatin may have to acknwledge and deal with nasty situations in ways that he really wishes were not necessary, because they don't have the tools to do it a better way. This includes making very clear what the GPL license applies to, in order that it not be declared invalid because it overreaches, and dealing with distressing problems like the insistence f NVidia on keeping their drivers closed source, but seeing a big demand in the free sftware world for NVidia drivers.
The comparison where windows OEM is listed as that price you do not get the office suite, unrestricted database software, ability to create adobe pdf files for free just to list a few If you look at the cost of a true desktop in a Microsoft corporate environment without the mass volume license its more like this :
Windows XP Professional OEM : $140
Adobe Distiller : $199 (Direct from Adobe)
Office Professional : $399 (from Amazon)
MSDN subscription : Anything upto around $10k/year
All up that seems more expensive for a true development environment using a Microsoft platform.
``what would need to happen before they could be competitive in the future?''
I don't think anything needs to happen before these products are competitive, because they already are. Vendors charge more for them, and apparently, customers are willing to pay more for them. In other words, the products are worth it.
It makes sense that OSS is more valuable than closed source software, all else being equal. You get the source code, you are allowed to edit it, you are allowed to sell it, you're allowed to incorporate it in your own products, etc. etc. You can maintain the software even if the vendor won't. These are huge advantages.
Of course, all else is not equal. You're not looking at the same product being available under a closed source and an open source license, you're looking at different products and different licenses. Nor do all the advantages of OSS necessarily matter to you. So, to you, perhaps the open source offerings are not worth the cost. However, that doesn't mean that they are not competitive; it means they are in a different market.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
> there is a complete dirth of products available for
> companies like us [...] particularly in the FOSS arena
I really don't think so. OFBiz, TinyERP are two. Compiere is the best known in this space. These are all competent and widely used. They need professional implementation, however, IMHO.
Sorry the support offered for free for OSS products is pretty hopeless for businesses. If a company has lost 100's of hours of work due a bug or problem, they have the option of complaining the makers of commercial software. Ever tried complaining to the makers of a piece of OSS? "if you don't like it, make something better yourself" isn't an option for the vast majority of businesses (and inviduals too). Most community support for programs involves forums and messageboards, sometimes wikis. That's not an advantage of OSS, every popular piece of software has forums like these.
So what you are saying, is that paying 35-60$ to fix something That-Should-Not-Happen (tm) is cheap because a MS-rep need 7 hours to do the job?
Maybe they're just greedy companies who want to extract as much money as possible from the OSS trend?
hmmm... dumb...
Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-.
fine but you should understand that support is extra with most propietry software too.
We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat.
yeah trolltech (strangely fitting name don't you think) have set themselves up in a neat position to rape commercial software developers for linux, use a freeer toolkit like gtk. IIRC that $3300 does include the distribution though (unlike with MS where you will have to pay for a copy for every device you sell).
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700).
and what if any support do you actually get at that price?
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year.
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops.
if you are shipping software based on cygwin you are a f*cking idiot anyway. Cygwin is barely tolerable in the controlled environment of your own boxes, once its on machines you don't control expect crashes caused by different apps shipping different versions of cygwin1.dll which don't play nice when loaded at the same time.
ultimately with any software if you wan't good support you will have to pay through the nose for it. The software itself (whether free or propietry) tends to be dirt cheap in comparison.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If you're a big company having dozens of products (volume), some selling good, some selling low, you can let yourself play with prices, with product placement stretegies, etc. If you have some products which sell in high quantitites (volume) you can allow yourself to play with it's pricing, feature set, release freuency, etc. If you have enough customers (volume) you can make big releases more infreuent, letting time for development, for working out some selling strategies, marketing, etc. But if you're a company with well, about one product and its related services, then you don't have much choice, and you still need money for development, for paying the coders and engineers, electricity and stuff. Pretty much the only thing you can strive for is trying to make a high quality product and raise its pricing to levels that suit your needs. You can later make changes depending on the sales numbers, but still, you have far less freedom in choosing what and how to do.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I as a person, and my company have been through the OSS problem a number of times. Either extremely bad support for which we were paying (ariadne cms), a bad decision by us leading to enormous inhouse maintenance costs (switching from SuSE to Gentoo) or ending up having to fix some software problems ourselves (OCS/GLPI inventory software). In the end we have decided that even though the support of commercial vendors might cost a lot up front, it is worth its weight in gold if there ever is a problem.
The article is right (although the guy seems to be comparing different types of products to one another, as other have pointed out) in that the costs of OSS can be really damaging.
That said, it would be nice if there were local companies offering support for Linux shops.
Does this mean that Stallman has contemplated a future for the software industry in which patents are gone but (less restrictive) copyrights remain?
software patents are FAR worse than software copyrights. While (i belive i can't seem to find the source right now) that stallman is anti copyright like most others in the FOSS community he sees patents as the far larger and more immediate threat that they are.
with copyrighted software i can use it (looking at the code if availible is more risky because i may inadvertantly remember and copy it or be accused of doing so but i can always pay someone else to look at it). then based on my experiances using it safely create a clone.
with patented software (at least under the US system) if i implement the methods in the patent (which may be nessacery for decoding a popular format) then there is no choice but to license from the patent holder at whatever price they set. The general lack of competance of the patent office (granting many obvious, already implemented elsewhere or even duplicate patents) doesn't help either (fighting a patent in court is outside most OSS projects financial means}.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You are now part of the Microsoft Collective.
All your roadmaps are belong to us.
'Nuff said.
I've also had the 'sticker shock' a few years ago when I started out, our licenses per server for the Ensim control panel ran $119 each, Redhat 7.2 was "free" to download, and life was good. Then that Ensim software went to $149, then $199, then $349. At that time I began shopping for new software, when it hit $649 per server I settled on a newcomer to the market, at less than $100 per server, I was happy again. But what's this, it's "best" on RHEL? $399 per server, we're back to paying as much for the licenses as we do the hardware (well not quite but it's more than half). That's when I discovered the beauty that is Centos, free, based on RHEL sources, and free (did I mention free?).
Problem is no support, but for what support would cost for a "larger than my company company" from Redhat for over 100 servers (we have 112), $399 x 100 = $39900 per year in OS fees (which doesn't include added support just the OS license really), you could easily add one or more (for bigger companies) true linux geeks to staff and let them be your support. I'm pretty good at troubleshooting and have used linux for a long time, so the only support I ever really need is for the software I do pay for.
This also has a side effect of making "being a linux sysadmin" a viable career for YALG (yet another linux geek).
--- www.f-theocean.com
I do agree with the article that Redhat's pricing is way too expensive. If you want to deploy a Linux solution, then Novell/Suse's pricing is much more reasonable. You can get a SLES 10 server for about $800 and a SLED 10 desktop for around $80, I think.
Considering Novell's aggressive pricing (as compared to Redhat), I don't understand why SLES and SLED aren't becoming Linux defacto standards. Suse is deinitely cheaper that Windows and way cheaper than Redhat.
Novell also has consultants that will deploy a Linux based solution, and can provide on-site support staff for you that will sit at a desk for 40 hours a week and do your bidding.
I don't think open-source software is ever going to be adequately marketable in the same way as closed-source software if we look at the piece of software as a physical object that is to be bought and sold. Much more sensibly, the work to create and support that software is the service, and to attrack the service, there's incentive to make the software good. In short, mass-producing software costs virtually no extra effort or resources, except of course for the physical, and mostly unnecessary, packaging. I think it's fundamentally incompatible with basic economic principles to market a freely mass-producable item as a limited resource. For example, we don't have stores that sell pieces of legal information, we have services that provide us with information in terms of the law, but we don't sell the actual legal advice itself. The service is absolutely necessary even though the "good" (the legal advice) is in a way, free. You're free to tell others about the legal advice you acquired by getting someone's service. This is exactly why I oppose Qt and favour wxWidgets and Gtk, for those who are familiar with the QPL/GPL scenario vs. LGPL. With wxWidgets, you can use the software for your commercial products, whether closed or open, and you can hire the author or some of his buddies for support and that's basically the business model. But you and me can also offer support services for wxWidgets for those who wish to create commercial software out of wxWidgets. It doesn't have to be the people that made wxWidgets, it can be anyone who knows it well enough. Contrast that with the Qt way. If you're a business and you want services, you're just gonna have to buy it from Trolltech. If you're unhappy with their services, you're going to have to switch toolkits, you can't just switch service providers (as you can with legal service and ISPs). Me and you could both open up a support shop for virtually all LGPL'ed software, provided that we have the know-how. This would create competition which is the absolute foundation of any successful marketing strategy that is to benefit the consumers and not ONLY those who own the product being sold (as is the case with most if not all closed-source software). Long story short, when there is no competition in service provision, the prices will of course be high. It's not an open-source thing, it's an economics thing. That said, I still think the problem is primarily that too few software groups realize this, and thus there are not (yet) enough support services for software in general, but given enough time, assuming that people don't get gooped into economically unviable scenarios like those of Qt and Microsoft, it will be fixed, it just takes time for people to realize that open-source software CANNOT be sold as product in the long run, it HAS to be sold as a service and ONLY as a service.
"In the absence of copyright restrictions, the GPL would be ineffectual but also unnecessary, since the overall experience would be the same with out with them."
I disagree and as the Tivo incident illustrates, copyright and hence the GPL was the only defense available. In the absence of either one, all Stallman and the FSF could do is rant and rave about "spirit".
There are also other ways to subvert the FSF "spirit" especially in the absence of any legal protections. e.g. copyright. So pretending that without copyright the world will be some kind of software utopia is naive at best.
They charge so much because they don't have the volume that the others have ....
QT is $3300 per seat. ---> What about WxWindows? Its just as cross platform, and you can buy support contracts from several places:
RT Linux is NOT linux. It is an os under linux, that has some integration harnesses inserted. You were paying for that.
RH Linux work station comes with the ability to call someone up and get support. A version of windows with that level of support is going to cost you much more than 299 a chair for the first few copies. Also, "an OEM version of windows" is not a fair comparison. WinXpPro == $299 for the *unsupported* product. For community supported linux, you can get it for FREE! Many people who think they need RT linux don't. Soft real time works just fine with a fast enough processor. YMMV
Yes, commercial cygwin costs a lot. Who gives a crap. Why exactly do you need it?
Or did you actually just need the support contract, which costs much less than the license to use the GPLed code without the GPL encumberances?
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700)
(THIS PRODUCT IS ALSO UNSUPPORTED!). WxWindows is FREE and unsupported and hell, it's cross platform.
This article is disengenuous, and possibly a MS snowjob. Yes, embedded linux is harder than desktop windows. Yes, if you try to pay for support for everything, it costs more. Embedded linux is VERY possible without a support contract, as long as you're working on a well definied processor that has a working port of linux+uclibc/glibc for it.
------------
Either A> You're windows programmers who thought you could all of a sudden become linux users by paying for a lot of support (but less support than the cost of unsupported windows products).
Or B> You're windows lackyes who are attempting to setup a straw man and present a case why embedded linux development is overly expensive.
Either way, the article is just wrongheaded.
--Michael
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
SLED 10 is $50 if you buy it individually and is far superior to (and newer than) RH's Workstation product.
I hope you did more research on your other products because these are the bwo biggest players in the desktop space and you missed the better one.
rich people are greedy
they think they can cheat to win
personally, I think that makes them stupid too
Why does a Bentley cost so much? Limited supply, relatively high demand...
Commercial OSS are typically small companies, with less market share, who want to produce better quality stuff, with a smaller staff of intelligent engineers who want to make a good 30-50USD per hour wage. Lots of people want the commercial OSS stuff, but they say they want COTS, but they really want custom stuff at COTS prices. So, you get higher prices as compared to the mass-produced main stream software. Plus, there isn't much in the way of incentive, since most people who are cost concious find a way to make the free versions of various OSS work for them.
cost of VxWorks is much higher than 20K, go get a quote and don't be suprized to be paying 50K for a single seat development license as well as a crazy expensive per seat run-time license. (i got a quote from them recently).
Our company has switched to using FSMLabs real time linux. about 2K for development seat and 500 for run-time seat. This uses mostly posix compliant calls for all timing. they offer good support and training too.
You're only counting development seats. Have you looked at deployment costs? Development tools are cheap at almost any price, it's deployment that counts.
You don't say how many users you will have or whether you're an in-house deployment, or something more web based.
That's where the real cost is.
Take a small but common component:- the RDBMS. Oracle vs MySql. Oracle development tools will vary from expensive (Windows) to close-to-free (on Linux). Your development database license will cost virtually nothing. MySql with support will be comparable give-or-take depending on your environment and the number of developer seats.
But come deployment, Oracle will hit you hard based on user numbers. MySql? Nicks. Zip. No per-user license just support if you want it, and far cheaper than an Oracle license.
The real world. That's what makes the difference.
While I agree it should be there are some pretty specific conditions that are required to put yourself in a position to save a lot of money with it. I think your complaint is very specific here and obviously doesn't apply across the OSS spectrum. Any person or company that has the expertise can use OSS with that expertise for free. It didn't sound like your employees had the expertise required to use those particular pieces of software. That isn't bad or good, it just is.
If a person or company requires support for a piece of OSS then they are going to have to pay for in many cases. A corporation can purchase OSS support in general for a wide array of OSS for practically nothing compared to the costs required for closed source stuff. There is definately an economy of scale involved in this as well.
Just remember that OSS, in my opinion, isn't just a philosophy (its a pretty damn good one). It also has to make business sense. If it makes business sense to use OSS I recommend using it in every possible case because of the Free and Open Source Softwawre philosophy. Its not a magic pill and it should be treated just like any other software decision.
It costs a lot of money to run a profitable business. Building a business on OSS reduces development costs, but it can also reduce the number of customers. Some potential customers do self-support. And the barrier to entry is much lower (remember the reduced development costs?), so more companies can provide the same service.
The anonymous user, for example, is comparing the OEM price (that you get if you're making computers) of XP Pro to the Retail Price of Red Hat. The retail price of XP Pro is the same as Red Hat at $299. The big missing point here is that while there are costly alternatives (and this person is only picking the most expensive), there are also completely free alternatives. Either this article is written by a Microsoft or other software house employee, or perhaps by someone who hasn't spent a great deal of time researching what software they should be using. I agree that its easier to go with the big names, but with a little extra effort, you can save yourself a lot of money.
Reason Commercial OSS is so expensive is because there's not many choices of software that comes with support keyword with... Same goes for tech to solve problems not many certified linux or OSS techs to solve your IT problems and the ones out there charge fortunes because of this fact... Yeah you could buy some of the free linux programs or Os's but you wont get any support and a degress of sanity... with Red Hat and Novell only the 2 OSS vedors that i know of that have certs, licensing, etc.. They go and garuantee software with work with the OS out of the box were as your ubuntu OS you dont know if your DB or apps will work propery yes its free but most businesses wont take the time to stop and work out the bugs and risk even more potential problems if they do something and screw it up they'll wind right back at square 1... Or if you need to make adjustments and take care of other dependancies to make it work somewhat... Downtime in business is money lost
is 99$ on higher than basic machines-- try an optiplex on dell small business
Just an FYI...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I am NOT a fan of Microsoft, but I'll have to say that I think you're being unfair to them here.
Both the problems he called about were created by third-party software and/or his own errors. You can't really blame Microsoft, but Microsoft did manage to fix things for him for a flat fee each time. In one case, he foobarred his registry and in the other Norton foobarred it for him.
Personally, I think he got a deal.
Life is short: void the warranty.
It seems that this story is comparing the support costs of these OS products to the license costs of the other products..
Yes, XP is just $140 bucks, but you call them for support, then the dollars start adding up, RHWS's price includes support.
If you are going to make a comparison, add in the support costs for the Micro$haft products and then see who is more expensive...
You state that Qt is $3300. That is for desktop edition for one platform. The main selling point of Qt is that it is cross-platform. Sure it is a great API, even to be used for one platform, but if your product is just for one platform, is Qt really the best choice for you? I don't know the specifics of your situation but its just something to think about. And $3300 is pretty expensive, I do agree, but considering Qt is basically the best thing to come since sliced bread (ok I am exegarating but it really is really really ridicilously good), their prices are managable for companies that do require an excellend cross-platform solution.
Additionally, you mentioned that you are a small startup. Trolltech does have a special pricing option for startup/small business users. Maybe you qualify?
MS subsidizes all kinds of stuff (support, service) in order to maintain their monopoly.
When you look at some solutions like MyEclipse, which integrates dozens of open source solutions into a seamless IDE, you pay only $30 for the product and full support. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. http://www.myeclipseide.com/
Touting MyEclipse AJAX Tools
None of my major points was a complaint. Instead, I tried to demonstrate the absurdity of comparing the purchase price of a license to use MS software with the annual fee for a support contract of OSS. I attempted this by drawing a comparison between the annual fee of a support contract and the payroll cost of in-house IT employees.
It is now very clear to me that in at least one instance I have failed it...
Perhaps others will recognize that the cost to benefit ratio for a $1,000 per seat annual support contract should be compared with the estimated decrease in workload of the IT department. If the support contract makes more than $1,000 of IT hours available for other work over the year's time, then it is clearly worth it. It might still be worth it even if the net cost is higher, since support work farmed out to the contractor would never interfere with some other IT project (like perhaps cleaning up a wiring closet or upgrading the routers).
Disclaimer: It is true that I have a bias against MS that does surface in my posts. I have been forced by uncontrollable circumstance to work with MS products for 18 years. I know very well their level of support, and the kinds of relationships they foster with their partners and with their customers. They have worked very hard to acquire the evil reputation they now have; they have fully earned that reputation; and it would be terribly inappropriate to withhold from them the rewards that they so richly deserve.
No he is saying that either through his own mistake, or the mistake of another application, he screwed up his system. Which then was fixed in 7 hours by a MS-rep. I haven't called MS support for a personal problem, but have for the server support. And I would do it again if I was in a bind like I was. I was on the phone with the engineer for like 30 minutes. Oh and this was after I spent a day searching on the internet for answers. As for their being more free "knowledge" on the internet(web, newsgroups,etc) for MS stuff than OS stuff....to hard to say IMO.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
There's this tremendous myth that OSS is all written by good Samaritans in their spare time, and companies that sell it commercially simply rebrand it, box it, and ship it.
That has always been impression, as just a single, lone user. OSS just equals free software. I don't expect support, because I don't get support from any commercial software provider (like if I emailed Microsoft about a problem I was having with Word I'd actually get a response from a human).
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
- Web and phone-based comprehensive support 9am-9pm
- 4 hour response
- Unlimited incidents
What kind of support does your OEM XP license provide? None, of course. To compare apples to apples, you'd need to compare RHEL WS with Windows XP Pro retail, which costs $299.00 and includes two support requests. After that, it's $35.00 per request.This whole article was a massive troll.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
"No, it's not. I may have an interest in growing developer base, but I don't care about a big user base when these users are only leeching the software."
Uh, huh. So how many here download F/OSS and don't contribute in any way back? Sounds like some of you might want to get rid of that mote in your eye, before complaining about the plank in others.
"Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing
You wanted to take from the OSS community and not give anything back.
Instead you will be spending time calling your proprietary software suppliers and asking them to fix the bugs that you found. Maybe they'll even do it! Wouldn't you rather not put the fate of your company in another's hands like that?
We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock.
Turns out there's no such thing as a free lunch, huh.
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats.
Talk of "seats" leads me to believe you are only looking to use Cygwin in your development environment, and that you will not be redistributing Cygwin binaries as part of your product. You don't need a commercial Cygwin license for that.
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
Again, good luck getting Microsoft to fix that show-stopping Windows SFU bug for you. I'm sure they are just as concerned about the survival of your business as you are.
When you pay that "fee". You are buying yourself the ability to either call somebody or email. Most have an incident support.
When you pay that 150 dollars for Windows XP, you are *not* buying a support package for Win XP. If you have development issues, MS isn't going to be helping you for free.
All in all, OSS SUPPORT fee's are on-par with Commercial support. this is a non-story.
No one ever answers these questions, they all focus on why your quandry is, in fact, wrong or mis-informed.
IRL, most people (even the folks here) would ask a couple probing questions and then just flat out say, "The reality is, software support is a cost-factor that gets steeper when you are forced to use 3rd party companies. There are market indicators that highlight why this is and most of them distill down to the fact that the people who didn't develop the suite have no choice but to charge higher fees because the staff will be less involved and often leveraged to support multiple different suites."
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
You're right. I've noticed that a lot of time opens source software that sells enterprise level support ends up costing more because the software vendor prefers the direct model to VAR model. Almost everything in the enterprise is actually done through a var, very rarely do you directly engage the vendor. Additionally the volume done by open source enterprises tends to be lower than normal, so the cost is doubly high. Novell actually does it's licensing through a VAR, and SLES 10 easily costs more than Windows 2003 Enterprise in this model.
Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat
Yeah, Qt is expensive (overpriced even among commercial cross-platform toolkits, IMO). So why did you buy it? There are dozens of other toolkits you could have used. And why do you blame open source for the particular business model of a commercial toolkit? You weren't using the open source Qt toolkit, you were using the commercially licensed one.
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700).
If C# met your requirements, why the hell were you writing your application in Qt/C++? Choosing to write applications in C++ when your requirements are met by a managed language (C#, Java, etc.) is an incredible waste of money. We're not talking a few tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees, we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs.
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless.
Lots of people do embedded RT development on Linux without ever buying anything from anyone, so it can't be that you were paying for the ability to develop on Linux.
We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140.
Be sure to look up the term "runtime license" before you start shipping.
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
You don't "do good" by using open source software, you "do good" by contributing to open source software.
Furthermore, you obviously require lots of handholding from a vendor since you're incapable of making informed decisions on your own and aren't even able to understand simple licensing terms and their business consequences. So, go ahead and pay your $140 fo Windows XP Pro. Microsoft will be happy to give you all the advice about your long term business strategy that they can, and you are obviously willing to do as you're told.
PS: Don't bet on that "survival" thing. I think your company is doomed no matter what platform you're choosing.
I don't mean to insult anyone here, and I don't want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions.
Your characterization of the funding models is misleading. Yes, most programmers are paid for developing OSS, but they are not paid by revenue directly derived from the OSS product.
The overwhelming amount of OSS development has always been, and continues to be, people who develop OSS in order to address a problem that needs solving in their business. They share the software freely because that turns out to reduce the amount of work they have to invest in developing the software and therefore lowers cost. They don't try to derive revenues from that software.
Business models like Troll Tech's, real time Linux vendors, and RedHat are the exception, not the rule, among open source business models. And from a user's perspective, open source software whose development is directly funded by revenue derived from the software is undesirable because the developers of the software will make decisions based on their business interests, not based on solving problems most effectively.
So, please don't confuse the issues. Yes, RedHat and Troll Tech get paid for developing OSS, but they are a rare exception, and I think open source would die out if their model became predominant (in fact, I'd go as far as suggesting that people should avoid them if they want to help OSS). Most OSS developers get paid for OSS development but don't derive revenue from their software, and that's the arrangement that has made OSS so enormously successful.
After years with propietary software, I am wishing my company would consider open source. Why? For what we pay for support, we could hire three competent developers. What we get are patches that break existing applications, or a statement that they have decided not to implement the enhancements we need. For the same money, I could just fix the bugs and add the enhancements I need to OSS. And I end up getting what I paid for, instead of excuses. All this pain just so that we have someone to point a finger at when things go wrong. I don't want to point fingers, I just want things to work.
"Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-"
,, OSS solutions. You did say you rewrote everything to C# so you must have pretty intelligent developers. If you are an end user get a support contract. You know something as I reread your post I get a strong wiff of trolleri.
Fud #1: Use OSS and you spend all you time fixing bugs. According to this, the Trolltech Qt Open Source Edition is available under the GPL license. And if you subscribe to one of the support groups you won't have to spend all your time hunting down bugs. Also if your company sells any OSS product, you won't have to pay any upstream 'licenses'. Did you factor in licensing costs in your figures for the C# IDE, WinCE and Vxworks?
From the same page: "Trolltech Qt License Pricing One Platform Console Edition, 1420, Desktop Light Edition, 1590, Desktop Edition, 2630"
You didn't state what business your startup is in, but if you are selling down stream solutions use GPL er
davecb5620@gmail.com
I'm sorry, but there just isn't any two ways about it: Qt is an expensive toolkit compared to other commercial offerings. And at the tie the KDE project adopted it, Qt was immature and incomplete compared to other commercial offerings. Qt managed to become a predominant toolkit only because it used KDE to get a big user community quickly, which helped improve the product and helped with marketing.
You can reasonably try to argue that the Troll Tech - KDE relationship is mutually beneficial and that the price of Qt is acceptable relative to other development costs, but that's a separate issue, but those are different arguments from whether Qt is competitively priced.
if you need the tool to do the job you want to do, you suck it up and buy it
10 years ago, people may have needed Qt, since the state of Linux/UNIX toolkits was poor. But I think these days, nobody "needs" Qt, since there are plenty of excellent alternatives that cost you nothing under less restrictive licenses.
Sure.
... Did.
Users call for support because Something That Should Not Happen
When I get a couple of test boxes to go dive into the complex world of Linux, lots of things that Should Not Happen, will.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
One of the things that continues to make Microsoft so dominant is that their early adoption allowed them to be the entity which defines how we view computing and the development of computing solutions.
So much initial frustration with alternative software models like OSS stems from this impedence mismatch. I speak from personal experience here.
For example, Qt is not primarily designed to be a low-cost alternative to Microsoft development tools. It is designed to achieve a flexiblity the Microsoft product cannot match.
So the question is goals. If the primary goal is to save money one can take the Qt example and put a twist on it. For example GTK can be used with your choice of C, C++, python, Java, perl, php, etc. wxWidgets has a similar list. Then there's the obvious example of Java using Swing or SWT. All of these are in fact used in commercial products, especially Java. Some research should reveal a choice which has been proven acceptible in the real world whether or not it subscribes to the exact support model you had in mind going in.
The 2x4's I pick up at the hardware store come with no guarantee but I have seen enough real world examples to have a good idea what kind of reliability I can expect from them.
If, on the other hand, official support is your primary goal you will need to take the advice given in previous posts and be sure to compare apples to apples. Perhaps a support-level/cost analysis will sway you toward OSS in one situation and toward proprietary software in another.
When you pay for Commercial Software, whether it be based upon Open Source or Proprietary technologies, you get what you pay for... the ability (for your staff) to avoid accountability by purchasing a commercial vendor support license.
When you hire a team of qualified/skilled developers who are smart/experienced enough to use FREE OSS products, AND google (or other search engines) as their means of support, rather than avoiding accountability by purchasing a commercial vendor support license, you will save yourself ALOT of that money, even though you may have to pay a bit higher on the Salary level. *Not to mention they probably have the ability to make a much better product.*
Take the time it requires to find the solution to a 'bug' on a search engine... 5-10mins.
Compare that with the time it requires to get help (after sitting on-hold for 5-10mins) on some vendor's support line: 10-25mins
Managers insist on purchasing support licenses so they can avoid accountability. How often do you really use those support lines? And if it's more than 1hr a month, then you should probably be looking for better personel, imo.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
If nobody really cares about licensing, such as if you find pirated DVDs on street corners, then you can't afford to develop a product and give away the binary to your customers either.
No he didn't get a deal. In a sanely designed system, rolling back a borked configuration should be a matter of minutes. Thats less time than you need to look up the phone number, call your MS-rep and explain the problem.
I do understand that sometimes things happen that shouldn't have happened, and you have pay to have the problems fixed. But when the MS-rep needs 7 hour to do a job that shouldn't have lasted more than 15 minutes, the value of of the job done is still a 15 min job, not a 7 hour job.
The answer to your question comes down to a simple rule called "Economies of Scale". Microsoft sells many more copies of their products then their open source competators, yet their price to develop software stays the same. Thus, because they can divide up their development costs among many more customers, they can charge less then the open source versions.
I think the real problem is that you don't understand what you're building. Why did you choose to go with open source in the first place? Was it for some fuzzy "feel-good" reason, or do you need closer control over the bits and bytes of your environment? If your answer was the latter, you could end up paying much, much, much more in choosing the closed source route because sometimes Windows just doesn't do what you want it to do unless you can coax some kind of shared source liscensing agreement with Microsoft.
Are you selling devices that will end up being special-purpose computers? In the long run, building on Windows will be more expensive because you'll need more powerful hardware in each unit that you sell. On the other hand, Windows might give you the advantage of moving to market faster.
No, I will not work for your startup
Wow, you comment on my "reading comprehension skills", and then you go on to demonstrate your own... Appearantly you "miscomprehended" what you have just written; what you are doing isn't called "troll baiting" - you weasel - it's called "insulting". "Comprehend?"</sarcasm>
My only satement that your entire post is focused on seems to be this: "The only time the GPL isn't legally binding is if there is no such thing as IP." Now, it may be my "reading comprehension skills" working against me, or something, but how does anything you say negate that particular statement (or any one after it, for that matter)? Your explanation is great and all, but you're just elaborating on that very same idea. I'm also a little amused at the fact that my previous post was just a knee-jerk reaction to someone who is deliberately trying to misinform others into thinking that Stallman is this evil, little bastard, who is trying to facilitate the "death of the software industry" (sic!). Yet it is I who is misinformed?! BRILLIANT!
To the rest of the /. community, thanks for making me a strawman. Go ahead and keep digging your own graves (that's a metaphor - for the unimaginatives). I will not save you (... also a metaphor). You won't let me :P.
If you care, I prefer to be modded funny. Cause it is... Like the rest of this braindead situation.
That's quite the barrage of insults you've mastered there... just before we part, I'll point out that if you are not going to bother figuring out why I inferred what you (wrongly) claim I did, it's actually best not to imagine it either.
Why is this about you? It is my suggestion, not yours. I'm implying Stallman is against all forms of IP. Now here, I admit I could be wrong, minds do warp in mysterious ways in old age.
It is quite interesting that you would get so pissed. I'm guessing you are a little on the sensitive side. My humble appologies. Now go your mary way, lick your wounds.
1) if you don't need branded support
2) you've got experienced users and admins (if you don't, WTF are you doing even considering writing commercial apps for Linux?)
3) you're willing to Open Source the output (make a CD or a download of the program source for an embedded product... which in the context of a Linux-based appliance, what's the problem?)
You don't have to pay any of those prices. Make a deal with a Linux consultantcy on an hourly basis for real trouble. If one wants a desktop which actually works and *has* support built into the OS price, buy Linspire. It's cheaper than either RHEL/client or SUSE support (the $50 for SLED10 covers the license and THAT'S ALL - rather like what one buys from MS)
Tech Public Policy stuff
From my experience, the quickest way to get the right answer to what ails your OS or Linux app is to take a few words from the error message, enclose in quotes, and google it. While whoever said that 'chances are whatever your problem is, somebody else has had it' is true enough, the odds that this particular person is on whichever forum you decide to ask for help on aren't especially good. I think that with respect to the queries I've put on community forums, I've gotten useful answers back maybe 20% of the time.
Plenty of people willing to help, but if they don't know what the answers are, that's not all that useful.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I have to agree with the parent 100%.
I use qt in my qt job and I know for a fact that it has bugs.
However, that $3300 licence allows me to directly email TT and send them bug reports (and get fixes back!) or get additional help outside of the offical documentation. (Or support lists)
And it does help! Besides which, since QT is 100% opensource, its trivial to locate the bugs and send in the patches (I'm not crazy enough to maintain my own patch-set yet...)
Besides, when was the last time you tried using C# in an embedded system?
Sounds like a nightmare to me...
Cheers,
Ben