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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.
I don't see how RedHat is competing with 'Big Iron' when it doesn't have half the features. May be against lowend Solaris installs, but the price isn't that different.
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"
While I think your second line is a good idea, your first misses the point - the submitter was comparing commercial OSS vs. CSS not commercial OSS vs. free OSS.
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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
Exactly.
My employer is going RH (and possibly SuSE) and we're saving something like 7 figures in licensing and hardware support contracts by dumping the majority of our HP and Sun systems for bladeframes running RHEL.
Even with that, we're still paying a crapload, but the savings are immense when compared to RH's "real" competition. Personally, I suspect that RH would be nore than happy to lose what little of the workstation market that they have so they can rake in more money in server licenses...
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
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!
Exactly, Redhat WS is not equivalent to MS Windows XP. With Redhat you get a lot of stuff you don't get with Windows XP, like a full office suite, which from MS would cost more than $300.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.'"
apples & oranges. You are dropping HW & SW support from HP/SUN and getting SW support only from RHEL. If you compare SW only support costs from Sun/RedHat/HP at equivilant support levels, they are fairly equivilant.
*full disclosure. I work for Sun Support, onsite at a large company that uses HP, RHEL, and Sun. I work with the folx who purchase support from all three vendors, and I'm going off of what they tell me, plus what I've seen elsewhere.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
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
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 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.
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)
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.
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
Qt does not cost $3300 per seat. You can download it and use it for Free. Oh wait, you meant "proprietary licensing". Right.
Microsoft Visual Studio costs $700. Doesn't matter if you open-source your code or if your license is "proprietary".
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!
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
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?
You'll still need a $400-$700 copy of Visual Studio even with your $1000 Qt libraries. Qt looks even worse now...until you need your code to run on Solaris,Irix,OS X, and Linux. Then your investment is quickly recouped when you can develop on one platform and deploy on 4 or 5.
Do you think you can port any non-trivial Win32 application to Unix for under $1000 ?
Sorry, but your comparison is ridiciluous.
Which means, if you have 5 developers using QT you already pay a similar amount. And now, what comes with MSDN Team Suite: Visual Studio, SQL Server, tools for software architecture, Business Solutions, all MS operating systems for different languages and more. You can absolutely not compare those two products. Even if you just take the MSDN Professional, which costs about 2000$ you get much more than just a library to create applications.
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.
That is quite interesting. I was under the impression that OpenOffice.org was available for Windows.
I hope you're not just trolling...
What the hell is that supposed to even mean?! As far as I can tell, information is a pretty damn abstract concept, and it is people, if anything, that ever want something. Someone slaving away at the keyboard to make something work cannot be described as "information". It is called "labour".
First, to clarify it to anyone who may actually be misinformed enough to believe this nonesense, the whole idea behind the GPL is to undermine the concept of IP. Therefore, RH is most definately an exception to IP. While companies like Microsoft rely primarily on distribution sales (sometimes almost to the point of competing with themselves), RH is relying on providing customers with services (and they probably sell things too, but I don't feel like checking). So, no, this argument doesn't work, at all, without exception.
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.
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.
Visual Studio is an IDE, while Qt is a set of libraries. MFC/Win32/.NET are the libraries you would use with MSVS and they are free (with every copy of Windows, or LGPL'd with WINE/WineLib/Mono). Eclipse is an IDE you can use with Qt and it is free.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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
Startups will frequently take the quick way out... develop for Windows with Visual Studio first since they think that's the fastest way to market. Then they find out that the customer wants the app on Solaris, HP, even Linux. The startup doesn't have the resources to re-write the app, so what do they do? They try to port their apps using MainWin or some crap like that and find themselves in a living nightmare of royalty and development licensing fees as well as horrible performance. At the end of the day they finally bite the bullet and purchase Qt licenses and their lives become a lot easier.
That was my last company.
The flip-side? Develop on the Mac and then have to port to Windows! Use something Mac2Win, find that it doesn't satisfy, and then start migrating to Qt.
That's my current company.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Makes for an interesting saying:
Information wants to be free
But the people who produce it want to eat
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
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.
So is it your point that no human being can ever buy support for any other open source toolkit other then QT?
He says that QT costs too much so we goes to VS for around 700 dollars. Does that 700 dollars include support? No it does not. He just threw that out because he is a troll. He is comparing the cost of QT + support to VS without support and picking a solution that only works on windows. C# + GTK is available for free from mono which he also completely ignores.
The guy decides to drop QT because it costs more and moves to C# without once considering java with swing or swt or anything else? He never considers Mono and goes directly to paying for VS while not buying support from MS.
The guy is either an idiot, shill, astro turfer or a troll.
evil is as evil does
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
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
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.
Actually, yes it does:
Also, while at $700 he wasn't talking about an MSDN subscription, were he to go with that instead the following would apply:
(Note that I can't be bothered to reconstruct the links)
So no, you don't get as much support (I assume - I actually don't know what TrollTech's support is like), but it's incorrect to say that you don't get any, even if you just buy VS.NET. (And any company serious about developing with/for MS products ought to buy at least one MSDN subscription, if only for the support...)
On top of that, community support resources for MS are at least as plentiful as those of the OSS community. Programmers working with MS tech are not fundamentally any different from those of us working with Java, or with OSS tools; we're all human, and most of us are more than happy to help out a fellow programmer in need from time to time.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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.
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!
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.
``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.
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.
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
This is nothing like the support one tyically expects with a commercial support contract. 3K per seat per year is a typical price in the industry. Our RTOS licenses are in this ballpark, as are our commercial (non-Microsoft) compiler support contracts. If that is what support prices really are for OSS, there is nothing unusual about them.
One of the things that periodicly paying a large amount of money buys you is leverage with someone who can fix your problems. If they are tardy or non-responsive, you can shut off the gravy spigot. The thought of getting Microsoft to do that, even if you were paying them 3K a year, is laughable. They are so big and rich, nothing short of government action can budge them.
Perhaps a better topic would have been "Why are Microsoft's support options so odd?"