Slashdot Mirror
The Business Case for Open Source Software
An anonymous reader writes "An InfoWorld blog entry makes a business case for open source software, and attempts to explain the business benefits of OSS to management and business owners. The primary benefits the piece uses to argue in favor of OSS include no licensing fees, and no license keys. The article also argues that OSS results in freedom from 'ownership' by software vendors. 'Never again will you fear the BSA (Business Software Alliance) knocking on your door wanting to perform a software audit. The BSA even takes out advertisements on Google search pages for and up to $200,000 reward a disgruntled ex-employee can receive for reporting your company to the BSA! That's quite a powerful motivator...'"
It's quite different over here. It's not just a question of experimenting with OSS, it's a combination of seeing the job as deciding between presentations from different vendors and being averse to taking personal risks.
As I mentioned, it seems like people have stopped doing their own research and now mainly choose between different schpiels from different vendors. Vendor 1 selling you something for 100,000 dollars, and vendor 2 selling it to you for 50,000? Clearly if you go with vendor 2, you've saved the company 50,000 dollars a year. No need to point out vendor 3, who doesn't have a substantial sales team but who sells something identical for 5,000 dollars per year, or an OSS solution which might need 1,000 dollars per year worth of tweaks. Or maybe it makes sense for you to write your own. We generally have a 2-vendor solution, and nobody can fault you for choosing the better of the two, right?
The risk-aversion deepens. In corporate US if you create a product that everyone else is making, your job is reasonably safe even if it tanks. And, in fact, simply because everyone else is making it, it's likely to tank. On the other hand, if you create something original (i.e. something with an open market) and it tanks, it's more likely that your career will bear the brunt of that mistake. OSS is currently viewed a lot like that. Taking risks is largely regarded as a negative, and certainly regarded as a dangerous career move.
One does not experiment with OSS, because one does not experiment. One either knows for sure, or one contracts a vendor who will bear the brunt of the responsibility when things might go wrong.
The ______ Agenda
Where I work we have a 400000 lines VAX-FORTRAN software that we are struggling to migrate.
Yeah. And, I bet that when those 400,000 lines of code were written, the idea of DEC folding was about as plausible as the idea of Microsoft folding.