Slashdot Mirror
The Benefits of 'Vendor-Free' Open Source IT
mjasay writes "IDC has released a report looking into industry adoption of open software. In the study, analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing trend: IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies. While IDC believes this is a bad thing, the data in the report suggests otherwise. 70% of the enterprises surveyed did their own implementations, while roughly 90% supported their own open-source deployments. This might be a cause for alarm if the projects weren't so successful: 70% of the projects were deemed to be of "Critical" or "High Importance" compared to other IT projects and 90% plan to maintain or increase their investment in open source projects. Could it be that open source is liberating enterprises from an unhealthy dependence on vendors, and that early results suggest that this will be a Very Good Thing for the success of IT projects, many of which have failed historically."
This might be a cause for alarm if the projects weren't so successful: 70% of the projects were deemed to be of "Critical" or "High Importance" compared to other IT projects..."
This post reminds me that most slashdotters are engineers, and not project managers. How in the world do you infer that the projects are "so successful"?
The article (which I did read) does claim a large percentage of the projects are "Critical" or "High Importance", but this does not mean, "These are the successful projects." Rather it means, "These projects had damn well better be successful!" Are they successful? No word on that.
This is another example of posters' bias, reading conclusions into an article that does not support them.
Come back when there's some history of these internally supported projects. Let's see if they do better than the dismal 50% average success achieved by today's corporate technologists.
Where I work, it seems to come down to
(a) Spend several ten of thousands upfront and the another few thousand every year on a commercial product. Never have it integrate like they promised it would. Wait weeks or forever for fixes. Repeat every three years. Or..
(b) Buy a couple of servers. Spend time I would otherwise have spent trying not to fall asleep putting together what we need by gluing together a few open source systems. Fix it when it breaks. Maybe it takes a few weeks. But we always get there in the end.
I'd be much happier paying good money for commercial 'solutions' if they weren't pretty much always rubbish. And by rubbish I mean plaintext auth over http, I mean wasting a week whilst vendors argue over whose problem it is - without actually investigating, etc etc.
If want less-than-perfect products with substandard support, I can do that myself.
Why are you looking at me like that?
The article has a chart, labelled "Primary Source of Project Services".
And the line on the chart that struck me was the most was the one labelled "No other services required", with responses in the 20 percent (or more) range.
That means one in five projects, relying on Open Source Software, requires no support whatsoever (other than what the developers do for themselves, I presume).
That suggests that the Open Source Software they are using requires very little, if any, support.
In other words, IT JUST WORKS.
Can you imagine a project that relies on Windows, or other Microsoft software, that can get along without someone assigned to support? Heck, even a simple home Windows user has to know or hire someone to provide support, otherwise their PC ends up being used as a doorstop.
This matches my own experience. My son provides my PC service. When I was using Windows, I had to ask him for help every couple of weeks or so. But then he installed Linux for me (Debian, Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice), and he hasn't had to touch my PC for almost two years. Linux has never crashed on me (though Firefox has).
I know that my son also converted a small business to Linux (servers and desktops), and now they don't call him unless they want something new added -- they never call him to fix something that's broken, unless it's a hardware problem.
This means that, when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership, Open Source software is not only cheaper for the initial installation, it is also cheaper in the long run, due to reduced problems, and reduced support costs.