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Cost-Conscious Companies Turn To Open Source

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

Martyr4BK writes "BusinessWeek has a slew of special reports today on open source software discussing the benefits for buyers who are cost conscious and open source being the silver lining for the economic slump. They even have a slideshow of 'OSS alternatives' like Linux, Apache, MySQL, Firefox, Xen, Pentaho, OpenOffice.org, Drupal, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Asterisk. These are all good examples (we use a bunch of them already); what other open source software can I use to drop my company's IT costs, and maybe get a decent bonus for the year?"

4 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory question by fgaliegue · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And what about the _total_ cost of ownership?

    I'm all for open source software, don't get me wrong, but switching from a known solution that Works For You(tm) even though it's horribly expensive to a $0 one but with a steep learning curve can be disastrous.

    Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?

    I know, this is one example, others may not be that extreme. But taking this kind of decision has to be done with some caution.

  2. Re:Would love to... by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just goes to show that anything can be implemented badly...
    Where i work we have 2 separate networks serving different parts of the company, one is all OSS while the other is primarily MS based.
    The OSS one is faster, has better uptime, cost very little to build (runs entirely on hardware that was discarded by the MS oriented staff), and requires minimal maintenance. Users don't really notice any difference until something goes wrong, which happens far less frequently on the OSS network. The bean counters notice because of how under-budget the OSS based network is.

    The MS guys are jealous of some of the fancy kit we have to play with, but we've still spent a lot less overall.

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  3. Tech support? What support? by mangu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And there was no quick answer from a tech support email address when I would have trouble

    Obviously, you've never worked for a corporation using commercial software. Try emailing, for instance, Oracle's tech support. At one time, it took me *two months* to get the response I needed from Oracle. Or rather, a response that *didn't* solve my problem: "that feature has been deprecated since Oracle 8i". It took them two full months just to find that an obscure feature that was essential to my work wasn't supported anymore.

    Based on my 25+ years of experience of using software, both commercial and free, today I'd rather have Google and the source code than any paid tech support.

  4. Re:How about GIMP? by danieltdp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sorry for the bluntness, but... holy crap! not The Gimp Thread Again. It boils down to:

    1) Gimp is nice
    2) Gimp gets better with time
    3) Gimp's interface is horrible
    4) Gimp's interface gets better with time
    5) Gimp doesn't have CMYK support
    6) This is not important to a whole lotta people
    7) But it is a show stopper for some
    8) iterate until hell freezes over

    There, one less gimp thread!

    --
    -- dnl