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Cost-Conscious Companies Turn To Open Source
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?"
Do they mention anything about project management? Even on linux, the free stuff I've found can't compete with the uber-expensive proprietary stuff. Am I just looking in the wrong places?
Would love to save $$$ with OSS, but the software I need (robust, full-featured POS system) is non-existent. Bummer.
I don't respond to AC's.
I've implemented Dansguardian webfiltering with a squid proxy on an unused Mac OS X server to placate my bosses need to control everyone's surfing habit and keep the cost of doing so at $0.
Besides Slashdot how much FOSS does Slashdot use?
Do they use Asterisk for it's phone system? Or does it's parent company do all the "business" stuff for them and just let write perl and post articles?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I used to think the TCO argument was rubbish. But then I did some research this year on bug tracking software for my company. At least in this one area, it was obvious that while you'd save a few hundred initially on open source solutions, these solutions were much less polished and supported than their commercial competitors. I would have had to do a lot of additional installations and customization to get things working right. And there was no quick answer from a tech support email address when I would have trouble. And in another recent purchase of music production software, the open source versions were an absolute joke in comparison to commercial varieties. Open source is great. I use Firefox and Open Office all the time. But for business and specialty applications, commercial applications are still often much more solid and cheaper in the long run.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Without telling us what non-free applications are currently being used, it's a very difficult question to answer.
If I were starting a business tomorrow, I can't think of a single piece of commercial software I'd standardise on.
Partly because I'm stingy when it comes to software. Partly because I don't want license management to become a headache as the business grows.
Ever since I started using Nagios, I've been able to slowly help the rest of the IT department consider open source when starting projects. Now we use Nagios, Backuppc, MySQL, Perl, Splunk, Snare and Ubuntu LTS for servers. The clincher was not having to pay for licensing for a SQL server, OS and all. We're all so tired of dealing with the behemoth of a licensing scheme that Microsoft uses, and that's really what pushed us to alternatives.
Time was, MySQL was an open source alternative to 'non-enterprise' DBs like FoxPro. Now it's a viable alternative to Oracle or DB2 in certain circumstances where the high end commercial features are overkill.
in contrast to all those companies out there with a policy of spending as much as possible.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
A spoon is a viable alternative to a shovel in certain circumstances like eating soup.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Linux/F/OSS is mostly supported by angel investors and Sun Microsystems
This is just completely wrong. Most open source projects have no outside investors at all, but are either maintained on a developer's free or salaried time. IBM, Apple, and Google, for example, have hundreds of employees who contribute to open source projects on company time.
I don't know why you would think so many projects would be backed by angel investors when those projects would return nothing financially on their investment.
Developers: We can use your help.
I've personally found that vi(m) is the best development tool around. You can say that DW/Eclipse saves you time with auto-completion and whatnot, but as for me and my sites, I take pride in the fact that I have typed every single character.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Planner wasted a day of my life last week. I put an entire project into it, and then found out it couldn't do leveling. It also couldn't export in MS Project or any other common format, so I had to start again in another project management tool. Eventually I just went with a table in a wordprocessor, and a collaboration webapp.
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.
Despite being free on one level, if you look at opensource from a business perspective you realize they are looking at the costs slightly differently.
If they are looking at all that is. To be considered by a business, the opensource alternative has to be noticed first, and that isn't trivial considering the vast majority of opensource projects don't exactly have a marketing budget.
One way to lower the barrier to entry is to make an opensource solution really easy to try out, but sometimes even that isn't enough. Often an opensource alternative is noticed, but its not a perfect fit for what the business (thinks it) needs. The free part is less impressive when you have to consider customization costs, integration costs, long-term maintenance costs, etc. Most businesses don't want to have to notice their software, they just want something that works.
Now for the plug. I'm one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free. The project's motto is "everything that can be easy, should be easy!"
We've been building a family of installable live CDs that are based on Ubuntu (Debian too soon!) and are each pre-integrated to serve specific usage scenarios (e.g., CMS, database, Wiki, web development frameworks).
We only launched a few months ago, and we're still officially in beta, but thanks to the feedback from the community we've already made pretty good progress (up to 9 appliances now - we're covering the low hanging fruit first)
Technical highlights:
We're hoping this kind of last-mile integration effort will make opensource alternatives an easier "sell" and promote adoption.
Check us out!
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
TurnKey Linux: everything that can be easy, should be easy!
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
At this very moment in time there is nothing I can pull in from the Net which I can run for a while as Exchange replacement without a large amount of work on the client side - MS has built the barriers quite well.
As long as there isn't a USABLE Exchange replacement we won't be able to lose it in the server room - management is addicted to Outlook (even though the 2007 version suffers the same productivity obliterating GUI) and its ability to share calendars. And AFAIK there is NO plug-n-play replacement out there.
Next up: Outlook. Without an API compliant replacement that integrated what Outlook put together you've got no hope. Mobile phones sync to it (including the Jesus phone), calendaring is integrated and there is over the air sync available as well. And it sucks VERY badly on networking (which you find when you make the mistake to use it on EDGE or 3G) - but it works for management. End of story.
I would LOVE to nuke the Exchange setup and move that last bastion to Ubuntu as well, but no chance..
Insert
I save easy $250,000 US a year being an all open source shop, and would likely not even be in buisness without open source software in a small company of less than 10 employees that is not primarily IT related but uses a lot of software to reduce cost.
For those that complain that they did better under Microsoft, chances are has no idea what their IT staff was doing when they ran MS.
Living in Chile
There is still no substitute for doing your job. You still have to evaluate the software.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?