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Microsoft Asks Open Source Not to Focus On Price
Microsoft's supposed open-source guru Sam Ramji has asked open-source vendors to focus on "value" instead of "cost" with respect to competition with Microsoft products. This is especially funny given the Redmond giant's recent "Apple Tax" message. "While I'm sure Ramji meant well, I'm equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM."
You can tell that most Microsoft apologists haven't had any sort of role in supporting or managing IT in business.
Been there. Done that. Have the faded t-shirts to prove it.
Although this isn't just about the fabled "business case".
This is also about the bargain conscious consumer that might
see various bits of commercial software and get a sudden case
of sticker shock or try something that claims to be free but
is really just an open door to malware and spam.
This is about taking Microsoft's own marketing approach and turning it on them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Open source software is often the better option both on cost and quality. As a consultant, I've found that when you stand up open source and proprietary solutions side by side for a customer, the open source solution wins most of the time. Now ISV's prefer the kickbacks, training and marketing support they get from proprietary vendors, so the customer has to ask for the open solution to be compared, but when they do the results are significant.
That may be true on the workstation, though rather than pay even $150 a pop for 23 licenses for Office Home/Educational or whatever its called, I threw in OpenOffice. My manager was a little nervous about this, and even tentatively put money in the budget for the licenses, but allowed me to "experiment". There have been a few problems, to be sure, but nothing so earth-shattering that, after a month, when we discussed it, it was agreed that OpenOffice was the obvious solution for these workstations. For what they're used for, if there wasn't XP licenses to be had, I'd probably just have installed Ubuntu.
But on the server end of things, it's quite different. I see no reason to pay thousands of dollars for the operating system and CALs for a fileserver, when Samba does the job quite well. In these harsher economic times, the value of a GUI drops pretty substantially when you're talking about licensing costs. What's more, because of Microsoft's insane licensing system, it's not just costs, but making sure you've got the right kind of license. Oops, that was an OEM license, so sorry, you can't put that copy of Server 2003 on a new server, you naught boy. Buy a new one! BWAHAHAHA.
We just went through a software-licensing-review-that-wasn't-labeled-as-a-review with Microsoft (likely because, once I was on board, I stopped paying their crappy, useless and expensive Software Assurance), and it was the first time my organization had gone line by line through our licenses.
Microsoft is absurdly expensive and restrictive, and believe me, so far as I'm concerned, OpenOffice is thin edge of the wedge. Next up is Exchange. Everything is going web-based anyways, and the only real "Exchange-y" feature we use is shared calendars. I can either use one of the open source groupware packages, or as some have suggested, just look at Google's calendaring.
I'm telling my rep flat out once the review is through that with the next round of purchases, the only thing likely Microsoft on the computers will be the operating system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Open source
Pros:
1. (Generally) free up front costs
2. A multititude of versions readily available, all the way back to early alpha, and will likely always be available, accompanied by the source code
3. (generally/often) cross-platform support
4. A huge support base made up of both paid professional support and "community" support
5. If you have a nagging "must fix" bug that affects you and only you, you have the option of fixing it or hiring someone to fix it for you
6. 0% risk of violating "per-seat" licensing
7. Development might be in someone's bedroom, or backed by a big company. YMMV, batteries not included. This could be a "con" if it's the former.
Cons
1. No warranty
2. Programs are often buggy or incomplete
3. Some projects are run by arrogant BOFH/RTFM types.
4. May require administrator training, in the form of self-study or tutorial videos on youtube, or time spent on messageboards.
Proprietary/Closed Source
Pros:
1. Shrink wrapped package and professionally-replicated DVD (oooh, SHINY!)
2. Development backed by a professional company
3. Program is usually relatively complete and bug free
4. Training i$ generally available for a co$t - where your sysadmin will receive a year's worth of information in 3-5 days and will remember precisely none of it, so he'll be asking you for funding for books, time for self-study and will be spending time on messageboards and/or watching tutorials on youtube
Cons
1. High up-front costs
2. High risk of copyright/license violations if you install more seats than "allowed" by your "license"
3. Support is generally expensive
4. Only the latest version is commercially available
5. If you have a bug you and only you encounter, you're SOL. It ain't gonna be fixed. They have your money already, so why should they care?
6. You are tied to the one and only one platform the software runs on
7. Support is paid support only, and in many cases, if you need support on an older version, they will require you to upgrade prior to providing support. Some community support may be available.
6. All warranties are expressly waived/disclaimed.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You can tell most Open Source advocates have never had to make costing decisions in large businesses.
Businesses are a lot more interested in the total value of something than its price tag.
Linux might be "free" but if you include the support contract, [re-]training, only then do you start to get close to its real cost in a business.
To get ever closer you have to look at how efficient it is for people to get their work done on that platform when compared to the competition.
I personally find getting almost anything done on Linux much more time consuming than either OS X or Windows...
1. We have anecdotal remarks, at the very least, that have found retraining costs can be surprisingly low. In any event, those costs are non-recurring, as opposed to keeping up with Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
2. On support costs between Linux and Windows, I think there is sufficient evidence available to show that the cost difference is either a wash or favourable towards Linux. Microsoft-sponsored studies claiming otherwise have been largely discredited.
3. Efficiency. True. No tool drives in a nail as efficiently as a hammer. In some cases, proprietary applications either outclass or have no Open Source competitor. However, the less specialized the task, the more likely that a Free/Open Source solution is "good enough", or even the better choice. Cases in point: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Apache, Asterisk, the Linux kernel, various GNU utilities. And one more thing, just because you *can* have lots of eye candy doesn't mean that you should.
4. Another consideration that affects how products work and attitudes of business is that many proprietary products are built assuming that the user is a thief and should not use the product. As a result, you pay Microsoft for software that can decide to downgrade your multimedia playback, for example.
Further on this point, the culture of user as probable thief spawns the BSA. As long as you use software by BSA members you risk a costly license "audit", whether your licenses are 100% compliant or not. Productivity loss during these audits has a real bottom-line cost to a business.
I think you're mostly right but it's clear you're not using AD beyond an authentication system for your workstations. Start putting group policies to use and you'll quickly see that Linux/Samba can't compete.
I don't know about you, but when someone asks for a change to one of my apps and I tell them "It's open source, make the change yourself," what I'm really saying is "**** off."
If you're business this is only possible:
- Assuming you have the budget for a development team.
- And the time to become familiar with the code base before the feature is needed.
- And a repository maintainer who is willing to accept your changes, or an even bigger team and budget to track security and bug fixes from the original developer and incorporate them into your modified code base.
- And a silver tongue, so you can convince your investors that it's totally worthwhile to spend their money improving a product that anybody can use for free with absolutely no way to profit directly from the improvements you made to the software.
Or if you're a home user, in which case you probably don't know C, and if you do you're probably too tired from writing C all day to fix someone's code for them.
The ability to make contributions is far from the main benefit of open source software. The main benefit is the fact that someone can't shut it down for selfish reasons. The code is essentially in the public domain. Apache or MySQL will never enter a "vault" like The Lion King or Sleeping Beauty; the Linux kernel will never have its "support period" expire. The real benefit is social, rather than technological.