How To Save $1 Trillion a Year With Open Source

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Cygnus founder Michael Tiemann estimates IT customers globally could save a trillion a year with open source or free source software." Not that a guy with a title like "VP of Open Source Affairs" at Red Hat would have a reason to be biased, but it's an interesting little read about a guy who's been doing this longer than you. Well, most of you anyway.

Comments

And you can save even more

[ClosedSource]

If you don't get it from Red Hat.

Uhh, Who's Gonna Pay?!?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Uhh, who's gonna pay to hire a trillion dollars' worth of architects, developers, testers, trainers, managers, distributors, support personnel, human resource departments, etc etc etc?

Or is all that functionality supposed to spring from the ether in a perfect steady-state universe of human perfection & utopia?

Re:Uhh, Who's Gonna Pay?!?

[sakdoctor]

Mark Shuttleworth?

Re:Uhh, Who's Gonna Pay?!?

[dwandy]

hey, I'm just prepping up a response and need to clarify if you were going for strawman or false dichotomy ?

Re:Uhh, Who's Gonna Pay?!?

[Runaway1956]

Ho-hum. The solution to your nearly non-problem is to require high school and college "computer science" classes to teach - wait for it - here it comes - COMPUTER SCIENCE!!!

FFS, I'm quite sick of little morons telling me what they've learned in "computer science" classes. It is not science, period. They learn Microsoft-centric keyboard shortcuts, and they are fucking SCIENTISTS???

The brainwashing has simply gone to far. And, the brainwashed haven't a clue that they are victims.

If your little dweeb graduates from any "computer science" class, and he is *nix illiterate, then he has been cheated of an education.

Re:or how to...

[lordofthechia]

"Suddenly pulling a trillion dollars out of the economy would have a pretty severe effect."

Since companies would take the Trillion dollars they save and throw them into a furnace to heat their buildings...

Re:or how to...

[MickyTheIdiot]

You're forgetting that the savings would be immediately put back into executive salaries.

Curious about the F/OSS devs thoughts.

[NoYob]

When you guys see these kinds of articles, the ones that say "save BIG money with F/OSS","Get anything you need in software for FREE with F/OSS", etc... and there you are: designing, researching, cranking out code, putting it out there, and for the exception of a very very small minority of you, barely getting enough money to pay for the bandwidth for your server(s) - if that.

I'd be pretty pissed to see folks in big offices making real nice livings off of software that I designed and developed and tested.

I guess that's why I'm not a F/OSS developer.

It's true

[goombah99]

I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!

I'm sure I'll get modded troll or something but I'm being serious. Some software is really expensive like matlab. But it always works. But a couple times a year I have to swicth from Fink to macports or vica versa because one or the other won't build the dependencies I need for matplot lib or octave. that costs me a lot of money in time.

Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value. But I still use it a lot none the less. it may not be cheap but sometimes it is better or has features you can't replicate easily in a single computing environment outside open source.

  The biggest advantage and problem with open source is portability. I use open source so that I gan give my code written on top of it to someone else. I can't do that if I write in matlab and use exotic toolkits. But on the flip side it's also why code written in open source rather than a homogenous environment is so fragile and may not work in a few years (because say some critical library is gone). (Take for example the disappearance of whythelucky stiff and thus the demise of all SYCK based YAML bindings.)

SO it's true that you'd save a bundle on open source. You'd wish you could pay to have it maintained. You will pay with your own time instead.

Re:It's true

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!

What open source software can't you find support for? Have you tried IBM, Redhat, and Canonical? I usually attribute support as a win for OSS, since you can take bids from multiple companies for your support needs. Obviously it only scales well on the top end, but a lot of larger companies hire an engineer to support a package internally as well as do development on that package to better meet the company's needs. I tell you, support is never better when one of the core developers for a project is on the payroll and works on that software 24-7.

Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value.

This is often quite true for individuals using packages that are not very widely in use. But that's not what this article was all about. He's talking about big businesses who spend huge amounts of money on software licensing for small returns. By the numbers, those companies could work together to fund the creation of OSS tools for a small fraction of the cost. We're not talking about you donating $5 bucks to use the GIMP and then supporting it yourself. We're talking about a couple hundred companies each paying a coder to work on developing it and saving all the photoshop license fees which currently cost them 25 times as much. Mind you, that's how the numbers he put together represent it for the low hanging fruit programs in use right now in the industry. It probably would be a lesser benefit going forward. For those companies, support becomes a whole lot better than it is now. The internal employee or directly paid contractor you have developing the GIMP is going to be a lot better in general than going through the hell that is trying to get an answer and solution from Adobe. For individuals, most of the problems they have are smoothed out by the big players and they get a free ride, but for support, well then they have to go with a contracting company that supports that package. But at least as an individual you can still shop around and pick your support company and I bet it is cheaper than paying Adobe licensing and support. Try telling Adobe you don't like their support so you're going to somewhere else that supports Photoshop if they don't improve responsiveness.

The real problem with all this is showing businesses how much the status quo is costing them and convincing them of the real savings they can get, and convincing enough of them to make those savings a reality. For this, third party companies can be a support barrier which is why organizational groups are probably more efficient. Then you still have to overcome the momentum of business culture. You might, possibly get a raise or a promotion if you save your company money by switching to an OSS project, but it is risky. It's a lot safer to let a commercial vendor take you on a few junkets, buy you some nice meals and expensive booze, take in a show, and sign off on a purchase order and don't rock the boat.

On open source

[Anonymous Coward]

While I can appreciate the appeal of open/free source for IT guys like myself, I can't help but think that some of us push this ideal a bit too far. I currently make a living writing software, as millions of others do, and I'd like to continue making a living for the foreseeable future. Developers need to eat, too. The normal reply to a comment like this is that customers will pay for the support, rather than the software itself. Okay with me, but then how are customers going to save one trillion dollars?

What other industry consists of so many people that argue that the products they develop (or services they provide, if you prefer) should be free? Do doctors or lawyers or engineers ever argue that their service should be free? Construction workers? Accountants? Anyone? We're shooting ourselves in the foot.

Re:On open source

[Maximum Prophet]

Do doctors or lawyers or engineers ever argue that their service should be free?

They should be paid for their services but the knowledge they use shouldn't be secret, especially in Medicine or Law. (Imagine you doctor wanted to give you a new drug, but wouldn't tell you the name or what was in it. or you were charged with violating a secret law)

From TFA

[mcgrew]

I got a chuckle from this gem:

The reality of the situation was that we couldn't find any names that were not previously registered. When I lamented this fact to a couple of my Net friends, one of them searched the dictionary for words that contained "GNU". And "Cygnus" seemed the one that was least obscene

Re:Dubious figures

[sjames]

Licensing without solid support buys you exactly nothing but the warm fuzzy feeling that when the BSA extortionists parachute in to your office and screw you over you were ethically in the right (even though you still had to fork over). Most licensed software is not a paid solution, it's just pieces you pay for and then you have to build the solution yourself.

That's why even 100% Windows shops still have to have an IT department and internal helpdesk.

Open Source is Customer Driven

[xzvf]

Most proprietary software companies spend little money on software development. The big players have margins close to 80% with a significant portion of their expenses in marketing and sales. Open Source companies are conduits of money and support to FOSS projects, making money off support and add on features. Generally low margins and small marketing and sales budgets (mostly word of mouth and try before you buy). Now, a massive movement to open source software will cause less total employment in the software industry, but the vast majority of those losses will be in non-technical fields. The economic issue is software is worth only ~25% of what people pay for it today. As performance gains from software purchases decline, the ROI is less compelling, and thus cost of software more critical. The critical shift now is convincing software consuming companies to shift from buying prepackaged software to contributing to the development of open source software. That could be co-ops of like minded software consumers, or some other innovative way.

Broken Window Fallacy

[Comboman]

Normally the windows in the Broken Window Fallacy are glass windows, not Windows OS.

Re:or how to...

[Rhaban]

And, the heat generated by the burnig of this trillion will accelerate global warming. Open source is bad for the planet.

Re:I love FOSS software, but that seems optimistic

[DragonWriter]

RedHat (current owner of Cygnus) has made a successful business providing high quality support for FOSS software, and I think that's great! However, the $1T estimate seems like it might just be a tad biased and perhaps ignoring some hidden costs, but I can't tell from the FA because it just references the figure without any details for the estimate.

It does provide a link to the paper that is the source of the estimate, but I suppose clicking the link would be too much to ask.

Re:How To Spend $1 Trillion A Year With Open Sourc

[danieltdp]

I don't want to fuel this old thread, but I upgraded my computer, which was a dual boot machine. Windows and Linux. I changed everything but the hardrive. After the upgrade, Linux just booted at the new hardware without a blink. But iIt took me three hours to set up windows properly.

I couldn't find the setup CD for my wall-in-one printer. It was impossible to print on Windows before I downloaded the 200mb(!) setup utility for windows. Guess wich OS just printed and scanned out of the box?

Oh, BTW, back when I installed Linux, I didn't used a single line on the shell. All the setup was done with some kind of GUI.

Welcome to the 21th century, where Linux evolved quite a bit while you were whining about it