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Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive

Posted by samzenpus on from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.

schliz writes "The Australian Government Information Management Office says that a platform change to open source could cost more than it saves. It was pushed to investigate open source software to reduce its AUD$500m budget at a Senate meeting yesterday. From the article: 'Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they apply a software,' spokesperson Graham Fry said. 'If the cost of assessing it [open source] was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice.'"

1 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Think long term by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Sorry, it's not absolute. A lot of the time OSS saves you nothing and will more often cost you more. My organization has years of experience with this and we've where it makes sense, and more often where OSS solution don't. For small businesses OSS can make a lot of sense financially (assuming you have a plentiful talent pool to hire support staff). Once you are in the big leagues it's totally different.

    The cost of software is trivial for medium to large businesses, so not paying software is not enticing; it's all about support and having somebody to sue. Additionally, OSS software support is very hit and miss, hackneyed... And frankly there are only a few OSS software vendors that can provide quality enterprise level support. I'm not even going into the scalabiilty limitations of OSS replacement solutions in a lot of cases. There are cases where OSS choices are the better choice financially, because you know enough about the setup to forego paying for support (e.g.: Apache or a generic DNS servers are known quantities).

    It's not that OSS is flawed, not at all. It's that age old problem of there is no accountability/responsibility for quality and support the majority of OSS software that is in existance. And frankly, the code quality for most OSS solutions (even Apache) doesn't compare with good commercial code. These problems and facts I'm stating are not new, are well known, and well established by even some very well known staunch OSS icons. Sorry.