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Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS?
mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"
My problem has been convincing them that they con't just pass of the cost of Windows to the customer. They like the fact that they can hire 3-4 MCSEs for the cost of one good Unix admin, but they don't realize that the Unix admin can set things up so that maintenance is much easier.
Windows is ingrained in business culture here, for the most part.
I've used TWiki (OSS, all Perl IIRC and aimed at corporate usage) at one job and Confluence at another but not Plone. Confluence is good for non-technical people because it has a pretty good wysiwig editor, but its search was simply wretched. I think we had a lot of 'lost' knowledge in the Confluence DB because nobody knew it was there and the obvious searches didn't show it - I would come across nuggets now and then. If you have the discipline to build index pages, it's probably a good choice if you have a lot of non-engineer type people.
TWiki (and this was a number of years ago so it may have improved) was almost the reverse. Good search, good architecture for plugins, but no wysiwyg so non-technical contributors had trouble with it. They were writing a wysiwyg plugin so that may have now arrived. It was easy to maintain and of the two I would say I like it better.
Graham
I once asked Richard Stallman how to convince my school to go with FOSS instead of Windows, since most of our CS lab was on Windows.
His reply: "Defenestration! Throw Windows out of the computer, or throw the computer out the window!"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Might I suggest Liferay (http://www.liferay.com)? Open source, but also commercial, and more featureful than both Plone and Confluence.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS? If the open software isn't as good it just isn't as good; just because it's FOSS doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all to solve your problems. Compare features, stability, cost, and support; if your boss is actively against FOSS make a point to explain it's advantages (and disadvantages if you want to be fair) and leave the decision to him. After all, it's entirely possible that the closed, proprietary solution fits your situation better; basically, its dishonest to make your decision and then go digging specifically for evidence to support that decision.
I haven't used either system but the podcast FLOSS weekly recently did a whole episode about PLONE that may help you decide if it is right you.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
That would be a totally coherent or relevant comment in an alternate universe where the question had to do with a replacement for MS Word. Please tell us how you get to that universe, so we can loot their alternate technology to improve our own.
In short, "let's say an open office variant" is a pure non-sequitur, because "competition for MS Word" is a field where compatibility is widely imagined to be important. (Note: I've had a lot of trouble with compatibility between MS Word and MS Word -- in fact, more than I've had between MS Word and OpenOffice.) We're talking about a tool for internal use, at which point, all that matters is its compatibility with itself -- it's not something that other people send you stuff for. And, even if it were, the chances that the commercial one is an effective monopoly aren't high.
MS Word is really a very special case, and no example based on it is likely to be relevant to other cases.
FWIW, we use Foswiki at work these days, I think, and we're pretty happy with it. Search is sorta frustrating, though -- it really does need someone keeping it maintained.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Atlassian makes the source for all of their products available to anybody who buys a license. It doesn't cost anything extra, and even the $10 starter licenses come with full source.
Perhaps the question you should be asking is, cost aside, which would better suit your needs? Sure FOSS is great but if there is a better fit for your needs and someone else is going to foot the bill, who are you to say that management is looking in the wrong direction? I, for one, believe that there is a place for both commercial and FOSS in the business (and in the home for that matter). Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done. Ultimately the decision needs to suit the needs of the business and not the ideals of the employees.
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Plone is a CMS, Confluence is a wiki. Incedentally, both products are quite good. I used Confluence at a previous job and it is a very nice wiki. We used it because of it's tight integration with Jira, an issue tracking system by the same software vendor.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Also, strictly speaking, Confluence IS open source, it's just not FOSS. You get access to the source code with your license, and as long as you keep your license up to date, you can download the source for the latest version at any time. If at some point you decide not to pay for support, their license allows you to keep working with what you have, binary or source. I think Atlassian as a company have taken a very enlightened approach to this issue, and I have no qualms in paying for their excellent software. Most of the issues I would have with closed source proprietary solutions are not an issue. You are free to tinker, just not redistribute, and they give you the insurance policy, in source code, that you can keep going should there ever be an issue with them as a company.
Plone is only "free" in software. In my experience with open source CMSs -- Plone, Typo3, Drupal, Joomla -- you get best results by paying an expert to program and set it up initially to your specs. It looks better, runs smoother, etc.
I'm not that expert, by the way. I've just worked on projects that lacked an expert, and projects that had one, and the difference in result was night and day. The expertly-configured sites ran much better.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
No they don't. We use a proprietary, closed source "ticket management system" for lack of a better word. This thing is horrid; it has no recordkeeping, no search to speak of, no customization.... I could go on. We also have no direct access to the database; all we can get is a CD of what are essentially static pages of a particular issue.
It's also pretty close to being abandoned. No new licenses are sold and no new features are being added; the whole thing is in maintenance mode.
They jumped the subcription about 6 fold last year. I argued strenuously for something like RT, even worked out the cost of adding our needed features - 1/10 of the cost of the annual subscription of the proprietary product.
No dice. Not windows based, not supported by a major vendor, not approved by MS.
They're back to evaluating other, closed source, proprietary, locked in systems. So basically some people never learn.
I washed my hands of the whole deal when I was told "That's not how we do enterprise" as a response to my suggestion to use FOSS.
This gets much less attention than it deserves:
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/whos-using-free-software
Testimonies from Cern, NYSE, the EU, Wikipedia, and the US Department of Defense, plus another page of testimonies from individuals:
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/meet-the-free-software-community
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If you want to make a solid business case, you need to approach it objectively; what option will cost the least, in the short, medium and long term?
Maybe it's OSS, maybe it's not. But drop your bias right now before you research associated costs.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Depending on corporate culture(and the exact policies RE: demos of the proprietary vendor) cost can actually be a huge factor; but not for the obvious "cheap=better" reason.
In some institutional cultures there is a surprising power(assuming you don't step on the wrong toes) in Just Fucking Doing It. Obviously, unless you have really impressive guts and not too much sense, this doesn't mean putting a production server on an internet facing IP and hacking the company's DNS records to point to it; but showing up with a solid, functioning demo that everyone can gather around the projector and poke around at on their laptops can really sell something.
If a proprietary product isn't either available as a free demo version, and not through some subscription program you have to sign up for, or so expensive that the company will send a guy in a nice suit to do the demo, hand out some swag, and give everyone a really nice handshake, doing that with a proprietary product is hard and/or illegal.
Doing it with a FOSS(or freeware, admittedly) product is easy. You just throw something together in a VM and show it off.
That was my experience when I was trying to convince my employer to drop sharepoint for a wiki. They weren't turned off by the cost of sharepoint; but the fact that I was able to ask my boss for some time at one of our department meetings, get behind the projector and say "Hey, I threw this demo together in a weekend and put in some example content so you can get an idea of how we would use it. Easy web interface, versioning, strong ability to create links between otherwise disparate pieces of technical knowledge, check it out at $INTERNAL_IP..." Everyone pulled out their laptops, poked around a bit, there was some discussion, and the boss green-lighted it.
Had I given a speech about how we had to, like, fight the proprietary power, man, it would have gone nowhere. However, being able to just sit down, turn on, and show off, all without any serious backing or funding(because everything was free) allowed me to go from "nothing" to "green light-full production status". "Free" never entered into it in a hard financial way. However, had it not been free, I couldn't have done what I did. Now, Anecdote doesn't equal data, much less proof; but it is something to consider.
First, simply walking down a checklist tells you nothing about how WELL those features are implemented.
Second, it appears that the Confluence entry is only about 58% complete. Thus, many of the comparisons made assume that Plone wins by default.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Unfortunately, I can't help you there. We were rather underutilizing the sharepoint setup, as little more than a glorified shared drive, only with more annoying complexity.
That, combined with the fact that virtually all the document production of the department is lightly formatted near-plaintext technical documentation, with the occasional screenshot and hyperlink, also had a lot to do with making the pitch successful. Had we been 100% behind sharepoint at the time, it almost certainly would have failed. However, since we weren't putting too much effort into gettting the most out of any document management setup, I was able to sell the wiki(ended up being dokuwiki, I think) as a great "80/20 solution". Sharepoint would give you more features(and I freely acknowledged that); but required a greater level of work and buy-in than the department was giving it. The wiki would give us 80ish% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
So far, that has been largely true. For a department of our size, the wiki lives on a tiny little VM, not consuming any CALs or licences or anything, gives us versioning and attribution for the mostly plaintext documentation/links/screenshots stuff, and supports links to an SMB share where we can store installers and documents that absolutely have to be in Word, and so forth.
Not quite as seamless; but it was fast, easy, and cheap. The fact that I could go from "nothing" to "full demo" in a little bit of spare time just helped drive that home.
Tits.
Seriously. Thats all you need to do. Hire a stripper and write Plone across her tits. Show it to your boss.
You don't understand business if you try logic and reason.
Point out that the vendor can and will kill off a product and support for that product OR charge like a wounded bull for specialised support OR that the company may fold, and that they are not legally obligated to continue a product that the company may become dependent up. Then point out that in the case of open source, it is possible to hire someone to develop the product further and support it, and that even if there is a cost penalty it won't be extortionate.
All other arguments are a waste of time for mission critical applications. Open source may or may not be cheaper.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer