Open Source More Expensive Says MS Report

doperative writes "Much conventional wisdom about programs written by volunteers is wrong. The authors took money for research from Microsoft, long the archenemy of the open-source movement — although they assure readers that the funds came with no strings attached. Free programs are not always cheaper. To be sure, the upfront cost of proprietary software is higher (although open-source programs are not always free). But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software"

Comments

Out of context

[Verdatum]

Am I the only one who see's this summary as picking the most incendiary portion of this article, and elevating it by taking out of context? The latter part of the article discusses choosing carefully, and promoting open standards to allow for more compatibility in open source software. Plus, this is a partial book review...what's up with that?

Re:Turning the table

[serviscope_minor]

Even that I am a programmer, I do not know how to fix it.

I too spend much of my working life programming. It's really not that hard.

1) Download the source.

2) Compile with all debugging symbols and perhaps -fmudflaps

3) Run the program (with valgrind or mudflaps)

4) Go to the line number of the first error, and have a look.

Most of the crash causing errors are simple things, like uninitialised pointers. Some require some digging. But I have successfully fixed bugs and added fearures to a few projects and it's often not as hard as you might expect.

The modern tools available on any decent linux system are feally fantastic. Evil, nasty bugs like subtle memory corruption can be caught much, much more easily than before and therefore require much less in-depth knowledge to fix.

But for some reason, a number of high profile distributions don't have a package with the mudflaps helper files, even though they enable it in gcc.

Re:My psychic prediction

[Ciggy]

What the research actually concluded was that the total cost of ownership can vary...training and support.

My one objection to most similar studies...is that switching from, say, MS Office 2003 to 2007...is considered to take little or no training...but switching to OpenOffice is projected to incur significant retraining expenses...

A few years ago a large UK retailer upgraded their staff laptops to Windows XP. All the [laptop] staff went on "XP training". Changing to "what you know" doesn't necessarily mean no training costs; proves your point, and that was in use of WIndows itself - which I seem to always hear as touted as not needing any training when "upgrading".