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

My psychic prediction

[elrous0]

I predict that this report will be met with much skepticism on /.

I also predict that I will make the argument that open source really *isn't* always all it's cracked up to be--and be shouted down by many, many voices

Re:My psychic prediction

[epiphani]

The argument is valid for certain cases. That said, the large majority of work I do has the same operational cost regardless of where we get the software. We still have to learn how it works, and integrate it into the system we're deploying.

A proprietary solution has merit if you don't have technical people and you depend on an external company. Take whatever solution they provide.

But out in the technology world proper, these things cost more upfront and probably take just as much work to integrate.

Re:My psychic prediction

[betterunixthanunix]

I will predict that:

1. Time spent learning how to use a different software system is a one-time cost
2. Open source software can be good or bad, just like software developed any other way
3. People who "don't get it" will be screaming about how great or terrible open source software is
4. People who follow the free software philosophy (like me) will smugly laugh at it all

Re:My psychic prediction

[MightyMartian]

Is there some particular reason you trust any statement on open source that comes from Microsoft, considering it's long track record of animosity?

At any rate, it depends on the software in question, much like proprietary closed source software. In some cases with some products one side has an advantage, and in some cases the other side has an advantage. Working in a world where I deal with both closed source software (Windows+AD+Exchange) and open source software (LAMP servers, Samba) I have to say that there are aspects of both that cause me grief, and aspects of both that work well. At the end of the day, my level of competence is sufficient that issues of long-term licensing costs, particularly as far as upgrading to new versions goes, that in some areas open source clearly wins the day. However, in other regards, Active Directory, particular as far as Group Policies goes, does indeed have a clear management advantage that cannot easily be duplicated in open source. So I'd say, at the end of the day, large generalized statements like "open source more expensive" is clearly an invalid statement.

And I'll return to the fact that Microsoft paid for this. Microsoft's long history in regards to open source means I pretty much ignore anything Redmond or its mouthpieces have to say on it. I wouldn't ask a Microsoft rep or anyone given a nickel by Microsoft about the costs of software.

Re:My psychic prediction

[i.r.id10t]

Even if monetary costs are equal, F/OSS stuff may be a better business decision for the community.

Example - A college can pay $75k per year for an Angel or Blackboard license, and host it locally (or contract the hosting out to Angel/BB). Or, they can adopt a F/OSS solution like Sakai, and instead of paying $75k/yr to a corporation outside of the area they can pay $75k/yr for a programmer to maintain and enhance Sakai for their needs. Dollar costs are the same. However, by hiring the programmer, that improves the local economy and keeps that money local, as opposed to sending it out of area/out of state/etc.

Re:My psychic prediction

[Locke2005]

They are correct in that retraining people to use new software IS generally an order of magnitude more expensive than the purchase/license price of the software. What they fail to take into consideration is that Microsoft drastically revamps their user interfaces every couple years so that the training costs involved with upgrading to the latest Microsoft release is comparable to the costs involved with retraining users to use an open source alternative. Continuing to use what you've always used is always going to be cheaper!
Let's look at this from a different viewpoint: If you are already using open source and have already put in place all the systems, scripts, custom software, etc. to run your business, how much more expensive would it be to switch to a Microsoft solution with all the same functionality?

Re:My psychic prediction

[hairyfeet]

Well then how about personal anecdotes? I run a little retail PC shop and several times in the past (last one was Ubuntu 9.04) I have tried to offer Linux PCs alongside the Windows ones and every single time they cost me more than the price of a Windows license. How is that possible? Simple the increased support costs combined with the higher returns (which since the law says you can't sell a return as new you end up losing $$ on) made Linux a losing proposition.

You see with Linux I ran into "update foo broke my driver" more damned times than I can count, and thanks to home users refusing to buy long term support contracts (see hatred of Best Buy for an example) that means I had to either fix it on my own dime or burn the customer and ruin my rep. Even offering 90 day free support was a nightmare because about half would come back with something screwed. With a good AV and low permissions accounts set up for the kiddies the Windows machines just don't come back until/unless they want a hardware upgrade or REALLY fuck things up. Also thanks to lack of a hardware ABI (which for all the "poo poo Linux doesn't need it" bullshit I hear here and elsewhere I have yet to hear a SINGLE solution that would work without one) which makes shopping for Linux compatible devices a wonderful game of "paperweight roulette" where the customers have NO CLUE as to what works and what don't you end up with customers seriously burnt on things like AIO printers. And before anyone says "bundle" unless your last name is Dell you WILL lose money of you attempt to bundle, as you can't compete with Walmart on price.

So you see with it only taking two hours at my current price per hour to equal a copy of Windows home and the "update broke driver" problem alone averaging FOUR hours of trawling forums and jumping through hoops looking for "fixes" in the end it was simply cheaper to not offer Linux. I really wanted Linux to succeed, as lack of having to buy Windows licenses would have allowed me to have lower prices than the competition, but as myself and so many retailers found out FOSS OSes sound like a good idea but in practice are nothing but a giant headache. And finally before someone trots out Dell, Dell hides Linux at the back, Dell has enough geeks shopping online they can throw a few machines to Linux (geeks don't shop B&M) and finally if you have ever handled one you'll notice there is something...funny...about them. Specifically Dell disables the Canonical repos and run their own because otherwise thanks to Canonical's piss poor QA running straight Ubuntu BREAKS DRIVERS. Now since most places like mine can't afford to set up our own repos and pay someone to recompile and maintain for the hardware we sell that is just another sunk cost that makes Windows cheaper than Linux.

Maybe in 5 or 10 years we'll have someone come along and do for FOSS OSes what Jobs did for BSD but I doubt it. The whole thing that entices retailers is the "free as in beer" part which means any corp trying to offer desktops is gonna quickly find it a money pit, which is why I believe Canonical is pushing more and more towards servers and mobile devices and will probably be out of the desktop game in 5 years, just as those like Red Hat did before them. The margins on most PCs and software is razor thin as it is, it really don't take much to turn an operation from the black into the red and if I would have continued offering FOSS OSes that is where I would have been. I still give them FOSS software on Windows such as Open Office and Firefox as a courtesy, but I certainly won't be offering FOSS OSes anytime soon. It is just too expensive to support.

Yeah...suuuurrrrre....

[Pojut]

The authors took money for research from Microsoft, long the arch- enemy of the open-source movement-- although they assure readers that the funds came with no strings attached

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! THERE IS ONLY ZUUL!

making them work with other software

[He who knows]

Maybe that is because software by certain companies deliberately ignore standards and try to maki it as hard as possible to work with other peoples software.

TCO Fud

[aBaldrich]

Come on, Bill gates more popular than the pope, Total Cost of ownership bullshit... I agree this is news for nerds but, is it stuff that matters? No.

disingenuous?

[caffeinemessiah]

So using an MS or MS-compatible (thanks to years of aggressive marketing by MS) stack is less expensive in terms of training time than inserting a piece of open-source software into that stack and trying to make everything work? Interesting...next up, replacing my car's wheels with motorcycle wheels makes it take longer for me to get to places. Perhaps I should just get the entire motorcycle instead?

Re:"Took money from Microsoft" = FAIL

[Svartalf]

Indeed.

I love the supposition that closed source stuff is all "easier to learn" which isn't the case any more than open source stuff is all the opposite.

Learning to use them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. My wife's office recently upgraded from Office 2003 to a more recent release.

How do I know?

The first day it was on her computer, the conversation at home went something like this:

Her: "What the FUCK! The fuckheads in IT gave some new bullshit version of Word on my fucking computer and it is completely fucking different. I spent like a fucking hour trying to find how to do "X". Where the fuck are my fucking toolbars? There is this new bullshit toolbar that is completely useless."
Me: "It's called the 'ribbon'."
Her: "Whatever the fuck it is called it is fucking stupid. And what the fuck is this 'docx' bullshit?" ... continue 15 minute profanity laced tirade...

Companies spend more money on learning how to use open source? The three-year quota on profanity that my wife used up in a day says otherwise.

Re:Out of context

[Pharmboy]

To be perfectly fair, almost no one is going to read the article for a topic like this, and the editors know it. They can just pick any study that MS had any financial input in, and that favors them (in any degree), publish a link, make sweeping claims, so they are simply feeding the fanboys and trolls. These types of articles are never insightful anyway, and most users here have better information about this topic than the authors of the articles. No one on the planet has ever switched platforms because of the contents of these types of articles.

Re:Turning the table

[Z00L00K]

And knowing open source also means that you know how to fix it when it breaks.

If Microsoft software breaks all you can do is pray and hope that it will be resolved in a future bug fix. A call to M$ support renders you a long wait on the phone where you can't do anything and finally a question if you have tried to reinstall, and if you have done it and have any kind of custom software in the vicinity then they can't help you.

So either you are putting in some hours to get in control or you give up control to Microsoft.

Re:Turning the table

[787style]

Assuming that you do have the staff and infrastructure in place to fix, test and compile the code, you and your organization are subsequently forked from the official release. A scenario which is can be just as bad than waiting for MS to fix.

Once you code a solution to your defect, the proposed fix still has to be submitted, and may not be accepted by the developers. This could continue on for months, or even years of never implementing your fix. The onus is on your org, then, to repeatedly merge in changes, recompile, retest, and re-release your forked code base.

Again, this is all on the assumption you have the resources/knowledge to actually code a solution. Which many organziations do not.

Re:Turning the table

[DerPflanz]

And knowing open source also means that you know how to fix it when it breaks.

First off, I am a professional software developer/entrepreneur and a big supporter of open source software and freedom. But the argument you bring here is the worst argument *for* open source. I work with Evolution in my professional life and it crashes on me quite often. (Not often enough to replace it, so I will continue using it.) Even that I am a programmer, I do not know how to fix it. Getting to know a moderately complex piece of software takes a lot of time and effort (and thus money), that I rather spend on working for my customers. They actually pay me for my work.

Otoh, I also purchased Novell Groupwise, combined with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (I thought it was a viable commercial Linux solution), and it is a lot worse than any do-it-yourself packages, so I guess closed source sucks too. Just in a different way.

I'll say it again

[Greyfox]

Just because you get paid to write code doesn't mean you crap daisies and unicorns. I've been in the industry for 21 years now, I've seen the code that professional programmers write. In general, open source is at least as good and quite often better than what the professionals are writing. That's not to say OSS doesn't have its problems, but they are problems that are fixable if you're so inclined. Retaining a programmer to fix them might be expensive, but is it more expensive than modifying your business processes and just living with something a closed source company is unwilling to change? I don't think Microsoft is qualified to make that judgment.

And this is better than "no means to proceed" how?

[IBitOBear]

Yes, having found a problem, and then found a solution you have to maintain or share that solution. The horrors!

I non-open code you have the choice of paying potentially millions of dollars to get a fix from the vendor, and having paid that sum, you receive one fix once, with no promise that your fix will become part of the product line's subsequent release. So when that subsequent release is made and it _doesn't_ have your fix, you get to pay all that money _again_ even though they already know the problem and solution. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

With open source you don't have to "fork" just to retain the patch and reapply it, usually with virtually no effort since, if someone is working on the code you patched, they likely used your fix, something like your fix, or didn't touch the lines you patched in any meaningful way.

I have had a kernel patch to "smarten up" termios for years. I submitted it and it was rejected for reasons like "we are about to change that code anyway" and "someone might have written code that _uses_ the fact that you can end up blocking on a one-byte read, waiting for one byte to be received, despite the fact that there is more than one byte in the buffer".

With every subsequent release of the kernel I just apply the patch and move on. I didn't "fork the kernel" etc. Nothing ever so daunting.

It is an obvious truth that exploring an option and making use of an opportunity is _always_ more effort and "clear expense" then just throwing up ones hands and living with no choice in the matter.

The costs of surrender are always hidden, prorated, long term. [Ask the French, their defense against Germany was sabatoged, as it always was, by Belgium's habit of buckling like a belt when threatened no matter how much the promised to do their part as a key point in the defense of europe. Nobody blames Belgium for being the useless twits they always are, but to this day France takes a load of shit for their surrender once their entire north flank went for strudel.]

Agree with Microsoft? I suggest you read up on "Plays4Sure"... and every single "microsoft preferred partner" in history.