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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"
{sarcasm}Yeah, having a company around that maintains and tests their products for compatibility is always better than having to do it yourself.{/sarcasm}
I do software development for a small company, we have a mix of tools in our environment.
Recently, my development workstation was upgraded from an old Windows XP desktop to a late model Windows 7 desktop.
Microsoft Visual Studio versions from a few years ago complain of compatibility issues and some need to be run in "XP compatibility" mode to function. "Would you like to check for compatibility updates online?" - Yes, I would. Fancy that, there aren't any.
ActiveState Perl and Python development environments and my HTML editor-of-choice VIM all function with no oddness at all.
THIS is why the first paragraph gets sarcasm tags.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
They assume that you've already invested in training employees to use MS products. On top of that MS saves a lot of money when interfacing with other systems and software as you pay them to do all that for you instead of you having to figure out how to do it on your own. All have to do is pay for all your licenses and support instead of having to install free software and hire people that have brains to set it up for you. Using their figures this save you tens of thousands of dollars.
And yet the same applies to many of Microsoft's products. I have yet to do a major upgrade in server software without some pretty big hangups and issues, uninstalling certain software just to make sure the upgrade succeeds. These problems do not go away just because you paid $1000 for the base software and $5000 in CALs.
The problem I so often have with these claims is they seem to mistake ease of installation with the actual maintenance of the software. You betcha that Exchange is a lot easier to install than any potential open source solution. But maintenance over time? I've had more issues over the last five years with my Exchange server than I've had with the Postfix server I run, which only really gets kicked when I need to do upgrades. The thing just keeps humming, chewing up significantly less resources, thus requiring less expensive hardware, licensing-wise being much much much much much much cheaper, so I'd say that while I had my upsets getting Postfix going, if we're going on man hours, it's been far cheaper than Exchange.
Another good example is VPN. I reviewed a number of VPN solutions; Cisco, 3Com, Microsoft, and had assorted issues from stability to cost, and at the end of the day picked OpenVPN, which is secure, rock solid, and all in all pretty damned easy to configure. The people who, I suspect, would have problems with something like OpenVPN would be admins who sit completely within the Microsoft ecology, taking the courses, getting their MCSEs (or whatever its called these days), and thus having avoided as much as possible notions like text editors and command line tools, having drunken the kool-aid on "ease of use" to the point where the ease makes them almost useless at working on other platforms.
I'm not saying that things don't have their places. I'm fully cognizant of the fact that there are are areas where Microsoft is superior, certainly other groupware solutions, both closed and open source, are not the equal of Exchange+Outlook, though to be honest that's more a user ease-of-use issue than an admins. I think one needs to be pragmatic, but saying "open source is inferior" is just plain inaccurate. It certainly is true in some cases, but not in all. The worst part of living in a Microsoft world to my mind is that they've produced a legion of intellectually crippled sysadmins, who view competing products like Unix with either derision or fear, often times not realizing how inferior Microsoft is in some areas. This is clearly Microsoft's intent, to control the kinds of admins that get into any shop.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
TFA is even worse than that with their usage of weasel-words.
Pay particular attention to the "not always" in that statement. If only ONE "open-source" app is more expensive than a SINGLE closed source app then their statement is true.
Useless, but true.
Certainly a user of Microsoft Office didn't have to change their mannerisms when they switched from Office 2003 to Office 2007's "ribbon".
Heh, hit a nerve there. My company is switching from 2003 to 2010 and we all sort of sit around Googling all day to unwind the ribbon. It's not that the ribbon is so bad, but the built-in help is horrendous. How hard would it have been to have a help section geared towards showing you how the old way translates into the new way? Maybe something as simple as a mock-up of the old interface, where when you select something it shows you how to do it the new way?
Or favorite Ribbon fuck-up so far: to copy-as-picture in Excel, you select the sub-menu on the PASTE button, then select "As Picture", and then "Copy". Yes, that's right... in their fancy new interface they make you Copy by clicking on Paste! I would PAY to talk to an engineer that had to sit through the conclusion of that meeting :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I've heard it said that Open Source is only free if your time has no value.
It has been quite painful to get Ubuntu working on my netbook. Same with kub and mint; they're just not playing nice at all.
Out of the box, the Fn keys don't work and jam the keyboard. That's a relatively easy fix though, just editing a few files. The problem is that the OS doesn't send the release signal to the Fn key combo for some reason.
I have to use the .27 kernel if I want the wireless to work because some idiot thought that putting random values in the driver would work. I don't know, did that get tested? I can't see how. I can also rmmod and modprobe the ath9k driver and that fixes it.
Screen brightness control doesn't work. At least not with the .27 kernel, so I have to choose between being not able to use my computer because I can't see the screen or being not able to use the computer because I can't connect to the Internet.
The kernel doesn't recognize the new line of synaptics touchpads, and because one guy said there was a workaround (which doesn't work) there's no more work being done on the bug. It's a multi-touch side and bottom scrolling pad that identifies as a generic PS/2 mouse.
All of those things worked flawlessly on Win7.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
If you assume that you will spend more time getting OSS to work than POS, you might have a point.
Last time I tried to use Windows 7, I ended up with my 6 month old laptop tied up for hours doing "updates" that Linux or MacOS could have done in the background while I was doing other stuff.
My time is worth quite a bit, I refuse to pay companies to waste it.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.