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

Re:My psychic prediction

[hairyfeet]

I don't have to Google squat, after dealing with those headaches I'll be HAPPY to tell you. By the way you know the difference between a FOSSie and a FOSS user? A FOSSie is just like you and think anyone whose experience isn't sunshine and roses MUST be a shill or lying, because it is NEVER the fault of FOSS, oh no. Maybe you should tell that to all the people on Ubuntu forums right now with fucked drivers. Go ahead, look for yourself, page after page after page? Are they all lying too?

The big ones I ran into were, in no particular order: AMD chipsets/GPUs, Broadcom wireless, pretty much all the AIO printers offered at Walmart, Realtek HD chips, Via sound and network was hit or miss and seriously flaky, USB wireless and capture cards (a very popular add on here) there were a couple of others that gave me a few head thumpers, such as the lovely "can't decide whether to use onboard or discrete" bug but the chips listed above were the main PITAs.

And of course being an amazing psychic I know what your answer will be "You shouldn't have bought foo, the support is terrible! You should have bought bar!" but wasting my time looking through outdated hardware lists showed me that route is pretty pointless, and trying to replace every onboard chip with a discrete because Linux wouldn't have played nice would have again made Linux more expensive than Windows and by a pretty large margin I might add.

Linux for web servers is just dandy, Linux for embedded rocks your socks, Linux for desktops frankly doesn't even make it to the level of hobbyist OS IMHO and if you thought of it objectively instead of as a fanatic you'd know why: Because the corporations paying the big bucks for developers and maintainers for Linux don't give a shit about the desktop and so simply aren't gonna waste money on an area they couldn't care less about. That is why workstation support is decent and nearly every server out there has drivers OOTB but good fucking luck on consumer level stuff, because it is frankly shit city if the hardware isn't at least 2 years old. And since I deal with a good 75% consumer level and all new that makes Linux simply unusable. As I said consumers don't pay for expensive support contracts, so when it leaves my shop it better run for at LEAST 6 months problem free. With Windows I have several machines still running virus free in SMBs and homes after more than 5 years. In Linux with the constant updates breaking shit and weird drivers that work in X but fail in X+1 I just don't get that, sorry if that makes you unhappy, but that is what I experienced.