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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"
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
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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!
Living With a Nerd
I'm shocked! SHOCKED I SAY!
Right out of the gate.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
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.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
One of the reasons to get something with source code is that you need to customize it, because there is no off-the-shelf solution that does what you want. So instead of writing your own completely from scratch, you start with something at least reasonably close to what you want.
If you're using commercial software, it's because the commercial software did what you needed out of the box; if it didn't, you couldn't use it, because you can't make it do what you need it to do.
This is not surprising.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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?
Regardless of what he said. It is reasonable to assume that not all open source software are cheaper to run on the long run than their propriety equivalent. Ok, it might be cheaper on the long run to have linux versus windows, but(and just as an example, I am not saying it is) it might be cheaper to run office then open office. Just because I am evil, that doesn't invalidate my point , nor does it invalidate the data I have.
{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"
It's a good thing Microsoft places so much value on keeping the user experience the same across its various upgrades. Certainly a user of Microsoft Office didn't have to change their mannerisms when they switched from Office 2003 to Office 2007's "ribbon".
Certainly, all of my XP habits still apply to Windows 7's Aero. None of the functionality has moved around in the slightest.
And it's also a good thing Microsoft places a lot of value on interoperability. Certainly they have never seen an incompatibility that prevents Active Directory from working with other LDAP solutions. Or certain Windows code that creates spurious error messages when run on a competitor's version of DOS.
I give Microsoft all the credit it deserves for making reports like the possible.
--Joe
He says although his phone cost more than all those millions of Android ones, he's happy because he knows he has all the smarts and know-how of the best brains in the business behind his closed source OS, so has great support if anything goes wrong. Then he got his phone bill
Chickens taste better, say panel of cows.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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." ... continue 15 minute profanity laced tirade...
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?"
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.
The closest the article comes to saying this is "that free programs are not always cheaper". Headlining it as "Open Source More Expensive Says MS" is pretty disingenuous.
One of my favorite quotes of all time summed it up nicely. I forgot it exactly and I can't find it now, but it was something along the lines of
If they're going to put scare quotes around "free" they should do the same for commercial software because you don't really "own" it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
what a surprise.
Experiments and other stuff
The real trick to software uptake is usability. If you can take a complex solution and make it a breeze to use you've got a win. The problem with a lot of the free software out there is the focus on "making it work" instead of "making it pretty"
If you have an application that takes a bit of configuration to get it right, grandma would rather press some buttons and fill in some text areas. Hiding options in config files or cli switches is not the way to go. Unfortunately, theres plenty of software out there that chooses this route
in the past, when you couldnt find people to work with those software. we are not in the past. o/s that has gone mainstream enough has huge base of professionals available to hire or to contract. from linux to php. check the listings here out, for example www.elance.com . it is a good picture of i.t. landscape.
it doesnt matter open source or not. software which has not gained enough userbase, will not have enough professionals working on it. this goes on from operating systems to platforms like python and php or android. this is the nature of software and hardware. hell, actually its the nature of all things technological. produce millions of volkswagen beetles, and in 10 years you will have people who can service them all over the world.
'strings unattached' sounds more bullshit when these are considered.
Read radical news here
The benefits of vendor lock-in and proprietary file formats cost me way less money every year. The ROI of adopting the latest and greatest version of my proprietary software gets faster every year too. I really like the way my choices become more and more limited, and dictated by a governing body focused mainly on capital and politics. Not to mention that secure feeling of having a digital noose around my neck, dragging my head towards a grinding wheel with each revision of my server software. The benefits of meeting new and exciting people is a big plus as well. Just last month, I upgraded my proprietary mail server software only to find out there was some sort of misconfiguration error on my part which was causing my users to be unable to log in. I was on the phone with so many people from so many third world countries that I actually managed to learn a new language! We didn't fix the mail server issue, but for now, we use a Swingline stapler balanced on the spacebar to automatically close the error message dialogs to keep them from taking all available memory over night. What a creative solution! And it only took two weeks to figure it out! The vendor of our proprietary system promised us they will have it fixed in the next release. You can't get that kind of commitment with open source.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The increase in cost is in the switching. Well that's nothing new. That's pretty much a one-time cost. After that training for new versions is going to be much cheaper, and with closed software you would also have to pay that. Difference is that once you have switched, you software costs drop to nothing, and you can choose whoever you want to do support/training as there is no lock in. That switching cost is something MS and others rely on, but it's a false economy to keep avoiding it.
The researchers will next compare Windows based and Open Source based mobile phones. The title of the article will be, "These are not the Droids you're looking for."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is merely one writer's take on the book, 'The Comingled Code'. I would recommend instead to read the book before we get all uppity. It's true they received funding from Microsoft, but I would like to know who else funded them. From the book's homepage, it seems quite a few people are happy with their work, including this guy from Google:
“Unlike much of the writing on open source versus proprietary software, this book offers factual evidence, careful analysis, and evenhanded discussion, while avoiding unsupported opinions, hyperbole, and exaggeration. Everyone who is concerned with open source will want to read this book.”
—Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google
The writer at the Economist seems to have a bone to pick with Open Source, regardless:
"Yet the finding that open-source advocates will like least is that 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."
Anyone experienced an implementation of new software, Open Source or not, where there was no cost associated with the learning curve and the integration?
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
These reports have been coming out since RMS has had a beard.
I agree with one of the authors points. We just ran into a problem where OpenOffice would not properly read a docx file. The problem of course is the maker of the priority (guess who) software constantly changing file formats just enough to break everyone's conversion code. The old MS moto - "It's not done until Lotus won't run."
Conservative, mod down for violating
I say hogwash. Admining *nix systems is much easier than Windows boxes. I'm constantly having to do simple things like "do $foo on boxes 1-24,35-90,102-150" on both windows and *nix boxes, and unless sshd and bash are installed on the windows boxes, it quickly devolves into stupid DOS tricks to properly run things like wmic via psexec (which doesn't work natively).
From the article : "Yet the finding that open-source advocates will like least is that 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.."
It may be Microsoft inspired, but this statement is hardly as inflammatory as the headline makes it out to be. In fact the entire article seemed to be as middle of the road as you can get.
Free Software != Open Source software. Open Source Really has nothing to do with free. The value of Open Source is that you are able to look under the hood. If it happens to be Free and Open and Good ala Apache and many others then it's just a bonus.
Of course you still need IT staff to manage it, pay for a computer to install it upon, and all the other fun stuff. Just because it's Open Source doesn't mean Joe Sixpack can suddenly administer a server - duh.
Having said that, experience has shown that Open Source software documentation is infinitely better than the rubbish in MS user manuals.
Hope is the currency of fools
Why fuel the Microsoft pandering by "legitimizing" the said "report" with anti arguments?
Microsoft does not matter and they haven't for a very long time and the sooner we stop affix relevance to them the better.
and oh... think about it before you mod and/or reply.
Seriously not a flame bait... hoping more of an anti flame bait.
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.
I'm wondering about two things here. First - in cases where proprietary software is used, its generally the case that the company has to develope its own middle-ware product for intergration into their systems (or buy a boxed one), either way, its part of the cost of the product. Is that being used in this calculation, or is that considered a seperate "product"? For an open source solution, the better option is probably just to modify for the source to integrate the product, which would be more cost for the product itself, but you miss the middle-ware costs. Second - is this looking at only the "cost" or factoring in time as well? If you're having an integration problem (even if you are a big enough company to complain loud enough to get say, Microsoft, to implement a fix) you're certainly not going to get it over night, or next week. In smaller companies, this isn't an option at all. If you look at time waiting for Microsoft to probably never fix the problem, versus devloping and submitting an code change for an open source product, I'd bet the amount of time actually used is significantly less than the Microsoft turn-around. Sure its a higher development cost to the company, but it will save them many hours getting a fix to their workforce in a faster time frame.
Third, people are trained through what are often for profit adult education programs. These programs are often funded through student loans. The default rate at for profit schools can be twice as high as public non-profit schools and three times as high as private non-profit schools. All these defaults are covered by taxpayer money. Again, the tax payer is funding the training of proprietary programs when often free OSS programs are available to teach the concepts. Firms are being taxed into bankruptcy to pay for training and buy licenses so their competitors can save on training costs. What is the point in that?
To be sure this report is a classic case of externalizing costs to make a product seem cheaper. Sure blowing up a mountaintop is the cheap way to get coal because it is the taxpayer, not the firm, that is going to be funding the health care costs of the townships below the mountain. Sure it is cheaper to run up debt to fund a ten year war intended to make war mongers rich because the debt will be paid by the next generation of middle class tax payers, not the war mongers kids.
OSS software is not useful for everything, but it does seem to work for much of the web infrastructure. Sure when I use OSS on my website there is a learning curve and the resources are not widely available. OTOH, when I want a feature I do not have to beg MS to include it, I can just pay one of the army of PHP, Python, of Ruby developers to do it. Even better, I am not a slave to an external upgrade cycle intended to maximize profits for a firm that has no regard to my needs and will demand upgrade fees even if I do not need the new software. This is another indication that OSS will sooner rather than later destroy the MS business model.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them
That's sometimes the case; in the long run, training and learning costs are almost always lower than for equivalent Microsoft software however. Microsoft keeps changing its interfaces so that marketing and sales can squeeze out a new version, and that gets really expensive in the long run. Many companies have been refusing to upgrade Windows and Office because of that, only to be forced to do so eventually.
and making them work with other software"
Sure, making FOSS work with Microsoft software is a real pain. However, that pain can be nearly eliminated by eliminating Microsoft software.
Thus, the article acknowledges that the use of open source is cheaper in some circumstances -- but what proportion? The article doesn't elaborate. It could be 1%, it could be 99%.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The game continues and changes each day. Android is open source, and doing very well. Open source is still evolving. IPV6 may greatly increase people's interest in p2p type projects, which open standards and source are very good at. Internet censorship is also growing, and nobody really knows what's coming with that, it could be a call for more and more open standards to combat it. Funding sources are also evolving, apparently the Humble Bundle guys invented a new format. The pledge system is becoming more popular.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Yes. And murder isn't always illegal. Bottom line, look back over the past 15 years and see how much you've spent on Microsoft Office. Then compare that to how much you'll send on training and support for Open Office. I see money saved. Guaranteed. Now if you're talking about open source flight simulators or image manipulation software, you probably would be better off buying retail versions of those applications. Beware the "always" in this claim. They should actually title it "Most of the Time, Open Source Saves You Money", but Microsoft wouldn't have liked that title.
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.
Even giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt regarding their funding, I find their study bleak and useless. Why? Well, they have discovered that migration has its costs: training and retraining. That closed environments designed to work together beforehand can have relative short-term benefits: exchange comes prepackaged to "work" with Active Directory, so there is no integration cost. But Zimbra comes prebuilt to work with its own openldap, another openldap, any kind of ldap (really) and/or AD, and its foss...
So they are pussies. They made a study that reflects that moving from one technology to another costs, without an effort to measure what the long term benefits of migrating may be....
I find Zero insight in their work (insofar as ive seen, like the arcticle in the economist, although i will read the whole thing once i get my hands on it),, they only bring what we already know to the table, with the FUD package we have come to know for years now...
NO SIG
Would we be hearing about this report if it hadn't come out with a conclusion favorable to its funders? Doubtful.
If I add the lost productivity using TFS vs any of the FOSS SDLC or even simple version control software. The only statement we have been hearing from our MS tickets is "It shouldnt do that" Or "That was by design"... So far I a loosing about 1 man day every 4. And now that we have an "expert" on site, I am full time trying to debug this for MS.
Free programs are not always cheaper
Implication: Free programs usually are "cheaper".
Slashdot slaughtering of statement
Open Source more expensive
Implication: Free programs usually "cost" more.
Headline sensationalism much?
"But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software". There are so many things wrong with this. Sure, that could very well be true in some cases, but it is entirely dependent on the situation. They are stating an extremely vague idea it as if it were an absolute in every scenario. If this really was an unbiased study they wouldn't be regurgitating this worn-out claim.
Just another view.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... this seems like pretty non-controversial stuff. Sometimes, "free" software has training costs that outweigh the the fact that it costs nothing to acquire? You could knock me over with a feather. Plenty of people are getting paid to write free software, and there are a bunch of business models that involve mixing, matching and selling free software with non-free (not just stereotypical hackers writing code in their basements for free)? I'm shocked, shocked to hear this.
There is a lot of free software out there, and I would be very skeptical of any claim that ALL of it has lower life-cycle costs than non-free equivalents. When choosing software, you should evaluate it on criteria including the capabilities/features, initial cost, support cost, availability of support, and of course, your level of commitment to the Free Software philosophy. The answer is not always going to be the free package (unless you're RMS). My response to this study could be boiled down to "no kidding".
People using an open source program spend resources to adopt it to work with something else.
And they do that just to waste money; making a program work with something else never helps their bottom line.
Therefore, open source is more expensive.
It boss; we need a monitoring solution
Me: ok, I will do some research
later:
Me: ok, I got a good one.
It boss: How much does it costs?
2 days later
Me: 3000Euros to cover our needs + Windows server license
It boss: ok, I need to get the founds approved from the management.
1 month later:
Me: so did they approved the founds for the monitoring solution?
It boss: not yet
1 week later:
Me: never mind I got everything up and running with open source
Moral of the story:
To use licensed story you need to waste you time to explain why you need the money. The more it costs, more time you will need to make the presentation good and may the god saves you if the solution is not perfect.
While with open source you can start right away.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
And here I thought we had left the FUD wars of the 1990s behind us and it was time to focus on substance.
Open Source != Communism
Open Source != Socialism
Gillette is not a communist operation and neither is McDonalds.
Why is it that Capitards always throw the workers out the window when they start calculating the means of production.
Software is not magic pixie dust, software and the machines it runs on are often improvements in operating efficiency but there was an effective economy before computers and software. It is also important to note that sprinkling magic software pixie dust on everything does not magically make it more efficient, with a background in manufacturing I can attest to the misuse of results garnered from software to make disastrous decisions.
Greed is a motivator for crime, the bulk of the inventors I have worked with enjoy what they do. Yes money can boost innovation but it does not automatically die when the cash stops flowing.
No, the reason the writing is patchy is because there is incentive to produce FUD. The greed factor motivates certain people and corporations to engage in unethical behaviour to stifle competition. That is what happens when you have 90%+ gross profit margins and virtually no competition.
Correcting lies != Offended
Once bitten twice shy.
Let me repeat...
Open Source != Communism
Open Source != Socialism
One of the anecdotal stories that demonstrates why copyleft arose is from Richard Stallman and his sharing of code for his Lisp interpreter with a corporation which refused to return the favor. It has nothing to do with politics, people just don't like to be ripped off by weasel scum bags.
It is also important to note that Copyleft utilizes Copyright to protect the commons.
Duh. So what was all the garbage in the beginning of the article about the need for incentives.
Heh, it appears the authors recently crawled out from under a rock. The utilization of both Open Source and proprietary code in business is not new, and no it is not predominantly left to the poor countries that cannot afford the expensive proprietary code. If the surveys suggest that developed countries don't use Open Source in their business then I suspect they are either oblivious or covering their rears to avoid litigation. There are many individuals and corporations that will vehemently avoid Open Source but seem blind to all the hardware running their operations on embedded linux.
Perhaps this is what the survey says but speaking from experience I can tell you that many corporations have
Not just that but, ask the question "what do you get for your money". In the open source world, it can take more time, and more effort to deploy a solution. I will readily admit that. However, the reason it takes longer, and costs more, is that deploying it actually involves.... understanding what you are doing.
In the MS world, it is point, shoot, hope, and call support when it breaks. In the open source world, usually the fact that multiple components work together is not hidden, and setup involves at least some knowledge of all of them. The upshot? When it breaks, you are not sitting around waiting for support to call you back, you are troubleshooting it yourself.
It may not be as polished, or as easy, and maybe, the initial setup costs more and takes longer. In the end though, I think you have more control and can get more done with less, in a more supportable manner.... because you get out of it what you put into it, rather than just paying for a canned product and hoping for the best.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I avoided this kind of irritation by marrying a Japanese woman.
Reflecting on this a bit, I think its more so even about open architecture than open source.
I have dealt with a few "closed" products that I was still, just from knowledge of the OS, and how the tools work, was able to get in, figure out what is going on, and solve problems... some which support told me could not be done.... like recovering files from backups that had been corrupted since the script that generated the dumps was "upgraded" by a patch 6 months prior. Sure it involved diving through 6 layers of shell script, dumping raw data off tape, and then writing a perl script to fix all the file names :)... but it worked.
I never would have gotten as far if it hadn't been for parts of the application bacup being written in shell, and a few commands the legato support person gave up while troubleshooting... I realized that one of the commands was dumping raw data off tape, so I saved the data instead of piping it to the process that he wanted me to pipe it to (which did jack since the filenames were corrupted.... duh)
Take monitoring. I have had the "opportunity" to directly deal with both Nagios and SCOM. SCOM has its nice polish, pretty charts, auto-discovery. Too bad the agent is crap, its just as hard as anything else to configure usefully. It doesn't have the granular configurability in the notification system, you can't as easily hack up a check in shell script and start monitoring.... overall.... out of the box, it beats nagios hands down, but, it is nowhere near a well configured nagios system, run by someone who put some time into setting it up....
and when the SCOM guy wanted to test the Linux agent. Not only was it obtuse and hard to get to install properly, it would only install if you changed the major/minor numbers on /dev/random to turn it into /dev/urandom. Nice... so now every system with scom installed has a fake /dev/random..... and no explanation as to what you are doing, why you are doing it, or what the implications of doing it are.... thanks guys.... never considered using /dev/urandom did you?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The scientific and skeptical community finds the anti-vaccination community a bunch of bullshit too, but they yell loudly enough and sometimes even get on Oprah, and this affects what people think. It's important that thinking people look at Microsoft's propaganda and address it appropriately, showing the fallacies and holes, and then provide counter examples.
Bill Gates being more popular than the pope yes is fluff, but that had no bearing on anything, and I believe it was appropriately in the idle section, so it is fluff. MS putting out anti OSS propaganda is not fluff, it's a problem that needs to be addressed and countered.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I would expect such results to depend on the precise use case. I can (without breaking sweat) name a lot of use cases where the OSS i know is more expensive *to use* than comercial, non-open software. But also (without breaking sweat) i can name many cases where OSS has the upper hand cost-wise. A use case always has so many parameters, that there is no general statement "OSS software is cheaper/more expensive than comercial softare".
CU, Martin
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.
Indeed, i have to deal with people like this every day... The problem is that smart competent people will evaluate multiple options and pick the one that best suits their needs, but people doing this would result in lost business for MS. So they would rather have an army of clueless drones that will accept what they're given and not try to think for themselves.
The problem I so often have with these claims is they seem to mistake ease of installation with the actual maintenance of the software.
Indeed, and monkey can get a windows based network up and basically hobbling along, and this is what their marketing concentrates on...
In many cases, a monkey could get many linux based setups hobbling along in the same way, its just that there is no marketing trying to convince people of this.
However, you don't want a system that is barely functional being managed by someone who has no clue how it really works... You want someone who knows the system inside out, who will configure the system to run optimally and ensure that necessary updates are applied in a timely manner etc.
However, running a system optimally is actually much harder with windows than it is with unix:
Under the interface, the windows system is actually far more complicated than any unix system... As soon as you try to do anything advanced which isn't catered for by the gui, or have to fix a serious problem it becomes extremely complex.
Windows suffers from security related design flaws which either have to be accepted as security risks, or kludgily worked around... Things like authentication with uncracked hashes, weak password hashing, file typing (including execute ability) by filename, broken apps which only run as admin, disorganised filesystem etc...
Windows lacks centralised package management, you will probably have to spend extra to buy a patch management system.
Windows requires anti virus, you will probably have to pay a lot of money for this too.
So sure, if you want a horrendously insecure and flakey network, hire the cheapest MCSEs you can and then you have money left over to buy the software... Such a setup will probably seem ok for a while too, until something goes badly wrong.
If you want a network thats reasonably secure and functional you will need to hire decent competent (ie more expensive) staff in any case. So why not run unix instead of windows, you will need less staff which will be a significant saving for people at this competence level, and you will obviously save on all the software (and perhaps be able to use less/cheaper hardware).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I wrote more than 200,000 words, and it's working for me, much more reliable than MS Office was, with less editing bugs, and smaller files too, so I was able to save every version of my books.
It's cross platform too.
I will be switching to Libreoffice soon.
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
This sounds just like the kind of fodder they used and funded to feed their Microsoft Get The Facts campaign against open source software.
The good news is that, along with the marketing efforts publicizing Windows on ARM, it shows Microsoft is still unable to move to a competitive business model and must rely on anti-competitive tactics to protect their Windows based revenue stream. Oh wait, they only have a Windows based revenue stream. No wonder every funded research paper they've backed showed Windows was better, faster, and cheaper than all others.
To prove Microsoft is a Windows-only shop, where are their iPhone apps, Android apps, Blackberry apps? A software powerhouse like Microsoft would surely want to get a piece of the huge market for smartphone users right? What? No apps for any of those and instead they are only supporting efforts for their own Windows branded software? Who can not see the lockin issues and the consistent effort to only do what they think they need to do to protect Windows instead of competing and generating revenue when markets open?
This is just more of their anti-competition efforts just like the original MS "Get The Facts" marketing campaign years ago.
The great news is that it still shows open source is a target worth spending millions and even billions of dollars in marketing efforts to try and stop. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
In my business its about the right tool for the job. Want to run a web server? Use your favorite Linux distro. Want to run a corporate network? Go get the Windows server. Doing some A/V, art, etc? Get a Mac. Like it or not, the business world runs on Windows. If you want to have a business run successfully, you have to stick with what your colleagues are using. That means no OpenOffice for the majority, even though it works fine. The file format differences and compatibilities are enough to put people off.
Licensing is only part of the issue. The rest of it has to do with what works best, not about whats cheapest.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Yes. And all of those things are far more likely to be delivered by any community based solution where the point isn't to extract the most money possible out of the end users by some sort of upgrade treadmill. No. You are far more likely to get a good experience out of any product where the product is actually the point and where perhaps some of the developers are actually end users.
This is especially ironic considering the idiot that originated that ancient aphorism.
Even at the time he originated it I found WinDOS to be the more bothersome and time consuming product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've told this story before, but I'll enthrall (or bore) you with it again. The company I work for based a good chunk of its IT infrastructure on Visual FoxPro. OK, it's not my first choice either, but it was a perfectly reasonable decision at the time the project launched and it really helped the company build its business. While not my cup of tea, it got the job done. Then MS bought FoxPro, and users rejoiced. Yay! It has major corporate support now!
Except MS let it die. They've explicitly stated that it will never be a .NET language and have officially abandoned it to CodePlex under its own custom Shared Source license variant.
At least there was an upgrade path for VB. It might not've been fun, but at least you had the option of migrating your pre-existing systems into something new and supported. Not so for us; we're throwing the whole thing away and starting over. We're using PostgreSQL for the backend and a mix of Python (my stuff) and C# (another dev's stuff; against my recommendations) for the frontend. If PostgreSQL goes away tomorrow, it'll be trivial to port our apps to another database. In the case of my Python stuff, that'd be a matter of changing the SQLAlchemy connection strings and running unit tests. I have infinitely more faith in Python's continued existence than I do in any specific proprietary MS language.
So in what bizarre situation is a closed MS "solution" cheaper? The initial installation might cost less if an installation wizard is many hours faster at getting it up and running than I could make the F/OSS equivalent work, but down the road? There's no way in hell. We still have Perl software written in the 90s running without problems on our multi-core 64-bit servers, and it'll still be cranking away a decade from now, unchanged, if we need it to be. I have no reasonable expectation that any given MS service will be that maintenance-free.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software"
Not like MS Office products that are infinitely simple, intuitive, and play nicely with all other software...
That is a HUGE stretch to conclude such things. It is presumptuous from the start by asserting that it takes more time (and money) for users to learn to use GiMP, Inkscape, Photoshop, Firefox or even Linux.
Is there something about these that make them harder to learn? Not as far as I can see. In fact, I learned GiMP and Inkscape before I learned Photoshop and Illustrator. The fact is, I am comfortable with the former and not comfortable with the latter. What does that prove? That F/OSS is better because the learning of expensive software is harder? It is true that moving from "Thing A" to "Thing B" is costly in the sense that transitional change is disruptive, but the direction of transition is irrelevant.
So the real question is whether or not the transitional change is worth the disruption. Well, let's do another "slashdot analogy." Let's compare quitting expensive proprietary software to.... (let's slant this in favor of F/OSS) SMOKING! Smoking is an expensive habit to indulge in. We don't need to talk about its dangers or the benefits of not smoking. But let's talk about how HARD it is to quit! There are emotional and physical issues to consider when deciding to quit. There may be times when quitting immediately is not the best thing to do. (For example, you are involved in something that requires your focus and concentration -- to quit smoking at that time would likely have a heavy impact on the result of your efforts.) But in the end and in the long term, to quit smoking is easily a no-brainer where benefits are concerned. It is cheaper to not smoke. It is healthier to not smoke. So to mitigate the pains of quitting, one should do planning and scheduling to accomplish the goal.
Now let's do another "slashdot analogy" famously invoking "cars!" Yes, another slashdot car analogy. Let's compare switching from POV (personally owned vehicle) commuting to public transportation (PT) commuting. As a Texas native, where there is almost 0 public transportation, now living in the DC area where public transportation is everywhere, I can attest that it represented a huge change in my line of thinking and the way I operate on a day to day basis. HUGE! With a POV mentality, it is more expensive, (higher auto insurance rates, fuel, maintenance, parking) but there is a lot more freedom from planning and scheduling. With PT, it can be cheaper in many ways (though there are times when PT can accumulate to a higher monthly cost than POV depending on your circumstances) but as a general rule, it requires that you are more mindful of the PT schedules, your transportation budget and more! In a way, shifting to PT has made me a better person by increasing by ability to plan and manage my time and resources -- something that being POV exclusive did not require of me.
But wait? In this POV vs PT analogy, which is F/OSS and which is commercial software? Well, since I DON'T own PT and I DO own my car, I think that distinction is more clear. So why would I come out in favor of commercial software with my car analogy? Because it's the truth as I see it.
Is it a better use of personal resources to use F/OSS or commercial software? Unquestionably, that question favors F/OSS. Is it a better use of business resources to use F/OSS or commercial software? That is the question and the answer depends on the circumstances. As in the case of POV vs PT, there are times when POV is more cost effective EVEN when the cost of parking downtown can be as much as $160 per month! (I take the bus to and from work every day -- $1.50 x 2 x 20 = $60/mo. A co-worker takes his car to work every day at $160/mo for parking, but he comes to work with his wife! When they did the math, they found that the cost of buses and trains x 2 x 20 for two people was more than $160/mo! So it made more sense for them to do that) But how does this compare with F/OSS vs commercial software?
I'm here to admit that there are operational costs connected with F/OSS. And as the paid researcher indicates, that cost
I'm not sure why this keeps coming up. In some cases proprietary software is better. In other cases open source software might be better. You can site a hundred cases for each that involve the initial environment, costs, goals, etc. Each company should look at open source to see if it can meet their needs. Sometimes it's better to pay Microsoft than it is to hire a contract programmer to fire-and-forget customize your product. Perhaps you have some great in-house talent already and they can customize and maintain your projects.
Anyway, to say one is cheaper than the other doesn't mean anything as a blanket statement.
First of all, hasn't this sort of article been done before, or at least posted on Slashdot?
Second of all, the title is just a tad misleading...it's an MIT study, not a Microsoft study, even though accepting funding from Microsoft sort of belies any claims of purity in the study.
And finally, I'd like to see the actual survey. Logically, if you take a business that doesn't own a single computer, wouldn't it be equally difficult (or easy) to equip and train the business on any software platform, open or not? For example, I have a hard time with Linux because I've used Microsoft all my life, not because Linux is more difficult to learn. Naturally, in a business setting, I would have an easier time learning how to use a Microsoft product since I'm already familiar with them. Same could be said for someone who grew up with Linux.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
Proprietary software especially Microsoft is not meant to work with other software by design. Unlike its open counterparts that are flexible and able to be integrated more easily. Maybe they are concluding that the time it takes to do these integrations costs more than if you had an all MS shop But i find it hard to believe.
You're deluding yourself if you think MS wants the truth. Repeatedly, they've shown they want skewed observations of things and the like (And there's official documents stating that this was the thinking they use and prior studies that were shown to be half-truths at best...)- so long as you buy from them they don't honestly care how anyone thinks of them or their solutions.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Envision an alternative reality in which development of FOS software, let's say Linux, OpenOffice, etc., predated Microsoft's rise to power. In that alternate universe, the FOS tools got widespread adoption. Services sprung up to support them, in line with the idea that you can make money from open source by providing quality support and services for a fee. Because of its widespread adoption, documents are exchanged as a norm in OpenOffice format.
Now, along comes a commercial entity that says, "Our $500 office software and $350 operating system is the way to go."
They would get nowhere, for reasons like lack of widespread support, lack of de facto standardization, etc. And of course cost would argue against them.
But in our universe, the commercial software got traction first and, in a sort of positive feedback loop, as they made more money they wielded more power and increased their influence and made more money.
So FOS fights an uphill battle and much of that battle isn't really based on cost so much as power and influence, especially in high government and corporate places. When the IT shop suggests open source, MS doesn't drop in to visit with the programmers; they go right to the top, suits talking to suits, and before you know it we have things like Australia mandating MS "standards" for government.
As an individual, I use Linux, OpenOffice, etc., exclusively. As an individual, proprietary software suits have no interest in buying me off. I can provide my own support and to me up-front cost is all the cost, and makes a big difference. But the corporate and government worlds are hardly the same. I sincerely hope FOS will make more and more corporate inroads. But it's a tough battle against powerful foes.
"Much conventional wisdom about Microsoft written by shills is wrong. 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 -- wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Proprietary programs are not always better. To be sure, the upfront cost of proprietary software is higher (although open-source programs are not always free) and getting timely fixes is difficult and expensive. But companies that use such programs support the cadre of Microsoft engineers and legions of independent programmers who "fix" and "augment" Microsoft offerings. Think of their children; move out of you mom's basement."
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Meat bad for you says vegetarian report.
I, too, performed a study using funds from Microsoft with no-strings attached. These giant metal rope-like things? Oh, those are chains. But they are most certainly *NOT* strings!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
... Study commissioned by the Very Big Corporation of America proves competitors products are inferior.
Lets assume that what they say is true, that open source can cause a company to spend more on learning to use software and integration. But once you spend money on that, you retain the value of that experience in your employees. You may also gain the ability to better customize a solution to your environment than relying on the priorities of your vendor. If you think in terms of cash, you have spent more money, but if you think in terms of value, that money more likely went to improve your staff instead of help someone else's profits.
I do think using open source and/or free software does demand and make smarter employees, which should be seen as good for business.
A while ago I donate € 25 to Aurélien Gâteau the maintainer of Gwenview.
The first one is closed source but the latter OSS worked out twice as expensive.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Of course they do. Because they can.
With closed software you're stuck with what you have. With free software you can tweak it to infinity and beyond.
Coke tastes better than Pepsi says Coca Cola Report
What a load of crap. Ever try making MS software work with non MS software.
But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software
This says a lot more about the intelligence of the company's employees than it does about the software.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Quoting PJ, "What an amazing coincidence. Two researchers take Microsoft money, no strings attached, mind you, and then after much study just happen to come to the same conclusions as Microsoft's talking points."
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The company I left last year (I got an offer from a old consulting client I couldn't pass up) built their entire platform on a number of opensource technologies including linux, FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, and Perl. We had grown and had a couple perl hackers and a decent DBA, but I was the systems guy (I was a little bit of everything at the start). It was extremely hard in that area to find a replacement because all the other shops were pretty much all Microsoft/.Net environments and a couple Java/DB2 shops. If they were a windows shop, they could have found a dozen good candidates locally, paid them about 80% what I was making and gone on. But I think it took them about 4 months to find a replacement. The amount of time and money they had to spend to bring someone new into the fold probably would have covered those software licensing costs a couple times over.
So if we had it to do over again, we may not have gone with the OSS stack.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This is a site for technical minded people, right? Computer science? IT? It is all about mathematics and numbers? Scientists, physicists, etc.?
Okay. This is easy. Do the math, folks.
"More expensive" is a synonym for "generates more profit". Open source, therefore, is obviously more desirable for the business world than the proprietary model.
The monetary system is not about the numerical value in your wallet--it is about how much money moves through your wallet over the course of time. First derivative, calculus, etc.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it's not elementary school math.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
On a real IT planet, you have a problem, you solve the problem, you deploy the solution, tweak it until it works forever, and then you move to the next cycle. File servers are yesterday's news. Should there be any cost there over and above electricity and depreciation? Yes, I know I'm exaggerating a bit, there also has to be a massive restructuring of middle management every time disk drive technology breaks through another BIOS barrier. On a real IT planet, BIOS barriers are not revisited in living memory.
In economics, there is this problem about the reference basket for measuring the inflation rate. Sometimes you have to update the reference basket.
I think Microsoft is partly pulling off the funny math by ignoring the fact that if you stick with open source, your reference basket updates more quickly as things you used to pay for become to cheap to meter.
For the high churn technology that isn't yet too cheap to meter (and Microsoft dearly hopes this day never arrives) the cost of integration within an open source culture is non trivial, but it comes along with the agenda of eliminating the problem forever, not just persisting with the bleed and weep status quo, turning it over with one low low low small-bite-out-of-your-ass monthly payment until the end of time.
With the basket of goods thing, an idiot can mount a persuasive case that the cost of living in 2010 exceeds the cost of living in real terms in 1970, by placing zero value on any of the goods that couldn't be bought back then for any price. This would be done by focusing on the cost of energy which has gone up (maybe back date this to 1968), rather than what you can now do with the same unit of energy (talk on the phone to Asia for a whole tank of gas, and not owe the phone company a kilo of coke).
It seems that the researchers really didn't find anything, only confirming what many here have probably already seen. In the real world, open source and proprietary solutions work side by side in many if not most large organizations. It simply isn't practical to 100% standardize on a Microsoft or open source solution. We IT folks have to get our money the old fashioned way! Only the smallest organizations would find going all one way or the other an attractive and workable option. I think that what Microsoft is worried about is that small businesses can more easily cut them out of the picture and have a strong incentive, very good free open source applications, to do so. And with the global economy not being so great, perhaps MS is feeling the pinch. In any case, anyone trying to sell software or services has to market them, so I'd expect another such report in a year or two.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
My netbook came with Xandros installed, works flawlessly.
I've been considering installing Netbuntu for some time now, since Debian Etch, on which Xandros is based, is becoming quite old. There are a few apps for which I would like new versions, but what the hell, Xandros works so nicely in that small, cheap, machine...
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Comparing proprietary software vs open source is retarded. From one side you have certain companies and their products, in the other you have communities and services. It is like comparing a solar system with a galaxy. Open source or Free software is much bigger, it has an ideology behind. It covers a wide range of programs, applications and even hardware that supports. Closed source doesnt have an ideology, it justs looks for profit. I dont think it is bad to create closed source programs or to profit from that, just dont attack an awesome idea that benefits everyone just because you want to profit.
It's 1997, and it wants its FUD back.
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.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
'MS funded report declares FOSS software cheaper!'
That would be news. This report is not. Why would anyone care or take this the least bit seriously?
that I am totally in love with your wife. Hope you don't mind! -Jay-
I've switched probably 100 clients to Open Office. Almost none of them have had a single issue, and frequently many of them PREFER OO to MS Office, as the GUI is familiar, and the new MS Office is foreign and looks like recycled space candy.
At about $410 a pop:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116858&cm_re=microsoft_office-_-32-116-858-_-Product
Times 100:
$410,000 is what I've saved clients. None of them needed new training, had any downtime, or any other cost. AND when they switch to a new computer, they won't have to pay ANOTHER $400 (or more!) to re license office for a new machine. So long term I've probably saved clients over $1 million dollars.
And I do it for $50 an hour.
Fuck you Microsoft. LOL
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Yeah Bill, and that made Windows godsend .
The article proposes the argument that open source is more expensive because the costs of learning and the costs of making it work together with other SW is bigger.
I am not convinced - Firstly, the cost of learning is a one-off cost; and while taking the first steps into Linux system administration may seem daunting, once you've got it, you will find learning new things under linux quite easy - configurations files are text based, the terminology is fairly uniform etc. And of course, the same applies to Windows; having worked with UNIX only for more than 10 years, I find Windows almost incomprehensible; things are not where they should be, the terminology is different etc etc.
As for interoperability, I find the biggest problem is to interface with systems that are deliberately designed in such a way that it is difficult. This is not a common problem in the world of open source - but it certainly is when it comes to closed source, although the problem is getting smaller. And the point is, when open source has trouble interfaccing with a closed source program, so does other closed source programs.
How simple it must seem... untill one has to fix a bug that results from an addressing error taking code or data from some unexpected location, not just an uninitialized pointer. And usually the point at which the program fails may be long separated from point the error crept in. Perhaps in a million-line compiler or database management system. A bit of humility is a good starting point for any serious bug hunt.
Yeah, the tools are better. But our ability to design in errors has also increased. And since we are so much in love with the folks who know the latest tools but have not the decades of experience to recognize mistakes when they make them again -- we are assured a good helping of the old logic problems as well.
Open source is great if you have the time and skills to use it effectively. But closed source just gets you started faster -- but in the end may be every bit as demanding and difficult to fix, maybe more so, than the alternative.
My Exchange system was shutdown in the end because it ate email for my wife from her daughter abroad -- but only on Tuesdays. They would go into the router and never come out. Everything else worked fine and had for years, even with this sender/recipient. The proposed solutions I found all seemed to be along the lines of 'find a black rooster and wait for the new moon...'. Fortunately, declining business activity meant that the real solution was to switch our remaining email to Gmail and shutdown Exchange. If I had source and the time to debug this non-trivial piece of code I could have identified and fixed the problem. But in the real world it would never happen -- and I suspect my little issue is probably not the only weirdness in Microsoft Exchange. Glad I did not HAVE to fix it.
This little example just goes to show that non-trivial pieces of software sometimes are in production for years with bugs that cannot be fixed. Doesn't matter if they are open or closed source -- being non-trivial means that just figuring out what is broke is non-trivial. A bit of humility is always appropriate. As is the decision as to whether a problem really needs to be fixed, lived with or just ignored -- or run from.
I have been to 6 Novell Classes, 6 Microsoft classes, 6 Sun Java Programming classes, taken 12 Unix Computer based training programs while maintain Unix servers in a web hosting environment for about 10 years. I have been an IT Professional in some very large environments for 15 years. --- Unix has never had a virus and I install Ubuntu 10.10 on every broken Windows laptop that crosses my path. When I show people how open office works, how easy it is to surf the web, how much faster their 3-5 year old PC works after installing Ubuntu, they sing my praises and say thank you. --- Anyone over $500 million in revenue thinks they are being smart by buying into the church of Microsoft and if you want gaming or multi-media it's probably the way to go, but for most people MS is just a pain to maintain and Microsoft learned long ago they can do more to kill the competition with one press release than any other means available. --- I will give Microsoft kudos, MS Exchange client is pretty hard to beat. Nothing on the market is really as good. For collaboration Share Point is great but the effort required on the backend to maintain, move around and configure is really expensive and time consuming. Most small business could do just a well with Xwiki for collaboration and Osmo on Ubuntu to replace MS Exchange.
All our windows servers lose on average 15% to McAfee.
There are, of course, plenty of situations where this is true: an example might be in the area of digital video editing, where free software is still inferior to turnkey solutions, and requires a lot more effort and patience to set up.
Conversely, there are plenty of situations where the per-seat license of proprietry software is crippling compared with using free software. High performance computing clusters are a classic example of this.
Both of these seemingly contradictory statements satisfy the original article's statement: "free programs are not always cheaper".
One real world example of how open source is actually saving money France's Gendarmerie Nationale switched to Ubuntu to replace Windows XP. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars Training cost is factored in however this is also pointed out as here: "Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users," said Lt. Col. Guimard. "Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority." They claim that Microsoft said you require training to switch from XP to Vista. By switching to open source they're saving 70% on their IT budget.
I have worked in shops using Microsoft code bases where the shop has paid for a massive fix, only to have the next release of windows restore the error and then Microsoft charged us (admittedly less) for the new windows with the old fix.
And it _was_ a fix.
Go ahead and wander through the microsoft knowledge base and look for all the fixes that aren't available to the general public.
It's not that no possible developer of proprietary code can pleas a customer. Its that if ANY developer of PROPRIETARY CODE decides NOT TO PLEASE YOU then you are farked.
See it's not that hard to see the distinction between "having a choice" and "not having a choice". It this case the choice to fix things the vendor doesn't care to.
Any small number of "that's not how I run _my_ business" anecdotes don't change the measurable fact that, the proven fact, that if I bought your product, whatever it may be, I wouldn't be able to do anything to it that you didn't _let_ me do, including fixing on-the-spot a critical flaw that brings my operation to a halt while you are off on vacation or whatever.
As for your "stunned silence", you really don't understand language do you? you cannot enunciate silence without putting the lie to your "silence".
Plus you must be new to slashdot if you think this isn't _exactly_ the forum for making war-related digressions in the name of metaphor. (I am 35.4 MILLION user id numbers senior to you here, so I think I know how this forum works, thank you very much...8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press