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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
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.
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?
{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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Even that I am a programmer, I do not know how to fix it.
I too spend much of my working life programming. It's really not that hard.
1) Download the source.
2) Compile with all debugging symbols and perhaps -fmudflaps
3) Run the program (with valgrind or mudflaps)
4) Go to the line number of the first error, and have a look.
Most of the crash causing errors are simple things, like uninitialised pointers. Some require some digging. But I have successfully fixed bugs and added fearures to a few projects and it's often not as hard as you might expect.
The modern tools available on any decent linux system are feally fantastic. Evil, nasty bugs like subtle memory corruption can be caught much, much more easily than before and therefore require much less in-depth knowledge to fix.
But for some reason, a number of high profile distributions don't have a package with the mudflaps helper files, even though they enable it in gcc.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?
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