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Study Urges CIOs To Choose Open Source First
littlekorea writes "A new study has urged CIOs to consider open source over proprietary software or public cloud services when replacing legacy gear. But the study's author, Professor Jim Norton, warns that open source won't be a cure-all for some companies. From the article: ' Open source software, Norton said, provides enterprise IT with easier access to innovation via a "great global self-re-enforcing community of shared resources, ideas and development." That same community provides a faster response to changes in customer preferences communicated on social networks or via business analytics, and faster resolution of common system problems.'"
All studies urging CIOs to prefer "professional solutions" -- not published on /.
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Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
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Invited everyone you knew
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CIOs buy open source tools all the time - and they pay RedHat or Oracle to support them. However - no CIO is going to spend real dollars, dollars which will get him fired, on unsupported software, no matter how cool the user forums are.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Companies should "consider open source". Well, duh. Some open source solutions, like Linux, Apache, and Hadoop, are best of breed or damn close to it. Others, not so much. Then there is MySql, which is not best of breed but is "good enough" for many purposes and comes free of licensing fees. Nobody needed this study to tell them that.
From TFA:
There are plenty of examples, he noted, of critical infrastructure relying on open source; the London Stock Exchange, Google’s search engine (and tellingly, its rival Microsoft Bing), and many Defence applications are among them.
Tellingly? Bing runs on Windows. Google's engine runs on Linux but the search engine is proprietary. Google developers have written papers describing their MapReduce framework (that's what inspired Hadoop) but the source code is still under lock and key.
How about studies of AC first posters with nothing worthwhile to say resorting to the predictably boring ad hominem?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
99.9% of all open source projects I have seen has or will have, or will soon have, DIED !!, never to phibes again !! And support ?? May as well go stand in a corner and spin round and round, because what comes around goes around !! I'll tell you why !! Because it's free, and in beer !!
That same community provides a faster response to changes in customer preferences communicated on social networks or via business analytics, and faster resolution of common system problems.
Bwahahaha... yes, that's why it takes Mozilla over 5 years to fix bugs in Thunderbird despite all the user complaints. I guess that's why they chose to "give it" to the community, because they can't be bothered to look after it themselves any more.
Most of this article reads like its 1999 now.
“The skilled, motivated staff that grew up with the internet don’t want to work with closed, old fashioned systems,” ...
"Norton cited studies from the London School of Economics which found that investments to deploy open source in-house drives longer-term savings of 20 percent over the alternatives"...
"It advises CIOs, for example, not to separate current support teams from new development teams"
It then goes on to explain the fish that they are trying to fry:
“We commissioned this study to highlight to our customers and shareholders our use of open systems and contribution to open systems,”
Ok great so you have opensource software. Before you propose any solution (any open source or proprietary) you'd think of a large number of factors. ROI is one of them. The capabilities of your staff and the availability of skills in the market would be another. The example of Tomcat and jQuery are lame to say the least. Some of the companies I worked for have use proprietary solutions AND save money in the process. For "enterprise" applications the major costs of running the show arent whether the software is open source or not. Maintenance over the life of the product costs much more (salaries, infrastructure, etc).
Some of the companies I worked for have use proprietary solutions AND save money in the process.
Really? Over the long term? What I have noticed with commercial vs. open source is that initially the commercial software seems a far better deal. They cut you a great price on the licence, support is included and you get very polished software (usually). However when the licence comes up for renewal the price goes up by well over the cost of inflation - but you got a good deal initial so it's still not bad. However after the 3rd of 4th renewal you realize that you are spending far more than you really should be on the software but the cost of migration is large enough that you decide to continue anyway for another 1-2 renewal until your budget literally cannot support the cost anymore and you are forced to switch to something else.
Compare that with Open Source where you purchase support. The company cannot stick up prices well above inflation because there is competition - if they charge too much it is easy to switch to a different company for support. In many ways, and perhaps somewhat ironically, open source seems to produce a far more open market, capitalist system than proprietary. Of course this is for commercial software aimed at institutes/companies, not shrink-wrapped software for the public where personal budgets are far smaller and the price cannot be negotiated with everyone purchasing the software.
Since open source software, at least when you carefully choose it, won't get obsolete as quickly, and even when it does and all fails, you can simply hire some programmers to maintain it for you.
However we are talking about management here. It is not wise to select the most rational solution inside a company. Everybody can find the most rational solution to a problem. If you make rational decisions in a management position you are easily replaced.
That is all really. Basically, this author sounded like "herp derp derp, open sores! loonix rules! haaaaar!"
(snore)
I've never understood how some OSS people seem to think spending money on licenses or support contracts is money wasted, but spending money on people to fight with software to make it do what you want is money well spent. No, it is all money either way. The question is what gets you more of what you want and costs less doing it.
There isn't a right answer for every situation. It depends on what your company does, what kind of people you have, how large it is, what your needs are and so on.
For example if you need a custom solution and you already have a bunch of developers, maybe getting OSS code and going that way is the correct answer (though maybe you don't give back, you don't have to if you don't distribute it). However if an off the shelf product meets your needs for a good price then it can well be the way to go.
An open source advocate publishes a study that recommends Open Source. This is about as credible as Microsoft publishing a study recommending Windows or Apple publishing a study recommending OS.X. Whether the study is accurate or not is made irrelevant by the authors known bias, just as it would from MS or Apple or any other vendor.
Our CEO calles Linux "linex". Not bad for a technology company which has approximately 200 Linux servers...
I found that most companies are afraid to use cloud services because they fear for the safety and integrity of their internal documents. This is whack in so many ways since the majority of the clients I dealt with had worse back-up and security in place than the cloud providers they feared. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
Standards 5h0uld 40,000 coming
to geeks who will work for nothing, or maybe a beer or two.
- greater innovation
- faster responce to change
- the ability to support a wide range of heterogeneous systems
- better access to skilled, motivated and innovative development and support staff
- faster exploitation of new technology developments
- the ability to draw on a global community for specilist knowlege and problem solving
- avoiding dependency on monopoly suppliers
- reduced total cost of owndership
- full visibility of, and thus confidence in the source code used Open for Business
AccountKiller
There are three key types of license under which OSS may be released:
- the GNU General Public License (GPL) requires that altered or extra code added to GPL software be also licensed under the GPL. This ensures the propagation of OSS but can cause licensing conflicts if GPL and proprietary software are combined.
- the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license gives anyone the freedom to release updates or modifications of the software under any license they wish.
- the Lesser GPL (LGPL) is a compromise between the restrictive GPL and the permissive BSD. Altered LGPL software must continue under LGPL, but extra code can be added under almost any license the author wishes. Open for Business
AccountKiller
"Whether the study is accurate or not is made irrelevant by the authors known bias"
Prof Jim Norton
AccountKiller
Think about this for a second. How many people here have jobs in developing software? Who wants programming as a career to conist of writing code without being paid? Now, I suspect that open source software is going to lead to fewer paying programming jobs.
I know that there are efforts to monetize open source software. However I think the tendancy is for a larger number of open source software users to not pay for software than those who would of proprietary software. its not legally required of them to do so.
The fact that open source software probably generates less revenue than proprietary software can only mean fewer programming jobs, its a job destroyer. Add the fact that the software can be so easily and legally copied being open source, it is likely that the programming jobs would be reduced even more since one or two open source projects would replace what may have been 5 or more proprietary products in the market, leading to less job creation.
I am certainly not opposed to the idea of source code being made available to users. Another model is a commercial shared source licence whereby access to the source code is provided when the product is purchased. This can include access to a revision control system, even, so that users of the software can contribute their own improvements back to the developers.
Originally in the old days of computers much software was made available for users. In those days in the 60s, software and hardware was sold as a bundled package, companies like IBM made their money by selling that package, including the hardware. This bundling however was challenged in court and as a result IBM was later required to stop doing this and charge seperately for the software, so software only companies could enter the business. The rise of software only companies meant software had to be monetized alone, it became harder to use hardware revenue to fund its development. As a result, companies became more protective of source code and did not licence it for free use.
Unfortunately the pendulum swung far in the other direction and instead of setting on a shared source model where paying users could access the code, the code was completely blocked off from users.
...but take any adobe application for instance...
You are missing the point - I explicitly excluded "shrink-wrapped software for the public". While Adobe might be at the upper end of that scale Photoshop etc. is still mass market software where the price is fixed in advanced (unless you are negotiating a site license discount in which case the box price is still an upper bound on cost). "Industrial" software is not limited in that regard e.g. Oracle DB or Blackboard LMS etc. In these cases the software is not made available to the mass market for a fixed price but instead the cost is a negotiation between the seller and purchaser.
The result is something like a drug pushing operation: low initial prices to get you hooked and then a rapid increase because migration is expensive and costly. I make no judgement about whether Open source is better or worse than proprietary simply that with Open Source you know exactly where you stand because companies providing support do so in open competition (or if you are large enough you can just hire programmers to provide your own support). Frankly whether or not open source is cheaper or more expensive depends primarily on how the company selling the proprietary software behaves which, with changing management, is impossible to predict and not under your control. So proprietary software introduces a cost risk which open source does not have so if you want to get me to take that risk you had better have something more than open source to make it worthwhile.
Open Source makes it possible for a team of programmers to add much more value with their work. When your work adds more value, you have more job possibilities and often, highter average wages.
That maxima is almost always true. But it plays out in complex and unintuitive ways at the real world. Don't try to emmulate an economy within your brain, it is a losing proposition.
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