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.'"

Comments

Publication bias

[Anonymous Coward]

All studies urging CIOs to prefer "professional solutions" -- not published on /.

Re:Publication bias

[Sir_Sri]

And are probably not published at all.

I wouldn't expect most CIO's to be broadcasting to the world their costing estimates or disclosing the full extent of their IT infrastructure etc.

Besides, it really does matter on a company by company basis - what works for your company may not work for mine, so as much as generic studies like this can be a useful piece of the puzzle they aren't the final word for any specific outfit.

Commercial support

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Commercial support

[Anonymous Coward]

Real CIOs spend dollars on officially-unsupported software all the time in commercial companies, successfully. They do it by hiring real talent that can manage open source software stacks internally (do their own bug-hunting and upstream contributions).

Re:Commercial support

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised what a CIO in the grip of the development department might do. Or, more to the point, since they are generally free, the CIO might be surprised to find out what is running on his hardware since one only asks the CIO for permission for things if they need it in the budget.

I've seen a few places that will install free software and then hand the execs a bill for "optional" support once it is part of the application. Although I like the initiative and the way they get around the execs, I often want to strangle them because they tend to throw this stuff at production without understanding that just because it is the newest and greatest thing, doesn't mean that anyone really knows how to support it.

Re:Commercial support

[Gothmolly]

You must be new here.

Re:Commercial support

[sumdumass]

Actually, they do it all the time by keeping outdated and unsupported pieces of software around instead of updating to the latest and greatest for the sake of doing it. This can be open or closed source software. I do not know how many windows XP workstations I run across on a daily basis not because the software running on them will only run on XP or the systems will not support windows 7 (some will not though), but because getting some piece of software to run on windows 7 requires an upgrade that costs thousands and there is no legit reason to justify it until it is necessary (No features needed or wanted outside of working on windows 7 reliably).

Hell, I have two application suits that can be upgraded right now under the existing support contracts (one of which I can get no live support outside of knowledge base articles if I do not upgrade) but it will not happen because the companies will not authorize the budget to do the upgrades. They are in a maintenance mode waiting on the economy to turn up more or something.

It's not just about competent employees or open verses closed source software, it is about saving a buck, backwards compatibility and so on too.

Re:Commercial support

[SpzToid]

Just wondering, but wouldn't it be worth it for the sake of oh, I don't know, lower hardware and space costs, energy, backup costs, ongoing risk, etc.) to virtualize those XP workstations to run in a more modern environment? As a small-business linux guy, I personally find the most cost-effective way to run any Windows requirement is by using virtual machines.

To try to answer my own question, I suppose not, because doing nothing at this point is currently perceived as the lowest-cost, lowest-risk option in your shop?

I ask because I don't have the responsibility you do, I'm just a developer and I'm curious what you think. In my own experience, I've learned to virtualize just about anything once I cloned the disk safely using dd on Linux, but I must say I worked for the skill, and broke a few things first; and clearly there's risk and cost creating even a virtual clone from the original HD, following earlier common backups bla bla bla, (and I suppose you must accept use of VMware-or-whatever drivers).

Re:Commercial support

[unixisc]

If they're not paying for support, but the thing breaks, and works stops @ the company - they cannot take customer orders, they cannot trigger orders to their supply chain or things of that sort, then it's costing them money. On one hand, the paychecks of employees still have to keep pouring out, but the revenue ain't gonna come in until operations can continue smoothly.

So if a company couldn't work day to day, and the reason was that the computers were broke, the CIO's butt would be on fire until he had everything up & running. So yeah, a CIO might (and should) choose to go the open source route, but in that case, they'd also hire a team of software guys whose job it is to make sure that everything is running smoothly - whether it's by patching code, or advising changes in certain configurations, and so on. Long term, it saves them from having to spend a bundle when a software title wants to do a migration but IT is not ready for it: they can keep running the old stuff as long as it works for them.

Logical Fallacy Bias

[oakgrove]

How about studies of AC first posters with nothing worthwhile to say resorting to the predictably boring ad hominem?

Re:Logical Fallacy Bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Hur dur. Yeah, railing against Slashdot for not showing the studies you want to see rather than arguing against the study highlighted if you disagree is pretty much textbook example of an ad hominem. Keep trying though, sparky.

Re:Logical Fallacy Bias

[bhcompy]

A statement of fact is not an ad hominem.

Re:Logical Fallacy Bias

[PNutts]

His claim is bias, nothing more. Here's a textbook example of ad hominem.

Is this 2012?

[nagasrinivas]

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).

Re:Of course it's the rational solution

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Yes, I'm sure hiring those programmers will be a lot less expensive than buying proprietary software. We can just pay them in pizza and beer, right?

And how is that money well spent?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:OSS == Faster resolutions?

[bickerdyke]

Yes, faster. Bug resolution in OSS will never be slower than fixing them for yourself. That may be slow, but compared to closed source, where there is no guarantee that a bug will be fixed at all, it's definitly faster.

Re:Open Source licenses ..

[unixisc]

Actually, there is a whole bonanza/plethora (depending on how one looks @ it) of Open Source licenses out there, and so there is quite a variety. The above are just some of the more popular ones. As for GPL, there is a whole mess of issues about combining it w/ any licenses - not just proprietary licenses. The FSF really muddies the waters by having all the categories os copyleft/non-copyleft, Free/non-Free, GPL-compatible/GPL-incompatible and so on