SAS Mocked For Recommending 60% Proprietary Software, 40% Open Source (infoworld.com)

This week SAS wrote that open source technology "has its own, often unexpected costs," recommending organizations maintain a balance of 60% proprietary software to 40% open software. An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: How they arrived at this bizarre conclusion is hard to fathom, except that SAS sells more than $1 billion worth of proprietary software every year and presumably would like to continue, despite a clear trend toward open-source-powered analytics... In a Burtch Works survey of over 1,100 quant pros, 61.3% prefer open source R or Python to SAS, and only 38.6% opting for SAS, with that percentage growing for open source options every year.

Worse for SAS, a variety of open source data infrastructure and analytics tools threaten to encroach on its bastions in data management, business intelligence, and analytics... Nearly all innovation in data infrastructure is happening in open source, not proprietary software. That's a tide SAS can try to fight with white papers, but it would do better to join by embracing open source in its product suite.
"In the paper, SAS correctly argues that open source versus proprietary software is not an either/or decision..." writes InfoWorld, but they note that the report also "put the percentage of open source adopters at a mere 25%, which is pathetically wrong." The article suggests a hope that the report "is the product of a rogue field marketing team, and not the company's official position." Adobe's vice president of mobile commented on Twitter, "I just wonder who in their marketing dept thought this was a good idea."

Comments

Seems about right

[somenickname]

This seems about right. Once you've introduced proprietary software into the mix, a huge amount of your time is going to be spent fighting with the software vendor, waiting for updates from the software vendor, working around the idiocy of the software vendor, etc. So, even though 90% of the company runs on open source software, you still need 60% of the workforce to deal with the proprietary software.

Re:Seems about right

[darkain]

This is however also true of open-source software. There are some very large and mission critical software tools in usage today that I've found bugs in, debugged them, wrote patches, and then had to argue with maintainers to get them pushed upstream. This process often times takes MONTHS after the patch is available and ready to go. The only other option is to literally manually build the package each and every new release with the small patches in place rather than using distribution pre-built packages, which takes considerably more time to deploy to an entire cluster than a simple "update" from apt, yum, pkg, whatever. So yes, even in F/OSS, there are costs with dealing with the software.

Software for sale...

[__aaclcg7560]

I came across a box of personal papers from the late 1990's that had print out of license keys for dozens of programs that I bought back then. Many of those programs have open source counterparts. Except for some specialized software, I generally don't buy software anymore.

SAS is expensive shelfware

[lucm]

A former client of mine was paying SAS $10,000/month to host a shitty dashboard that was updated once per quarter. It didn't even come with a vanity URL. That's the typical SAS market: gold-plated clients with unlimited budgets and almost no actual needs.

We spent an afternoon rewriting this piece of shit as a HTML dump from matlab and "deployed" it on the corporate intranet.

When you don't provide added value, you quickly become obsolete.

Farewell, SAS.

60/40 is exactly right.

[Snufu]

I have experimented with many mixtures of proprietary and open source software and discovered the ideal ratio when creating a document is: six pages in MS Word, four pages in Libre Office. Harmony and balance. However, it does slow down our team workflow. And making every document exactly ten pages doesn't speed things up either.