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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."
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."
The percentage here isn't the story, the story is that they are recommending open source.
Fifteen years ago, that wouldn't have happened: open source was a communist virus.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've heard before about the "hidden costs" of open source software. What utter crock. Closed source software has:
1) The same or worse hidden costs:
Their support largely consists of other users in support forums, with the majority of the cost absorbed by the client organisation.
Licence management costs are compared to zero as a baseline, and litigation for accidental breaches of licence is a real and catastrophically expensive danger for closed source only.
In terms of the effectiveness of the software, commercial software is largely chosen by those ill equipt to make the choice, based on marketing rather than any sensible criteria, so it LESS likely to be effective (and no, your favourite example of photoshop being nicer than GIMP or whatever doesn't change this general point, because that is consumer software in a completely different domain).
Lock in! Your bosses subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy. If you work out that it is worse than open source alternatives, you're still stuck with it because "we bought it so you better use it!". Then when it's time for contract renewal "we don't have time to swap" so you have to renew. Bullshit.
2) More up front cost:
Again, open source sets the standard at $0, and to take my most hated example of business software that is shitter than numerous open source alternatives (ClearCase), you can start the bargaining at about, what was it? $4k per head? They don't make it easy to find the cost but I think that was it. And if you are one of those people going "oh I don't understand why all of my co-workers hate clearcase because I have no trouble getting it to work and it has this one feature that is really nice in a particular use case, so..." do you actually imagine that to be worth the cost?
The sad thing about all this is: I'm not an open source / free software zealot. I don't have a problem with the idea of paying a fair amount for something that is good value for money. My problem is that IT IS NOT THE CASE, in general, for closed source software from large vendors, and SAP, in particular, is shithouse in most cases that I have seen.
SAS software's primary focus is on getting maximum value from analytics. A reliable, open analytics platform underpins that focus. Combining the power of SAS with open source technologies enables you to unify disparate toolsets, eliminate silos, increase productivity, foster collaboration and facilitate business agility.
Ah, a buzzword generator. Are these people relevant to policy wankers?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yep, but the idea you can recommend a particular configuration by a simple percentage is just silly.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It just depends on exactly what functionality you want, and there's no hard and fast rule to guide you. You literally are forced to try different packages, see which ones are buggy, and then pick the one that's right for you.
The difference is that when you find the software package you want, if it's open source then you can improve it and squish the nasty bugs but if it's closed you are stuck waiting for someone to fix it for you. If you don't want to put the time/money/effort into improving the software then I believe the saying, "beggars can't be choosers" comes into play.
TL:DR: Put the money you would have paid for getting closed source into improving open source and everyone will have much better software. Simply whining about it not being perfect helps nobody.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Nobody has a patent for mathematics. Even if you are in some data crunching field, there's no law saying you're required to know every random vendor halfway across the world.
Ezekiel 23:20
Many of us here are competent. This means we wouldn't go near SAS or any similar company with a ten foot pole. I have heard of SAS. What I remember about them is another one of those companies that has a business model that relies on customer ignorance. That's all I need to know or remember, and if you are thinking of arguing to the contrary, this article probably isn't the place to do it ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Donald Trump: "The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe, it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better. And certainly cyber is one of them."
Yeah, we gotta do better at "cyber", whatever that is. Has this fucking idiot ever even seen a computer?
Seriously, Trump has the speech patterns of a classic sociopath- the fractured, awkward grammar, the inability to finish most of his sentences, the veering off to side topics and never returning to the original subject, the hazy references to things he clearly has no idea about...and on and on and on. He pretends to know stuff when it's painfully obvious that he's ignorant of the subject, kind of like a kid giving a book report on a book he hasn't read.
"War and Peace was about some war, and then the people wanted peace so they went to war to get the peace and there was a lot of stuff and things that happened. I highly recommend this book. In conclusion, we have to do better at cyber! The End."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...