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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."
What do the other elite forces think - what do the seals use ?
Nullius in verba
...they're quite right. Open Source is not magic pixie dust. As long as software is made with the same broken techniques, the same broken tools, by the same broken people, it will continue to be just as broken as proprietary software. I think after a decade and a half of pro-FOSS FUD it's finally gotten to the point where people are ready to admit that the promise of FOSS has fallen well short of the mark due primarily to a lack of market incentives to ensure software is produced using best current engineering practices.
Consequently, whatever your particular need, you may find that a FOSS application fits the bill where a proprietary one wouldn't, or vice versa. 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.
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.
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!”
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.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Every time there's a story about OSS software being less than perfect, someone always trots this tired crap out. "Oh if it isn't want you want you can just fix it!" That is complete bullshit and you should know it. If you don't, you are hopelessly naive.
First off, most people are not programmers and many do not even have the request problem solving, analytical, and mathematical skills to become one. If you aren't a programmer, you can't just go and fix software. Becoming a programmer isn't magic either, you don't go and read a book and then you are good. It takes years of experience to get proficient, and decades to really master and is something you need to spend a lot of time on. If you think you are some hot-shit programmer and you "picked it up just by reading" and "just do it in your spare time" then guess what? You aren't near as good as you think you are.
Second, even if someone is a programmer they may not have the requisite skills or knowledge to deal with a piece of software. Not all software is created equal, not all problems are the same to solve. Someone might be a programmer who's actually pretty good, but knows about making database code because that's what they do. However if they are trying to implement an algorithm for processing audio they might be lost because they don't understand how that works, it is another set of knowledge.
Finally, even if someone does have the skills, knowledge and experience to do it, maybe they just don't want to spend the time. We all have only so much time to spend in a day, maybe they are not interested in dropping a bunch of time to fix something that is to them just a tool. They'd rather pay to have one that works and spend their time on other shit.
So knock it off with the "oh it is open just do it yourself" crap. That is extremely silly, and you know it.
And ... MBAs? WTF? Seriously, SAS is one of the most comprehensive, technically oriented languages out there. It doesn't support the 'McDonald's Burger-Flipping Developer' approach like many other languages - it requires someone with more than a one-or-two year college course to work effectively in it.
It is also, hands down, the best language for cross-platform work. It doesn't promote the 'lock-the-suckers-in-to-our-proprietary-model', promoted by so many others.
There are some 'weaknesses'. It doesn't do maps well, it is pretty poor at graphical stuff, and it's OLAP attempt, while nice to work in, isn't that powerful ... but that is also where adding another software product comes in. As an example pulling data together from multiple sources/platforms, creating a database, then dropping something like Tableau on top of that. You *could* do something like this with OBI ... but the back-end part would be significantly harder than in SAS
Finally ... backwards compatibility. SAS has not screwed its users, with an upgrade that breaks previous code.
I like higher level languages ... the more automation, the better. SAS continues to improve in that direction. At the same time, I like a language that allows one to do things at a lower level, when necessary. SAS has kept that too ... which puts it waaaay above certain other languages/packages in that regard.