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

Elite

[bugs2squash]

What do the other elite forces think - what do the seals use ?

Re:Elite

[r1348]

Last time I checked, seals seem to run mostly on fish, with the occasional penguin thrown in for the sake of variety.
They however seem to disregard licensing entirely, supposedly because they share the same environment with pirates.

Re: Elite

[Zero__Kelvin]

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 ;-)

Re:Elite

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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."

Re:Elite

[cleerline2.0]

Is it a case of "GNU dares wins."?

Re:Elite

[anegg]

Having worked for years with a US defense contractor, and being married to someone who works at a government-funded research and development organization, I can tell you that the word "cyber" being used as a noun rather than an adjective is well-ensconced in the US government domain. It appears to me that it generally refers to what I might call cyber security, but the usage of the term smears out to encompass other related domains as well. There are units of organizations that are called things like "the Cyber Division", etc. So Trump's speech patterns aside, his use of this term in this way simply mirrors the way the term was being used in this domain already. Trump's personal knowledge of computers is probably similar to his contemporaries - they know that they exist, and are widespread, but don't necessarily deign to touch the keyboards themselves (except Trump et al. with phones/Blackberry devices, etc.) any more than they pick up a pen to write anything, get behind the wheel of a car, or enter a kitchen to cook a meal.

As unpopular as it will be to hear...

[Digital Avatar]

...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.

Re:As unpopular as it will be to hear...

[TapeCutter]

Yep, but the idea you can recommend a particular configuration by a simple percentage is just silly.

Re:As unpopular as it will be to hear...

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:As unpopular as it will be to hear...

[Kjella]

Meh, I'd say the people who write open source software on a non-commercial basis generally have a passion for it, make more effort in making it work correct and work harder to hone their skills than coders just looking for a paycheck. What's missing is usually the time and resources, sometimes it amazes me how much gets done with a skeleton crew. Projects and packages where it turns out there was really only one maintainer and he suddenly got other priorities and things go into limbo.

Most projects are not like the Linux kernel where there's several candidates and a nomination process. Often it's more like if you want to write code or take ownership then tag, you're it. Or it's just nobody who is going to write that kind of software or functionality in their spare time. Or it just reaches a level of mediocrity that's good enough to get shit done and not enough care about polish or user friendliness or niche features. It's 2017 and MS Office and Photoshop is alive and well. I think I've heard since '97 that Office was pretty much "done", well shouldn't we be catching up then?

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.

Re:Seems about right

[jopsen]

Well, with open source you have the option to patch... With proprietary you are forced to find a workaround or make a hack to the part of the system you control.

Personally, I usually do a work around and keep using upstream packages... Then file a PR/patch and when/if that lands go remove my workaround.

Just because open source software gives you the option to fix it yourself and roll our own patch packages doesn't mean you have to choose that road.
It depends on the situation.. But at-least you have the option! :)

Re:Seems about right

[SendBot]

This happens to me too. With one such software, I was trying to discuss my bugfix in the forum when the admin deleted my comment. I asked why, and he said disclosing my fully-original modification that made the software work was a violation of the license agreement.

So I asked if Google was in violation of their license for distributing the code they ripped off and removed the Apache license from, and they deleted the whole post.

Percentage doesn't matter

[phantomfive]

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.

The same old bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What is SAS?

[fustakrakich]

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?

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.