My apologies for not being clear. But what I mean is that what truly matters is what management believes. You can have the best open-source product in the world, but you'll still have businesses/agencies opting for corporate solutions instead simply because there is an illusion of safety and reliablity backing up their products.
That's true. But the people who call the shots think differently. To them, business solutions are more reliable than open-source ones. What is better doesn't matter -- it's what management thinks is best.
I don't really know. I do know public education contains some of the most laughable IT staffs in existence, though.
I would take a guess that it's all about the feeling of security. Managers (or whatever government equivalent) are going to feel safer with business solutions rather than open-source alternatives because of support for bugs or other problems. If MS Word screws up, you call Microsoft. If Open Office (using it as an example) screws up, what then? There's no business guarantee that OO will respond in a timely manner to the problem.
A lot of outdated technologies still exist today that have existed for much longer than 25 years. For example, many legacy programs use Fortran, and it's still quite possible to find ISA to PCI adapters.
Considering the high prevalance that IDE has had over the past 15-20 years, it's not unreasonable to assume that someone in the future would be able to find a way to read data off of then outdated technologies. And even then, it would still be reasonable to assume that someone then would have an old computer laying around that would easily read the data.
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My apologies for not being clear. But what I mean is that what truly matters is what management believes. You can have the best open-source product in the world, but you'll still have businesses/agencies opting for corporate solutions instead simply because there is an illusion of safety and reliablity backing up their products.
That's true. But the people who call the shots think differently. To them, business solutions are more reliable than open-source ones. What is better doesn't matter -- it's what management thinks is best.
I don't really know. I do know public education contains some of the most laughable IT staffs in existence, though.
I would take a guess that it's all about the feeling of security. Managers (or whatever government equivalent) are going to feel safer with business solutions rather than open-source alternatives because of support for bugs or other problems. If MS Word screws up, you call Microsoft. If Open Office (using it as an example) screws up, what then? There's no business guarantee that OO will respond in a timely manner to the problem.
Each license bought allows for tech support from Microsoft. Is there any such tech support from open source developers? Usually not.
When you have tax dollars freely available, cutting costs matter little when expedience for bureaucrats is much more important.
I wish I had karma to mod you up.
A lot of outdated technologies still exist today that have existed for much longer than 25 years. For example, many legacy programs use Fortran, and it's still quite possible to find ISA to PCI adapters. Considering the high prevalance that IDE has had over the past 15-20 years, it's not unreasonable to assume that someone in the future would be able to find a way to read data off of then outdated technologies. And even then, it would still be reasonable to assume that someone then would have an old computer laying around that would easily read the data.