It seems to me that companies will continue to use what works best. Sometimes OSS will fit the bill, while other times commercial software will best serve the need.
Off the shelf solutions offer many advantages that OSS will find difficult to duplicate. An example of this is technical support. I am well aware that the vast majority of OSS projects have a large and acitve community that is capable of helping with many issues that may arise. However, this is not something that a project manager can look at and assign a cost to. With commercial software, you get commercial support. RadHat has shown that a successful business can be formed around open source software, but I don't know if this business model will form around other OSS projects.
Where OSS shines is research and development type work. The large code base created by OSS projects are useful to people who just want to try something out. I don't want to pay money to fool around with speech recognition in my new app, so ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking SDKs are out of the question. However, the CMU Sphinx project offers a speech recognition system that I can play with for free.
I think it is just an ActivMedia Pioneer robot http://www.activrobots.com/ One of these was used for a robotics lab at my university. I didn't get to play with it much, but it contains a full blown PC with linux and an xterm on it.
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I'd like to know what value is_computer_on_fire() returned.
It seems to me that companies will continue to use what works best. Sometimes OSS will fit the bill, while other times commercial software will best serve the need.
Off the shelf solutions offer many advantages that OSS will find difficult to duplicate. An example of this is technical support. I am well aware that the vast majority of OSS projects have a large and acitve community that is capable of helping with many issues that may arise. However, this is not something that a project manager can look at and assign a cost to. With commercial software, you get commercial support. RadHat has shown that a successful business can be formed around open source software, but I don't know if this business model will form around other OSS projects.
Where OSS shines is research and development type work. The large code base created by OSS projects are useful to people who just want to try something out. I don't want to pay money to fool around with speech recognition in my new app, so ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking SDKs are out of the question. However, the CMU Sphinx project offers a speech recognition system that I can play with for free.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
Thats why. Also, throw in a bigger hard drive and you have a great backup server or file server.
Just don't try hosting any slashdot stories. Even a cluster of these things couldn't handle that.
I think it is just an ActivMedia Pioneer robot http://www.activrobots.com/ One of these was used for a robotics lab at my university. I didn't get to play with it much, but it contains a full blown PC with linux and an xterm on it.
Yes, Epson has clearly demonstrated their superoir technological prowess when it comes to editing strings out of videos.