“A recent survey by Gartner found that more than half of organizations surveyed have adopted open source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions. However, the survey revealed that only one-third of responding organizations had a formal OSS policy in place.”
All the companies out there making use of open source.
Dont forget to donate.
Make this part of of your open source policy.
lol.
Quick reaction before reading the linked page.
I think this is very candid wishful thinking. Just reading the teaser in the rss feeds in Opera, I had a very nasty thought against these hypocritical “organizations”: have you realized that the cost isn’t cited among the reasons?
(
Btw, open source is necessarily freeware in my opinion. OSS is welcome and certainly has its merits, but no software that helps me out in significant tasks should be free, in my book again.
)
I believe in giving back to open source projects, who, as demonstrated by the shocking item about GIMP weeks ago, direly need contributions. I’ve done it in recent months and even thought about writing and submitting an article to OSnews about that topic.
I currently work in the premises of a company that has 12500 people on this site alone. Granted, it’s not an IT organization but it’s a big organization that has factories throughout the world. We all use Eclipse in the IT department, and this organization has never thrown a penny (or, more correctly, a eurocent) in the Eclipse foundation’s tip box. Organizations are just too happy for an opportunity to cut costs. Why would they cut their cost cuts by “donating”? What does that weird word mean anyway?
Edited 2011-02-08 16:00 UTC
voodoo you should write that article.
This issue need some pushing.
Some might be using enterprise solutions and thus pay for support. Or even have purchased licenses for their open source software (remember, GPL isn’t the only OSS license and nor does all open source licenses restrict against software sales).
The fact is, OSS is everywhere these days from fairly menial applications like Filezilla to heavy duty operating systems. It’s so widespread that it is very easy to use OSS without even realising it (Firefox being a common example).
However, there’s also plenty of occasions when neither the license nor the cost were a deciding factor in choosing a product. For example, one might choose a Linux webserver over Windows Server 2008 as CentOS will run Apache / lighttpd with less overhead and thus you get more performance for you buck.
Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) OSS /IS/ better than proprietary software because the actual product itself is better.
More often than not, really.
I disagree, most open source alternatives to proprietary solutions are limited in functionality. It’s only on the server that open source is very competitive and even then there are plenty of cases where the proprietary solution outperforms open source (Oracle DB).
Most proprietary software in fact does not have an open source alternative. Once you start looking at industry-specific software the gaps really become obvious.
Sure. Oracle is a niche product that is not suitable in the majority of deployment scenarios but I’m sure it’s good at something (other than financing Ellison’s next fighter jet). There must better examples of closed source that is “better” than open source.
Obviously we are talking about when there is an alternative.
Depends on what industry you’re looking at.
It’s a good example because MySQL is well funded and Oracle can easily outperform it. Sure Oracle is not cost effective for most organizations but it is quality software.
You are the one who made a broad generalization, I’m not going to make any assumptions about the limits of your generalization especially since there are plenty of open source fanatics that have no idea as to how much industry specific software exists.
I use both open source and proprietary and judge software by its usefulness on a per application basis. I’m using Chrome right now and have Filezilla and Keepass open the background. Being wed to open source ideology seems like such a burden.
Only the software industry has an ample selection of alternatives. Every other industry has at least one Product X that has no open source alternative.
As someone who works with Oracle and has for the last decade, its a piece of shit. When the official installation instructions have you patching files part way through installation, so that the installation won’t fail, that’s crap software. When they changed the length of daylight savings, which occurs on a weekend, Oracle put out patches for it the wednesday after. Thats crap software.
Now if you look at sheer numbers, then Oracle very much is a niche product. There are thousands of times for mysql and postgres installs out there than Oracle. Most people needing a database don’t require the feature set or support that Oracle gets you.
There are plenty of markets where open source leads the way, clusters being one of them. Embedded electronics are another.
So at the very least Oracle offers more features.
I’d say embedded is probably a split market. Linux is used heavily but then so are proprietary systems like VxWorks and IOS. I’m surprised actually by how many routers do not run Linux when software like DD-WRT is available. But there is definitely a trend towards Linux.
But I was talking more about software that is ran by the user, not software that runs in the background. When it comes to desktop software there is a large gap between open source and proprietary. That says nothing about the innate quality of open source, it more shows that existing methods of funding open source are inadequate.
That is because you do not consider the whole picture.
Open source software is best where it makes sense for a wide group of buisnesses and people can collaborate together to make a software product that they all can use to reduce their operating costs (typically in other areas). In areas like that, open source software beats proprietary solutions hands down.
For example, database:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/
Open source software is not as successful in niche areas where only a relatively few firms can use the product, and it does not occur to the users of the product to collaborate.
For example, desktop CAD
http://www.bricsys.com/en_INTL/
Personal finance:
http://moneydance.com/
Fortunately, proprietary solutions such as the above are these days being offered as cross-platform products, which do not force people into one desktop platform or another.
It seems from others in this thread that Oracle matches my own experience of many “enterprise” products: software of such low quality that Joe User won’t buy it and therefore it is sold to companies instead.
If you are comparing and stating that something is better than something else then obviously that something else has to exist. If a product is the sole player in a field then it is the best by default (although that does not necessarily mean that it’s good) no matter if it is OSS or not.
So do I and my experience is that OSS generally outperform (whatever your relevant metric may be) closed-source software. Not always, but more often than not.
Good thing I’m wed to my wife then, eh?
Edited 2011-02-09 02:24 UTC
Oracle is the big daddy RDMS, It been years since I used it but quite a few large fininacial organisations up in London are paying people £100,000 a year for Oracle Database admins … It is definitely good for something.
It certainly is not suitable for a e-commerce site (unless it is truely massive), but nonetheless for very large scale stuff I don’t think anything else comes close
As for closed software being better than open source, my opinions are as follows,
Microsoft Office > Open/Libre Office / Star Office
Skype > Ekiga
Photoshop > Gimp
Illustrator > Inkscape
CuteFTP > Filezilla (FileZilla 1 out of 10 times won’t upload something reliably, CuteFTP always seems to work and I upload a lot of files).
Fireworks > GIMP/Photoshop/Paint.NET (ultimately what you are using it for).
ImgBurn > Everything else
However, there are some apps that are open source, don’t have any compelling commercial alternatives .. such as,
Paint.NET (It isn’t now, but it was)
WinMerge
Putty
WinSCP
7Zip (better compression than rar and can use multiple cores)
CDEX
Virtual Box (seems to work with everything I throw at it)
Handbrake
Windows Media Player Classic/VLC
Synergy+
Tortoise SVN
All highly reliable applications and IMO better than any commercial alternatives.
We should investigate the recent versions and the adequate programs. For example Ekiga was substituted by Empathy in 2009 as the default VoIP client in Ubuntu. Also we should take into account that Skype uses Qt, which is free software, so Skype wouldn’t also be 100% closed source software.
Strange. You don’t mention WinSCP now, but you do it later as a recommended program. I used WinSCP years ago, and it can be used for ftp transferences, have you tried it also for your ftp uses?
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/screenshots
Mmm… “everything else”, that’s a big claim. I use sometimes the Cdrkit programs (www.cdrkit.org/) and habitually its graphical interfaces like K3b.
For the uses I have: I would add to the list Apache, Emule, Amarok, Workrave, Qt Creator, ….
And a really nice advantage of them is that you can improve them, you can develop new features, a company can contract a developer to modify a program, etc.
Here we go again!
Another bunch of unsubstantiated views based on personal bias sold as fact without a shred of evidence to back it up. Please show us the metrics in support of your sweeping statements, I dare you!
Let’s look at Oracle DB being all singing and dancing. Why do you think Oracle kept MySQL alive and the MSSQL engine is distributed for free? Oracle is an 800lb gorilla that does NOT always outperform FLOSS, specifically PostgreSQL. As Oracle’s license specifically disallows benchmarks to be published without their consent, we’ll never know the exact numbers beyond some unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence but that seems to be an area you’re more than comfortable in.
Industry specific software is NOT most software! In fact, if you stop your anti-FLOSS foaming at the mouth crusade long enough to read over your following statement:
Since when does industry specific software equate with most software, something you not too subtly hint at without stating it outright? Also, industry specific is by it’s very definition niche!
Before you start your usual flaming on me being a freetard ™, let me set the record strait. I regularly use both FLOSS and closed source software both at work and at home. For me both types have their strengths and weaknesses but I certainly don’t let the politics influence my decision on what I use.
Personal bias? I don’t use Oracle DB, I use SQL Server.
I pointed out that Oracle outperforms MySQL. This is a consensus in the industry, maybe you should calm down and explain why you think everyone is wrong.
Not when looking at it collectively. There is also some key mainstream software for which there is no functionally equivalent open source alternative. Quickbooks, Turbotax, MS Office, Photoshop, and Final Cut are a few that come to mind.
I don’t use that term, and you can check my history. So that means you are the one with unsubstantiated views.
And I’m not talking about your use of SQL server, I’m talking about your personal bias dictating your software evangelising.
No you didn’t. I quote: I disagree, most open source alternatives to proprietary solutions are limited in functionality. It’s only on the server that open source is very competitive and even then there are plenty of cases where the proprietary solution outperforms open source (Oracle DB).
First of all, you sweepingly state the open source “alternatives” to proprietary solutions are limited, without any evidence to back up your claim. You then fail to mention MySQL but instead point out, again without any evidence to back it up, that “even then there are plenty of cases where the proprietary solution outperforms open source (Oracle DB).”
A consensus in the industry? How can it be a consensus if Oracle’s license specifically disallows the publishing of benchmarks without their consent? By the way, I was talking about PostgreSQL where the industry “consensus” is that it has forced Oracle to up it’s game due to kicking it’s rear end in the past on performance.
Again you fail to get it. Where are your metrics?
I know a swath of people that prefer OpenOffice to MS Office, specifically since the ribbon interface (though I’m not one of them). Same goes for GIMP as they’d rather not pirate the ridiculously priced Photoshop. I’ve never met anyone who uses either Quickbooks or Turbotax so I’m not going to comment on them. As for Final Cut: Sure, if you run a Mac.
Really? Your blog says otherwise.
Some of the most popular open source alternatives like OpenOffice and The Gimp are sold on the basis that most users do not need the complete functionality MS Office and Photoshop. Most of the software on the Amazon top 100 do not have adequate open source alternatives.
Because word gets around. If Oracle and MySQL were comparable in performance and features then Oracle would not have the same profit margins. Given this migration guide it is clear that MySQL is at the very least missing a lot of features:
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2009/03/13/50-things-to-know-before-migra…
When a company like Oracle is charging 6 figures for a license you better believe there are plenty of corps that are looking at alternatives. I have actually heard more bad things about their sales team than any other software company yet big corps keep writing them checks.
It isn’t simply a case of subjective interface preferences. There are many industry required features that OpenOffice doesn’t have.
Same goes for GIMP which is that there are specific features that only exist in Photoshop. It isn’t a 1-to-1 alternative.
They are top sellers.
Open source video editing software is a major gap.
You must not read it then. I haven’t used the word “freetard” in a single post. Stop making stuff up.
You still fail to back up any of your assertions about FLOSS software under performing with metrics, which was my point. You point to MySQL as some sort of overreaching benchmark for the rest of the industry yet have twice failed to give PostgreSQL it’s due. Again, all of this done without metrics. Care to provide some?
You point out a select, very few, desktop apps that have, in your words, no functional equivalent in the open source world yet I was able to point to several apps which in fact do.
I don’t have a problem with people voicing their opinions, nothing could be further from the truth. I have an issue with people stating what so obviously is a bias opinion as fact without a shred of evidence.
I ask you one more time, do you have any metrics to support your assertions? I thought not.
Funny how you didn’t demand any such metrics from Soulbender when claimed that open source was more often a better product. That’s a double standard and one that I have become quite used to so you don’t have to defend yourself.
You are the one that brought up PostgreSQL, I am under no obligation prove anything related to it. MySQL was an example of how even when open source is well funded it is no guarantee of superior quality over a proprietary offering. This is still true even if PostgreSQL outperforms Oracle. You are the one who is missing the greater point which was in response to Soulbender’s smug and baseless comment.
You have twice in this thread made false claims about me using the word “freetard”. I haven’t used it once here or on my blog and yet are ranting about bias. That is grand. Smear me with false accusations and then complain about bias.
Soulbender did not start pointing out, baseless by the way, specifics on software. Something you do repeatedly.
You didn’t mention MySQL with your original post, you just stated as fact that Oracle outperforms it’s FLOSS competitors.
Now you start insinuating that MySQL is of lower quality than Oracle yet in this very thread an ex Oracle employee quite clearly points out that Oracle requires you to patch software during the installation, something no FLOSS product past Alfa would ever expect a user to put up with.
Still no metrics I see.
What does me mistakenly associating the umpteen mentions of the word “freetard” by those that post comments on your blog with you have anything to do with bias?
Again, still no metrics for those assumptions you call facts.
Yes, in the blog of someone: allowing that kind of insults, as if nothing happened, without being moderated or answered… is a way of insulting without getting the hands dirty.
Most of the software on that list is MS Office, MS Windows, Anti-Virus/Firewall/Security.
I’ll give you Dragon, Adobe’s CS and Adobe Primiere.(Amazon UK and DE sites)
US is a skewed market, because it’s biased more towards tax calculating software than the software industry overall. But accounting software overall will probably never be opensourced, otherwise it would be country specific.
Do you have an MBA? Because there are 2 major flaws in that sentence:
A) You fail to define the “industry”
B) You allude stating a single widely used/required feature
I work at an IT company over 400’000 strong(try guessing which) 50% don’t have MS Office. All somehow get by…
I love me some OpenShot…
And OpenOffice writer outperforms MS Notepad.
However neither examples are comparing like for like.
Have a read up on this next time you want to comment about open source databases:
http://www.postgresql.org/
what was the link for? I was hoping to see some benchmarks but it’s just a homepage.
The link was because nt_jerkface seems to have overlooked Postgre.
MySQL isn’t designed for large-scale datahouses which depend upon transaction processing and the lark.
I mean, you /can/ do that kind of stuff in MySQL, but you’re better off using PostgreSQL (if you’re after an open source product).
Much like how you can build pretty competent databases in Access, but if you want anything scalable or dependable on a production environment, you’re far better off in MS SQL Server.
Now I’m not saying MySQL is any where as awkward to work with as Access / Jet, but MySQL does excel at small to medium scale implementations.
As for benchmarks, as said before, there’s little in the way of unofficial Oracle RDBMS benchmarks to make any meaningful comparison between PostgreSQL and other enterprise solutions.
Closed source software is focussed all about making a profit from the sale of the software itself. It is often characterised by addressing a unique specialist market, where there is not much competition, and it is possible to become the “best of breed” aplication. There are typically few enough users of such software, and their business area is itself unrelated to software, so that they are unable to band together, form an alliance and “roll their own” product.
Open source software is just about the opposite, it is more about reducing costs for everybody. It is not about making a profit from the sale of software, but rather about making and using low-cost quality software to make some other product for sale. Open source software flourishes in areas where just about everyone uses such software, and the software is very often even useful to people who write software themselves. Poeple from all over are able, and motivated, to work together and make a product of their own, thereby reducing ongoing costs for everyone.
Now the thing that most advocates of closed source software cannot seem to admit is that both models work. As a software company one can have a business model of making best-of-breed niche software, and selling it to a small market. Also, as a company that does not specialise in making software, one can still hire one or two staff to collaborate with others on a community project to develop open source software, and thereby reduce overall the software costs for the company. “Profit from slaes” and “reducing costs” are both valid ways to make profits for a business.
The model that also works, but which should not and does not deserve to, is lock-in. This is where a software company has a business model of making non-interoperable anti-feature software, and selling it to a large-but-captive market.
“The model that also works, but which should not and does not deserve to, is lock-in. This is where a software company has a business model of making non-interoperable anti-feature software, and selling it to a large-but-captive market.”
On the contrary… this is a very good way to sell software. We don’t live in a perfect world and all companies have the desire to ensure competitors don’t come in. This is especially true of keeping out lower cost copy cat competition.
I would argue that in the absence of ‘interoperability issues’, the natural thing for companies to do is engage in patents.
Just my opinion, but wars based on patents are much worse than wars based on interop… due to the legal nature of patents which drags the whole legal system into it. Whereas interop issues are always carefully balanced by the desire of users to interop and clever engineers reverse engineering things.
That hurts customers. If you have bought something that later forces you to go to the same vendor, with abusive prices, you already have experienced what’s a vendor lock-in.
For a classic example: buying a printer from X that only accepts ink from the vendor X (hey, you have even to pay the microchips that come in the cartridge because they want you locked into X) with abusive prices, because now you have to depend on them.
There’s an alternative, and is standards. That allows you to:
– use petrol, tyres, etc. in your car even if they are not from the car manufacturer.
– change screws, etc in your devices even if they are not from the device manufacturer.
– use a TV even if it’s not from the tv channel station. Note: this can change with the possible Apple, Microsoft or Google TV, we’ll see.
A “funny” and graphical way of seeing the effects of vendor lock-in in software sales is seen in:
http://www.antipatterns.com/images/lock-in.gif
Edited 2011-02-11 05:05 UTC
You know… when I acknowledge in my original post that we don’t live in a perfect world… it’s a recognition that interop issues are bad.
What I’m arguing is that patent wars are worse.
I’d rather have developers and engineers have the freedom to reverse engineer a protocol, then have them stopped from doing it by patent restrictions.
It’s an imperfect world unfortunately, and standards aren’t the end all either. It’s hard to standardize on a new and developing field. Of the things we should standardize… they pretty much are (networking protocols…)
Document formats… are tricky. Many come from a legacy when speed and memory and other issues were actually big things.
And most of this is handled by user concerns about interop.
Edited 2011-02-11 18:56 UTC
Well when open source gets into these organizations on the basis of being free to license you can’t be that surprised.
The GPL allowance of internal changes really works in the favor of big corps. They can add changes that give them a competitive advantage and then use a web interface for public access. Small companies don’t have that kind of manpower and can only make use of existing functionality.
From my personal experience in a fairly big company as a .Net developer, FOSS has a way of sneaking in. As a developer sitting at the bottom of the hierarchy you dont have to ask for a license. You just use it. Mostly without modification. A library here, a bit of JQuery there, a little application that solves a need. You don’t have to ask permission to use it, because it costs nothing. Of course in my position I cannot ask my company to give donations, but given a higher position I would definitely throw money at OSS that we use actively.
Open source was a problem solved by developers for developers, it starts with us and our choices of what to use. Evaluating, motivating, and procuring proprietary software creates a serious hit in productivity and sometimes a marketing rep will sell the worst software at a ridiculous price, that refuses to integrate with anything because you need to pay them more to integrate with their systems. You pay exorbitant support fees to often be given the finger and your business suffers from serious inefficiencies.
Open source has none of these problems and you can throw something out if it doesn’t work. You are not stuck on an infinite bandwagon of inefficiency.
There is a change in attitudes that needs to take place. Throwing money at an open source project is not always the answer. It may be better to pay the OSS developer to add features or fix bugs in his code, or to get your developers to do that and submit patches.
Businesses should also identify useful projects of their own and contribute those to the open source community. The community enhances your code, and everybody wins. Many good ideas die in the confines big business because nobody has the time to maintain or implement them.
Depends … I’ve been recently been working with a .NET 1.1 CMS that community stopped working on in 2006 called Rainbow.
I was given a whitepaper with an example module code, and that was my docs … all the other devs that knew how it worked had gone, and the projects website has a lot of dead links.
Project took me 3 times as long as it would if I had used something more modern … but I wasn’t allowed to since that is what was used in the company.
Open source is good until you are stuck using something that the community has long since abandoned.
Edited 2011-02-09 11:31 UTC
At least people should have the source code of “Rainbow” and could improve the project, continue it, etc (That… if there’s no other usable but better free software project available, of course, which could explain a lot).
Another different thing is that: companies that use “Rainbow” earn money but… don’t want to contribute in any way to the project (neither donations nor submitting code nor documenting nor anything), and later demand the work to be done by others, and if it’s not done, it’s their fault.
But without collaboration of people there’s no free software :-(.
The thing is that we don’t have resources to improve it. Many companies can’t afford to improve it, because there is simply too much work on.
There is 25 mb of source code and another 10mb of dlls, without docs the source may as well be closed. Lots of class hierachies etc.
You ‘sniped’ the Debian article, so I’m replying here.
You are full of vitriol and misdirected rage.
I’ve done nothing to you, I simply made a conjecture as to the reason for the situation described in the post to which I replied.
You became confused.
I explained myself.
You then insulted me and used vulgarity to order me to leave.
You need to relax, or get perspective in _some_ way.
For the record, above when I said I work with Oracle, I meant the software not the company. I am the support person for my department. The rest of the stuff about the patching is true though. It has gotten better, but Oracle’s (the company) support is sometimes very lacking.
In my country the debate is again raging about banning the use of mobile phones – even with hands free devices – while driving, with claims being made that 33% of all accidents are “caused” by mobile phones. My wife works in insurance claims so I know for a fact that those numbers are over-exaggerated to say the least – for example I could be sitting at a red light chatting away (hands free) on my phone and some clown who’s been fiddling with his stereo runs clean up my butt and that accident would be included in those figures.
So statistics can say whatever we want them to. In fact it could be argued that many more companies have chosen FOSS as part of their IT strategy if their web sites are hosted on Linux based servers. Similarly I use Adium, CoRD, VirtualBox and a number of others on a daily / weekly basis but I didn’t specifically set out to pursue an opensource path, I simply found a tool that I liked that did the job and stuck with it.
Statistics are useful for marketing and propaganda.
I get annoyed when people malign statistics — they make perfect sense, and are an invaluable tool to help you understand what is signal and what is wishful thinking.
However, like any other mathematical tool, it’s susceptible to “garbage-in/garbage-out”.
Whether or not driving while using a cellphone is hype or real is off-topic, but I will point out that your example is silly: it’s like saying that drinking while driving is safe because it doesn’t matter if you’re drunk while sitting at a red light. The point is that while the vehicle is moving your driving ability is impaired; the same is (argued) of cellphone use.