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Slippery Slope of Religious Battles – Open Source vs. Proprietary Software
I knew it was coming, but am always hopeful that it doesn’t. The whole debate I’ve been trying to present is about the pros and cons of open source, and the way open source is presented competitively against proprietary source software. My issue was with the contention that it’s free or cheaper or has better support. I realize it’s not FREE – but the way it’s presented, well, it’s wrong. *That* was my point. But alas, it’s slipped into name calling. But I’ve found my delete key all over again. 🙂
I realize that TCO may favor some of these applications (thanks to the many MySQL folks for sending me links to a TCO calculator), but that wasn’t the point.
As one last look at this, I wanted to pass along Caroline’s comments:
"This is interesting, and both sides make cogent points, although today’s correspondent (Chris) seems to be basing a lot of his arguments on “studies”. I do closed source by day and open source for pleasure, and my experience is that free and open source support certainly outclasses many of its for-pay closed source equivalents. Obviously there is a huge difference in quality and quantity of support between a really big OS project like Joomla! and some or other small pet project with 2 developers, and it’s not reasonable to compare them.
I tend to agree with his remarks about MySQL, but then IMO, database technology is also the weakest link in open source (the strongest being the operating system itself – good distros of Linux are excellent and much better architecturally than Windows). What is interesting is that both Oracle and IBM have done their share of sniffing around MySQL. Oracle tried to buy them, IBM joined their partner program, ostensibly to WebSphere-enable MySQL, but I think both companies saw the gap and were looking for a smooth migration path from MySQL to either Oracle or DB2. Given Linux’s growing mainframe presence, heavily backed by IBM, the latter in particular would have been an excellent strategic direction for many large companies, and this partnership may well survive the Sun takeover."
This is a REALLY interesting point. I had admittedly been focused on two markets. First, MySQL because it’s a subject that we can all pretty readily relate to, and second the software that we were looking at that made the claims about cost (free) only to surprise with significant support costs. That said, it’s true – there are some simply outstanding OS options, and these, and other great projects, weren’t the target of an overall poke at open source. I don’t think anyone is saying that open source is all bad. I just want more upfront presentation and, barring that, I want to better understand the questions I need to know to ask so I get the real picture of the costs.
"However, I think the most interesting and telling comment on Open Source is here, straight from the horse’s mouth – it’s Microsoft’s quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filing, and they’ve been singing the same tune since about 2004 if I’m not mistaken. If they regard Open Source as their number one business risk factor, I’m not going to argue!"
Good point. Whether it’s because it’s a viable option for the anti-big-business crowd (and specifically anti-Microsoft) or because the options are truly superior, the one thing I *do* know is that the competition certainly has kept Microsoft’s attention and I, for one, am happy for that because it leads to competitive products.
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