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Making Open Source Pay 31

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-suits dept.
cenonce writes "This short, but informative, article over at Tom's Hardware Guide does a nice job of explaining the difference between Closed and Open Source Software and how it can save the suits money (as well as make the tech staff's lives easier)."
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Making Open Source Pay More

Making Open Source Pay

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  • FP (Score:2, Redundant)

    by DaoudaW ( 533025 )
    I think the article as already been summarized many times, "Free as in speech, not free as in beer."

    • Re:FP (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by byolinux ( 535260 ) *
      Exactly.

      Freedom, not gratis.

    • Re: "Free as in speech, not free as in beer." (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2004 @11:47AM (#9812993) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, but that doesn't usually have much impact on your typical business manager. If you try to sell them something, and start talking about free speech and/or free beer, they'll just think you're bizarre. What does that have to with running a business?

      A better simile, I've found, is to compare their computers to a delivery fleet. It's fairly obvious to even a PHB that a fleet of vehicles needs maintenance. And, while they might not want to get their hands dirty working on the innards of their vehicles, they know enough to hire mechanics for that. And those mechanics need the shop manuals for all the vehicles.

      Tell them that "closed source" software is a lot like a vehicle without a shop manual. If something goes wrong with such a vehicle, all you can do is report it back to the auto company that you bought the vehicle from. They'll fix it when they get around to it. Or maybe they won't bother fixing it, figuring that they can get you to buy a new vehicle if they drag it out long enough or say it's not repairable.

      Similarly, you tell them, things are going to go wrong inside their computers. You need "shop manuals" for all your software. With software, that's called "source code". If your computer support group doesn't have the source code, then they'll be stuck with just reporting problems back to the software vendor. And that vendor will be just about as interested in fixing your problems as the truck manufacturerer is interested in keeping your fleet running. More likely they'll try to sell you more (New! Improved!) software.

      But if your people have the source code (for software) or shop manuals (for vehicles), they can dig in, figure out what's wrong, and fix it.

      Yeah, studying the source isn't easy. But have you ever leafed through a shop manual? There are people who can understand those things. And, as with mechanics, the software people have friends and colleagues that share information about problems. With software, this is mostly done via the Internet, and you really want your IT people to know how to use it to find information.

      Most managerial types are smart enough to understand all this. We just have to get across to them that trusting software vendors is no smarter than trusting auto dealers. You need your own people to do the job, your people need the information required to do the job, and they also need to communicate with their cohorts in other organizations to find information fast when something's failing. But without the source code, there's often nothing your people can do, and you're stuck with begging the dealer for help.

  • Dry clean the suits thus saving money.

  • What a lame article.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh if it doesn't work, just fix it yourself!

    Come on mom, I don't know why Mozilla is crashing, just download the source from CVS and fix it yourself.

    Just shows how out of touch the open source community is.

    Along with your lame HOWTO's that are based on builds 3 verions back.
  • This article seems a little too biased for my taste. To say that Microsoft's centralized database isn't as good as just doing a google search is absurd. True the database may not have answers to everything, but good luck finding every answer on google. And "No longer do you have to wait for the software developer to solve the problem, just do it yourself" PLEASE, not everyone (read most people) has the time, money, or ability to do it themselves.
    • I'm pretty sure the article is biased.

      However just yesterday I gave up on a searching in MSDN after most of the day and started doing Google to locate an explanation for a Windows problem. Google revealed in 1/2 hour that I could not write what I wanted (even this information was difficult to locate, but at least somebody finally complained and others in mailing lists confirmed this).

      [the problem I was having was trying to figure out if I could get it so that _fopen() took a string in UTF-8. This is reall

  • The problem with Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) <seebert42@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 27, 2004 @11:48AM (#9813000) Homepage Journal
    From my point of view is that I'm a Marxist trying to live in a Capitalist society- and somehow my bank doesn't agree with the idea of me programming without earning money, they'd just as soon throw me, my wife, and my 14-month old out on the street.

    I love the idea of open source, I just can't see any way to make a living doing it.
    • Wouldn't it be nice if there were companies who paid people to develop open source? Nah, it'll never happen.
      • Would be great- but chances are it'd only happen for internally usefull applications that MIGHT be also usefull for a few other companies in the same industry. You'll almost certainly NEVER get generalized software this way- because it's far cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf-shrinkwraped solution than it is to pay a bunch of developers a salary to create your own open source version of the same project.

        Nice job if you can get it though- too bad there's such a vanishingly small number of such jobs that we st
    • Sometimes I just code for fun, to see if something can be done. No one is saying you have to devote every hour of your offtime to OSS, just do it whenever you can. If everyone does just a little bit at a time, everything will become better. Also, don't feel guilty about not contributing if you can't, for whatever reason. I am somewhat of an amateur when it comes to programming, so I can't contribute to a lot of things. But I still use lots of OSS. As Marx said, "From each according to ability to each
      • True enough- my ability seems to have gone way down though. I used to do a lot of open source stuff- in my own fashion (in that I never liked licensing anything, not even under GPL). But now, I've taken a 50% pay cut just to get working again, I have a 50 mile commute, and a 14-month-old who'd rather bang on the keyboard than allow me to program. My life has changed WAY too much in the last 3 years. And I'm just struggling to stay afloat at this point.
    • I've been thinking about this problem myself.

      Let's say you provide people with source code, under one of the mainstream open source licenses. You can charge for open source, everyone says so. So you charge, say, fifty bucks for a well done product. So far so good, right?

      Six months later, some creep decides you're charging too much, takes moral offense at your "greed" and starts a BitTorrent of your whole software distribution, available for free. Bling. Out of business. So much for that. And almost every
  • In my experience the problem has not been interesting managers in using open source software but persuading them to take seriously their responsibility under licences like the GPL to release modified code.

    In short, they love free stuff but think anything their company has put any resources into (i.e. paying me to code bits into) belongs to them even if it's GPL'd. Perhaps not major GPL violations but stuff that really should be released. This is the boss-education issue for me.

    That said they're not all

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