Study Urges CIOs To Choose Open Source First 95
littlekorea writes "A new study has urged CIOs to consider open source over proprietary software or public cloud services when replacing legacy gear. But the study's author, Professor Jim Norton, warns that open source won't be a cure-all for some companies. From the article: ' Open source software, Norton said, provides enterprise IT with easier access to innovation via a "great global self-re-enforcing community of shared resources, ideas and development." That same community provides a faster response to changes in customer preferences communicated on social networks or via business analytics, and faster resolution of common system problems.'"
Publication bias (Score:3, Insightful)
All studies urging CIOs to prefer "professional solutions" -- not published on /.
Commercial support (Score:5, Insightful)
CIOs buy open source tools all the time - and they pay RedHat or Oracle to support them. However - no CIO is going to spend real dollars, dollars which will get him fired, on unsupported software, no matter how cool the user forums are.
Re:Commercial support (Score:4, Insightful)
Real CIOs spend dollars on officially-unsupported software all the time in commercial companies, successfully. They do it by hiring real talent that can manage open source software stacks internally (do their own bug-hunting and upstream contributions).
Is this 2012? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of this article reads like its 1999 now.
“The skilled, motivated staff that grew up with the internet don’t want to work with closed, old fashioned systems,” ...
"Norton cited studies from the London School of Economics which found that investments to deploy open source in-house drives longer-term savings of 20 percent over the alternatives"...
"It advises CIOs, for example, not to separate current support teams from new development teams"
It then goes on to explain the fish that they are trying to fry:
“We commissioned this study to highlight to our customers and shareholders our use of open systems and contribution to open systems,”
Ok great so you have opensource software. Before you propose any solution (any open source or proprietary) you'd think of a large number of factors. ROI is one of them. The capabilities of your staff and the availability of skills in the market would be another. The example of Tomcat and jQuery are lame to say the least. Some of the companies I worked for have use proprietary solutions AND save money in the process. For "enterprise" applications the major costs of running the show arent whether the software is open source or not. Maintenance over the life of the product costs much more (salaries, infrastructure, etc).
Re:Commercial support (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they do it all the time by keeping outdated and unsupported pieces of software around instead of updating to the latest and greatest for the sake of doing it. This can be open or closed source software. I do not know how many windows XP workstations I run across on a daily basis not because the software running on them will only run on XP or the systems will not support windows 7 (some will not though), but because getting some piece of software to run on windows 7 requires an upgrade that costs thousands and there is no legit reason to justify it until it is necessary (No features needed or wanted outside of working on windows 7 reliably).
Hell, I have two application suits that can be upgraded right now under the existing support contracts (one of which I can get no live support outside of knowledge base articles if I do not upgrade) but it will not happen because the companies will not authorize the budget to do the upgrades. They are in a maintenance mode waiting on the economy to turn up more or something.
It's not just about competent employees or open verses closed source software, it is about saving a buck, backwards compatibility and so on too.
Of course it's the rational solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Since open source software, at least when you carefully choose it, won't get obsolete as quickly, and even when it does and all fails, you can simply hire some programmers to maintain it for you.
However we are talking about management here. It is not wise to select the most rational solution inside a company. Everybody can find the most rational solution to a problem. If you make rational decisions in a management position you are easily replaced.
Re:Logical Fallacy Bias (Score:2, Insightful)
You clearly have nothing valuable to say, because you put stock in wikipedia... have you never heard of wikiality? ;)
But yes... as others have said, it's a strawman if anything, but it's a statement of fact, so not really a strawman at all. Slashdot *does* have a publication bias, just as *every* "news" outlet has one. The good ones know they have a bias and admit to it so that you can adjust your perception accordingly. The bad ones claim to be fair and balanced and free of bias. Here, they pander to the fanbois, because pitting the different groups against each other generates page impressions (Apple vs. Android, or Open Source vs. Microsoft, etc.), which they can use to sell advertising space... and given that they let a lot of the older, higher karma posters turn off the obvious ads, this means that some of the stories are themselves ads.
More on topic, OSS is sometimes the right choice, sometimes the wrong choice. There's far more that goes into the decision of which platform to choose than people seem to think or understand. It's well and good to say that you should be sticking to OSS for your enterprise, but people don't seem to understand that there's interoperability considerations too. You need to make sure that your customers will be able to read what you're producing and communicate with you, too. This means that, sometimes, you don't really have a choice about whether to use something like MS Office, or AutoCAD, which necessarily dictates what platform you're running on.... most of MS Office will run on Linux/Wine or Crossover, for example, but if you want to run the latest version of Visio or Powerpoint it's a lost cause... it does not render properly, and Powerpoint is extremely unstable. You need to run Mac or Windows for it render properly. Similarly, if you want to put downloadable documents on your website, you may have no choice about whether to include .DOC or .PDF versions of your documents, even if the web server itself is running on an OSS platform. Likewise, if you want your users to be able to use their phones or tablets for e-mail and have full calendar/contact sync with their desktops, you may have no choice about whether to run MS Exchange, depending on which phone platform you standardize on.
You simply can't say that OSS > Proprietary software for all circumstances. It's an oversimplification of the real issues, and doesn't take into account other factors like interoperability with other organizations. It's well and good to suggest that you should standardize on OSS for the enterprise, but unless you're doing only the most basic office tasks, you will have at least some need for a proprietary system. For my personal use on my laptop, yes, I can easily go with open source for everything. I did, actually... there's not a single piece of closed source software running on my laptop and I have yet to encounter a use case to justify installing it. For Office tasks I have gnumeric and AbiWord installed and have never had a problem... for personal use where I don't need to interoperate with other users, and if I do I can copy to an e-mail or print it out. My desktop/gaming machine, however, is running under Windows 7. It's a different use case, and for that specific example, an OSS operating system is a non-starter. It's not about idealogy, it's about using the right tool for the job, and in business it's the same story.
Re:Open Source licenses .. (Score:4, Insightful)