A day in the life of the CentOS team [LWN.net]

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 25, 2006 22:48 UTC (Sat) by hpp (subscriber, #4756)
In reply to: A day in the life of the CentOS team by smoogen
Parent article: A day in the life of the CentOS team

Mind you, the arrogance of my previous post was not from a Linux viewpoint: it was from an IT department viewpoint (and this is at a Fortune 50 company). We find Open Source to be a competitive advantage, and if our competitors don't see it that way, the marketplace will decide who's right. When we benchamrk ouselves against our competitors, we get more done with less money, fewer people and with a higher uptime. As a result, we also get paid better :-)

Incidentally, that also means we feel free to abandon Open SOurce if a superior alternative comes along. Haven't seen that so far - in fact, when a commercial product gets inflicted on us (*cough* Exchange *cough*) it proves to be a royal pain in the behind.

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A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 14:06 UTC (Sun) by hpp (subscriber, #4756) [Link]

> Most open source products are commercial too, at least if you ask
> Red Hat, Novell or IBM.

True in the sense that you pay for commercial support. False in the sense that source code is available, we can make local patches, and we can bypass the vendor and do our own development.

One the key costs of commercial products in a large enterprise is integration: making it work with everything else that is out there. Having source code and the ability to make changes implies you can run the product in a different manner than the vendor intended; that you can analyze scalability problems yourself, and that the vendor cannot get away with false answers as to what causes any problems. Open Source saves time and money.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 19:17 UTC (Sun) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Sorry, I don't understand much of your comment. Do you consider open source businesses non-commercial? In what way?

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 20:54 UTC (Sun) by hpp (subscriber, #4756) [Link]

I am trying to make a distinction between:

Old-style commercial: closed source, single vendor, support from one vendor, don't tinker
Open source: multiple vendors, support from multiple sources (optionally a vendor, generally on-line, also in-house), freedom to tinker and adapt

I should have said "commercial closed source" vs "open source".

Ah, so you mean...

Posted Mar 27, 2006 3:08 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

You would have been understood immediately if you used the more explicit terms Free vs. Proprietary:

Proprietary: closed source, single vendor, support from one vendor, don't tinker
Free: multiple vendors, support from multiple sources (optionally a vendor, generally on-line, also in-house), freedom to tinker and adapt

I think we don't need "Open Source" any more.

Ah, so you mean...

Posted Mar 27, 2006 14:42 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

Actually, for proprietary, I'd leave out "closed source" and "don't tinker".

And being even more pedantic, "proprietary" comes from "property", meaning "owned" - and that INCLUDES LINUX! Okay, we don't use that word that way any more, but we can thank the marketing slogan "Unix is Proprietary, Windows is Open" for that ...

Cheers,
Wol

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 27, 2006 6:41 UTC (Mon) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

What has commercial to do with it? Where does noncommercial closed source fit in ("freeware")?

Why didn't you simply write closed source / open source, or nonfree ("proprietary") / free?