A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 16:54 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: A think tank's view of free software by nix
Parent article: A think tank's view of free software

The sentences from the report quoted in this article are all valid points. Yes, there is a lack of commercial support for most free programs. Perhaps you or I don't need it, but a lot of companies want it. Yes, there are sometimes weak points with interoperability - while you can buy plenty of things that integrate directly into Microsoft Excel, but not so many statistical packages in the free world have an OpenOffice.org plugin. Or if they work with OOo they don't plug into KOffice, etc. Yes, there are industry standards which are better supported by proprietary software. Companies aren't interested in the excuses for why this is the case, only that it is.

If a report published by Red Hat or the Apache Foundation or some other august body had pointed out the need for 'better governance of open source contributions' then we would be treated to a solemn LWN editorial agreeing with this and stressing that we, as a community, must remain vigilant blah blah. Because it comes from a report by users or potential users of free software, who happen to be companies rather than individuals, we get treated to a Slashdot weenie diatribe making sarcastic quips rather than acknowledging that there might be something to look at.

Indeed, even if none of the points had any validity, they are still _perceived_ as valid by these hundred or so business people. And their perceptions of free software will influence what they decide to use. If you wish, you could see it as a marketing problem, a need to correct mistaken views in the world outside. Myself I think that 'the customer is always right' is a good motto to follow.

These CIOs are not 'greedy sharks' as another commenter called them. They are users, just the same as you and me. They have their own businesses to run and saving the world is not their main job. The boring work of word processing, accounting point of sale automation and the hundred other things needed by businesses may not be as cool as setting up peer-to-peer wireless networks or porting Ruby to camera phones, but it's an important part of the world and free software needs to spread there too. We should listen to the conclusions of the report and find some way to address them, rather than blowing them off.

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A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 17:47 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> Indeed, even if none of the points had any validity, they are still
> _perceived_ as valid by these hundred or so business people.

A few points have more or less validity, but this is not an objective or balanced report. It reeks of careful steerage of unsophisticated business people by biaised consultant(s).

While it repeats common misconceptions that may be perceived as valid by some business people, some of the points just lack any relevance to software customers and only make sense if someone "helped" formalising the report, putting an heavy spin on the think tank more confused and neutral reflexions.

"Finally, OSS and proprietary models continue to converge. Proprietary companies are taking elements of the open source model...": no business people I know of would write this kind of drivel by themselves:
those who care about "the open source model" know enough to dismiss this (the business people approach to the open source model is "are we independant from $greedy_big_vendor", and open source fakes typically fail this test)
those who don't care just don't care

A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 17:58 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (13 responses)

> Yes, there is a lack of commercial support for most free programs.
> Perhaps you or I don't need it, but a lot of companies want it.

No there isn't. It isn't structured in the rigid fashion you might want it, but it DOES exist, plentiful and sufficient to any purpose.

At the bottom of the stack, if you are a small operation you can buy a commercial support contract, see www.redhat.com or www.novell.com for details. Clue, neither company is selling a 'product', they sell support and at least RedHat is selling enough to jump to the 'big board.' Novell is working hard on catching up. So if 'support' is what ya just have to have give either one of em a call and a sales weasel will be right with ya to power close a deal just like you are accustomed with whoever you are wistfully comparing open source with.

If you have a need for support on a particular package beyond what those options offer find yourself a local nerd/geek/developer and put him on a consulting contract. Or look into one of the many open source / free software consulting operations which exist. Remember, this is open code so you do not have to buy support from the same people developing the package, just from someone with experience with it.

And finally, if a package is vital to the operation of your mega corporation you simply hire a lead developer. For the price of one headcount you get the ultra elite platinum with glowing enriched uranium bars level support contract for unlimited seats.

> Yes, there are sometimes weak points with interoperability - while you
> can buy plenty of things that integrate directly into Microsoft Excel,
> but not so many statistical packages in the free world have an
> OpenOffice.org plugin.

No, what you want isn't interoperability since Excel doesn't have an open published plugin interface. What you want is Excel. If you define the problem as "A product 100% binary, bug for bug, compatible with Excel that releases new versions at the same time as Excel" you kinda stop even the hope of migrating someday in the future, because that ain't possible.

> Yes, there are industry standards which are better supported by
> proprietary software.

Only if 'standards' is defined as Microsoft. And if your 'reasoning' were valid everyone would still be running Lotus 1-2-3. When change comes again it will probably be just as rapid. The question is exactly WHAT would cause a switch.

>They are users, just the same as you and me.

No, look over that list again, they aren't users. The word you are looking for is competitor. A better description might be Microsoft's slaves. What the produced was a marketing document, any valid criticism was accidental and purely an unintended consequence. That's why the snarky reception.

The reference to ODF as a 'defacto standard' was the givaway. That wasn't just wrong, I'll go ahead and say what corbet wasn't willing to risk a lawsuit over, that it was an intentional, knowing lie. The whole basis for all this effort to get governments to adopt it is based on the fact it is a published standard, if everybody at that gathering managed to miss that they are so mentally challenged one wonders how they manage fill in their golf cards correctly.

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 9, 2007 23:12 UTC (Wed) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] (12 responses)

> At the bottom of the stack, if you are a small operation you can buy a commercial support contract, see www.redhat.com or www.novell.com for details. Clue, neither company is selling a 'product', they sell support and at least RedHat is selling enough to jump to the 'big board.' Novell is working hard on catching up. So if 'support' is what ya just have to have give either one of em a call and a sales weasel will be right with ya to power close a deal just like you are accustomed with whoever you are wistfully comparing open source with.

I regretfully have to say this has not been my experience. I am a Debian developer going on six years, and Linux user and enthusiast for nine years. But I am paid to do engineering not system admin, and in any case we wanted a partner who would be around in case I left. So we went shopping for a Linux shop to provide a server, software and support for our mixed Windows-Mac-Linux (me) shop, and I was confident we'd find just such a "sales weasel" to "power close a deal".

Unfortunately, neither RedHat nor Novell put anything good forward. RedHat referred me to their list of RHCEs. Out of five outfits, only two replied to me: one was a one-man shop (not an option if you hope your business stays around longer than that one man), and the other didn't seem to want to do business with such a small firm as ours.

Novell was worse: they forwarded my inquiry to an internal sales rep who took TWO WEEKS to get back to me, then sent a single email referring me to a local Novell vendor. So I contacted the vendor, which sent a secretary to "assess our needs" -- who had NO CLUE about our technical issues. Totally unacceptable.

The message I got was: unless you're a Fortune 500 company, neither RedHat nor Novell wants to deal with you, nor are their supposed legions of business partners competent to do so. There are a lot more MSCEs (or is it MCSEs?) in the world, and the competition is producing higher quality.

As for our business, we will likely get a Windows server, as the "safer" option. I will remain a Debian developer, as I love the stuff, but am sadly disillusioned by the lackluster performance of the two "market leaders", and now understand why we are getting no traction in the SMB market. For the sake of the community, I hope others' experience has not been as bad as ours.

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 10, 2007 0:32 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

unfortunantly you experiance isn't unique, I've tried several times over the years to have my company buy support (we actually had a contract with linuxcare for a year, but at the end of the year I was talking with their sales guy and outlined the problems that we had been having and he reccomended that we not renew whith them, points for honesty at least)

if you just want to pay someone money you can buy enterprise licenses from redhat or novell, but if you actually want to be able to get support on anything other then a standard desktop config you are basicly out of luck.

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 10, 2007 23:54 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

This is great information; I've always wondered just what the deal was on Linux support. It's hard to believe someone like Red Hat can economically support an entire monstrous open source distribution, culled from developers from all corners of the universe, as a proprietary vendor could support something it produces itself. And these experiences seem to bear that out.

It seems to me there's a middle ground between a Linux distribution and Windows. A commercial Unix would come with all the support, guarantees, and dependability into the future, while still leaving the door open for small unsupported open source deviations where necessary. It's pretty easy to plug open source components into AIX; IBM even gives you a boost sometimes. It's not so easy with Windows.

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 10, 2007 4:20 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] (8 responses)

> Out of five outfits, only two replied to me: one was a one-man shop (not an option if you hope your business stays around longer than that one man), and the other didn't seem to want to do business with such a small firm as ours.

So your problem with the former was exactly the same as the latter's problem with you? Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did wants a hug...

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 10, 2007 9:08 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (7 responses)

Surely someone looking for business support is allowed to make decisions based on business considerations. In this case, the only available option was found to be unsuitable from a business perspective. Are you suggesting that business perspectives should be ignored here? Or that free software is fundamentally incompatible with business?

Quid pro quo

Posted May 10, 2007 14:30 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (5 responses)

I think lysse's point is that your business considerations (to the one-man shop) were as valid as the business considerations of the second company (to your small business). Put another way, a small company that doesn't want to do business with another small company deserves to be disregarded by bigger companies. Will you disregard Windows if all MCSE's that want to do business with you are one-man shops?

Quid pro quo ignores market reality

Posted May 11, 2007 1:58 UTC (Fri) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] (4 responses)

So what you're saying is that a small business should not expect to get professional-level support in OSS. Which is why we are not getting any traction in the SMB sector. Like I said.

To answer your question, we already have a 100-strong company full of MCSEs doing business with our four-person shop, which sends techs out to our site on an hourly as-needed basis (installation, troubleshooting, etc.). And that four our TWO Windows users (one Mac, and me on Linux)! And there are multiple other businesses waiting in line behind them who could take our contract. They can set up a Windows server for us any time we say the word. But thanks in large part to me, we want(ed) to give Linux a try.

What a pathetic attitude. If this is how the community feels SMBs should be treated, then OSS will never get anywhere in this sector, while Microsoft continues to eat our lunch. And in the US at least, that's a very big sector to just walk away from.

Quid pro quo ignores market reality

Posted May 11, 2007 6:09 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

You did not answer my question, and it seems you did not understand my point, which is: maybe professional-level support can be provided by a one-man shop as well as by a 100-strong company. I don't know why there are so few RHCEs in your area and frankly I don't care, but maybe it is because SMBs don't want to do business with those who are small. On purely business concerns, the few big shops have to concentrate on the big companies which require their services.

What your comment suggests is that there are untapped business opportunities waiting for entrepreneurs to give them support, but we already knew that. So people, get certified and open your support company!

Quid pro quo ignores market reality

Posted May 11, 2007 12:46 UTC (Fri) by sepreece (guest, #19270) [Link]

Note, though, that "There's a great opportunity here" doesn't really respond to the "think tank" point - support is a problem, still.

Quid pro quo ignores market reality

Posted May 11, 2007 20:28 UTC (Fri) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] (1 responses)

You're right, I didn't answer your question, sorry. We wouldn't consider a one-man Windows support shop either, for the same reason. In case I wasn't clear, that reason is: there's no redundancy in case something happens to the one man. Whether that's retiring to Jamaica, or getting hit by a bus, or having to spend a week taking care of a sick relative, any of these things which took this person away would present a major problem for us if something went wrong.

Our clients don't depend on us in the same mission-critical day-to-day manner, so there's no valid comparison there.

And I agree that there's a real opportunity here...

Quid pro quo ignores market reality

Posted May 12, 2007 0:43 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Thanks for clarifying that. I have long thought about setting up a support shop for Linux machines, as I'm sure other LWN readers have; in fact it is only by chance that I did not do it three years ago, but the possibility is always there. Knowing the conditions of "our" future customer base is always valuable, so it was not an idle question.

Maybe a federation or cooperative would be a better model for one-man operations; probably a middle-sized company would inspire more confidence into customers.

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 11, 2007 23:58 UTC (Fri) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

> Surely someone looking for business support is allowed to make decisions based on business considerations.

Ah, yes - criticism IS prohibition. *shakes head in dismay*

A bad experience with RedHat and Novell

Posted May 10, 2007 9:06 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

It's not only small companies.

In a recent problem at a Fortune 500 company (one of my customers), neither IBM nor Novell was able to solve the problem. The amount of effort they put in was ridiculous low, if I compare that to Solaris or AIX support. So we addressed Red Hat (we were willing to switch distributions), and got the answer that they don't have sufficient resources to handle our support requests. (We wanted the equivalent of a Sun Platinum Support contract.)

Thus, I agree with your sentiment: The level of support for Open Source is not in the same league as that for proprietary Unix systems. That's why we still have to use Unix(tm) for mission-critical servers, even though the majority of the rest can run Linux.

A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 10, 2007 14:37 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

The sentences from the report quoted in this article are all valid points.

Even if they are valid points they are presented in a too biased way to be of any use. As e.g. this article from Schneier shows, how you present things affects the results you get; so judging from the output, those poor CIOs were effectively FUD'ded to death by Microsoft and Novell employees.

You are right in that I miss one of our editor's balancing paragraphs at the end about "not being smug" and recognizing that "there are valid points here".