Future of open-source (Re: Windows virtualization and Linux)

[Dan Ritter]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:25:18PM -0500, Rich Braun wrote:
> At my job, I'm shocked at the Total Cost of Ownership calculations for the
> Linux systems here.  They cost us about 3 times as much as Microsoft!  Why is
> that--because the QA departments at application vendors only have the
> resources to validate their offerings against one or two vendors. 

Can you say what you are running?

For example, I would typically consider that a desktop Linux box
will have no support contracts associated with the software. A
mail server will have zilch. A web server -- zilch. Ticket
tracker -- zilch. Backup system -- zilch. All of these have
overhead costs which translate into X percentage of a sysadmin's
time -- but that's typically very low, across a year.

Database server -- very expensive if it's Oracle, but that's the
same price they charge a Microsoft or Sun customer.


> If we buy
> an application and a maintenance contract that's only valid on Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux, we're locked into Red Hat. 

Sounds nasty. The closest I've come to that is buying Oracle, which
demands one of N supported OS revisions.

> On the flip side is the contribution question.  I and my team are building
> non-proprietary tools on top of open source tools.  We could publish them as
> our contribution to the open source community.  But we face two very real
> costs if we do so:  (1) QA verification--taking stuff that's too tightly tied
> into our systems and testing it on generic/vanilla configurations that will
> work for everyone else; and (2) customer support--answering emails about the
> stuff we developed.  The latter is what I ran into when I wrote an open-source
> file server package back in the 1990s:  the email got burdensome.

Erm. Both of those are costs that you don't have to bear. You
publish your code on SourceForge or what-have-you, and then you
can leave it alone, or not. If you want to use it to promote
your company's reputation, you write a FAQ and hand-hold the
first few external developers.

If it's wildly successful, you've won kudos points. And if it
fades into obscurity, well, you still have the right to do
whatever you please with it except for contributions from
external sources.

-dsr-

-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.

You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it.