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Admin
Nobody had promised it's gonna cost you 0.00, sales tax included. "Free" as in "freedom" means "freedom to use and modify with no strings attached (or with minor strings attached, as in GPL)". It also means being able to run the software without owing authors a license fee. After that, the cost of running is fully yours. Heck, even yum install takes (billable) time to complete, however minuscule. It's a piece of software after all, not magic pixie's dust.
You can even choose to contract maintenance to the software's author or a company that offers professional services on top of that software (most of them do). The point is that it's you who decide who and how much to pay to, but I think there is a minimum cost of ownership you just can't reduce further, no matter who your money goes to.
(Or you do reduce it anyway by outsourcing to some hell-hole like Pakistan and end up with shit quality of work, if the word "quality" is even applicable.)
Well, you can always budge in and fix it yourself, as you have access to the source. With closed-source vendors, you're out of luck if they decide it's not a priority for them right now (unless you're a Fortune 500 company and willing to pay extra). As far as I remember, Microsoft was quite notorious for not quite bothering to fix a few quite glaring zero-day exploited holes, and so is Apple. With Linux and friends, the turnaround is a couple of orders of magnitude faster.
Another example: you have a closed-source tool to work with some very custom and very crucial million-dollar hardware, and you need it networked, and it only works with Windows XP, not 7, not 8, not 10. When Microsoft EOLs Windows XP and the security patches for it stop coming, you discover that the vendor went bankrupt a few years ago and you're pretty much on your own. You have no sources, you have a vulnerable platform, you have a potentially vulnerable tool, you can't replace the hardware. Tough shit.
Admin
But those are exactly the reasons that many people use to actually make business decisions. That plus “my friend at the golf club gave me this article that he'd read in the in-flight magazine…”
Admin
...unless you don't want to work with the goofy technology anyway.
Admin
Support contract is likely to be cheaper than time & mats, if there are more users of the software. Many would tend to go full points to closed source here, unless a support contract can be purchased for the OSS solution.
This depends on how your closed-source license contract was set up. I've heard my employer specifically requires a closed source license contract to provide source if maintenance is not done. Tie.
Admin
Fork the open source program, put it up for a fee, get the company to pay you for downloading open source software
Admin
Admin
Windows will waste endless amounts of your time on trying to figure out how to stop it from doing broken stupid shit you never asked for.
Linux will waste endless amounts of your time on trying to figure out how to make it do just about anything.
Personally I find the second option a lot less soul-destroying.
Admin
This is going on my wall!
Do you require attribution, fine sir?
Admin
You make some good points. See: OpenSSL after Heartbleed.
Admin
flabdablet licence applies.
Admin
Is the flabdablet license FSF-approved? :trolleybus:
Admin
Never asked; don't care.
Admin
hmm....
looks pretty FSF friendly to me. i dont think they've formally approved it but i see no reason why it wouldn't be.
Admin
:checkered_flag: :four: :airplane: <!-- Did you seriously have to be a dick ***and*** not get the joke?! -->
Admin
E_<!-- -->Ν<!-- -->O<!-- -->T_L<!-- -->E<!-- -->GAL_A<!-- -->DVI<!-- -->CE_FOR<!-- -->UM <!-- ??? -->
Admin
E_AINAL :fa_question_circle:
Admin
God help us all if accalia becomes a lawyer.
What kinds of things would a lawyer accalia do?
Admin
it would probably be a better carreer move from the point of view of all of humanity than if i went into civil engineering.
a floating bridge across the atlantic carrying a suspended subway tunnel? THAT SOUNDS EPIC AWESOME!
probably get a lot of strange looks from judges for showing up to court clad only in my luxuriously awesome fur and holding my briefcase in my mouth because my paws are not so good for carrying things./me giggles at the mental image of her foxy self trying to cross examine a witness in court.
Admin
EATFY
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ooh! and to make the maglev work even better the tunnel should pull a vaccum for extra reduced drag.!
Admin
Also, the tunnel should have go-faster stripes and flames on it.
We should totally go into business together
Admin
I think the judges would be impressed with your expensive fur coat. Ever wonder why good lawyers wear expensive clothing?
:giggity:
Admin
and the capsules should all be fur-lined.
Admin
ah, but the flames are only visible under UV light.... otherwise they'd compromise the go faster stripes.
we totes should! FTFY you really should. expensive? no. i grew this fur myself. it's 100% @accalia made.:rofl:
faux-fur of course. we do want to be humane about this.besides with the really goof faux fur only a proper furrier will know the difference.
Admin
Mind if I borrow it for my new coat? :smiling_imp:
Admin
hmm..... sorry, but i find i'm rather attached to it... maybe some other time?
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<post can't be empty>
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:scissors:
Admin
So the floating bridge pontoons need UV lasers so that we can make the flames show up as the capsules zoom past.
Admin
absolutely!
and the lazers can be used to tattoo passing sharks too.
Admin
You're missing a whole other layer of awesome there
Admin
well obviously the sharks have lazars too. they get IR lazars so they can cook their food as they eat it.
Admin
More to the point, what kinds of thnigs would a lywaer accalia do?
"My client pleads guilpy of soil testing an otter."
Admin
Where I work (a pretty big corporation), I get the opposite argument. Companies like RedHat, who sell support and stand by their product, are generally OK (budget permitting), but small OSS projects that may have only one or two people doing actual development require additional justification, because it means we will need to train our own experts to test, deploy and maintain it. We can't expect "the community" will be able to solve all our problems the way we can when there is a signed and paid-for support contract.
Admin
Do whatever you like would also include using the code in closed-source projects. FSF doesn't like that.
Admin
.... bastards....
Admin
No, they don't like that, but there are plenty of licenses that permit this (e.g. BSD and MIT), and FSF approves them. GPL-compatibility and copyleft are things they recommend but do not (at least for the moment) require. See also Wikipedia.
Admin
The thing is… the FSF have one set of objectives and the BSD/MIT crowd have a totally different set, and they really don't see eye-to-eye. The FSF like to pretend they do for their own reasons.
Admin
Is that like the Talking Stick of pushing changes?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/48/73/69/487369fefaabf2b2c69c15463ebc12ce.jpg
Whosoever holds the Programming Brick has upon their desk the power of code - only the one who holds the brick may code, but must code terribly with poor formatting and no comments.
Admin
FTFY<g>
Admin
Admin
My entire argument did not hinge on a concept of, "they said it was free but it's not free." :wink:
Admin
In my experience, you are basically right. Open source isn't bad. But, the people who tend to shun/ban it tend to have jobs tied into the sale of software industry :shrug:
Admin
Are you kidding me? At the time I was using that computer not only for professional use, but also recreation as well. Not to mention the fact that without the correct drivers, the best resolution I could get was 640x480. If YOU want to work in that environment, feel free. Me, I wanted my god damn monitor to show a resolution I could actually work in, thankyouverymuch.
Admin
At least that's sensible. I can understand the worry about relying entirely on a small community for support. You have sane management. Sane management? :wtf: is that?
Admin
You are speaking to me, as a programmer. And you are correct, I could fix it myself, if I were so inclined. Although I feel you are being a bit specious with your argument that, "with Linux and friends, the turnaround is a couple of orders of magnitude faster." Aside from maybe a paid Red Hat customer, I defy you to show me a Linux-based application with people behind it that a company can contact with an emergency in a real, assuring way (and I mean phone, not just a forum or an e-mail address) and get a guarantee that they are working on a fix, and a time estimate for when it will be ready. Yes, the OSS community fixes things, but they are the worst kind of people to do with from a business' perspective. They don't want to be beholden to "the man" and they don't want to be "corporate" so, no phone support (usually), no contracts (usually) and nobody who will stand up and say they are the point of contact for your issue, and that they and their team are on it, and please stand by.
However, coming back to the original point, my argument was not on behalf of myself, a trained and professional programmer. It was for the small business/mom&pops out there who have zero interest in dealing with software at all, other than to use it. One of the main reasons Apple is rich, is because they mostly deliver on their claim of "it just works." During my time in the OSS community, I rarely encountered any OSS that was smooth as butter, zero maintenance, etc. It always required massive setups efforts, massive configuration efforts, and lots of time babysitting it. I bailed out in 2006/2007, so it may have gotten better since then, I don't know.
What I do know is, if a business buys Office 2010, they can use that sumbitch until the heat death of the universe, of the computer they are running it on dies, whichever comes first -- and they will have very few if any issues. Open Office (at least back in 2007, I haven't looked at them in a while) were much more fussy, and if your system changed it was possible they would stop working. I evangalized Open Office to all my friends and family back in the day, and without exception none of them are still using it. They have all told me over the years, that they switched to Office or some other paid software because, "it was too hard," or, "it never did what I wanted." That's the bottom line.
It doesn't matter how much of an equal footing OSS is on compared to CSS. If the users don't want to use it because the barrier to entry is too high, or the software doesn't work intuitively, or the way they want or need it to, then they just flat out won't. (This is my main problem with Ruby as well.) The users of the software are the most honest metric anyone can get for this stuff. They aren't even aware of the open vs. closed source war. They just want stuff to work so they can do their jobs. Yes, I am sure open source is getting better in both the Enterprise and Normal-Customer markets, but the experiences I still hear reported back to me, say that they aren't there yet. That being said, whenever someone asks me for "free" software (and what they mean is, they want me to give them illegal copies of something), I still point them to things like Open Office after pointing out that MS Office Home is only like $100. Sometimes they go and use Open Office and continue to do so for years, other times they use it then go and buy Office, other times they just roll their eyes and go download a torrent of a cracked version of Office (and all the viruses it can carry), because even though they don't want to pay for it, they consider it to be the "better" software solution for their needs.
:shrug:
Admin
As with any really big company, there is no possibility that every manager will be sane, but I've been lucky enough to work for a group whose management all came from engineering at various times in the past, so logical arguments are understood, even if they aren't always persuasive.
Admin
Pfft. A 80x25 characcter terminal only requires 640x200.
Admin
*growls at*
The Evil Ideas Thread is :arrows:
Admin
And that is an important point you need to consider when selecting OSS. The broader the support for a particular software package, the less likely it is to fall on you to maintain it.
When I wanted a wiki for a project at work, I selected MediaWiki for exactly that reason: even if WikiMedia Foundation decides to do something else, there are so many sites using MediaWiki that it's going to be maintained anyway.
It's a tie if you can get that, yes. But most organizations don't have the leverage to get a closed source company to risk their proprietary software. In the case of discontinuance, especially, they are loathe to give you source because they probably have something newer/better they want to force you to buy; giving you the source of the old product would undercut that. And in the case of failure of the company, you might well find you don't get the source despite the contract, because the bankruptcy court will want to protect the residual assets (a failed company is no longer in position to deliver anything).
That's not an argument against OSS; closed source wouldn't let you incorporate their code in your project, either. When we get down to question of use of source, the argument becomes different, but almost all of OSS source components allow inclusion so long as you provide your source along with your product. I guess it depends on whether you think your customer is buying your source or your product.
In both cases, it comes down to the same thing: you don't own the source. I don't see this as an argument either way, with respect to incorporation in your source.
I wasn't addressing your entire argument and didn't mean to be read that I did. Others addressed your other points; I wanted to focus on the "it's not really free" aspect. :wink: