Cost-Conscious Companies Turn To Open Source

Martyr4BK writes "BusinessWeek has a slew of special reports today on open source software discussing the benefits for buyers who are cost conscious and open source being the silver lining for the economic slump. They even have a slideshow of 'OSS alternatives' like Linux, Apache, MySQL, Firefox, Xen, Pentaho, OpenOffice.org, Drupal, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Asterisk. These are all good examples (we use a bunch of them already); what other open source software can I use to drop my company's IT costs, and maybe get a decent bonus for the year?"

Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned...

Do they mention anything about project management? Even on linux, the free stuff I've found can't compete with the uber-expensive proprietary stuff. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

Re:Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned...

I use planner.

Have you tried it? I find it is adequate for my needs. Mind you I am not the most hardcore project management user out there...

Re:Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned...

For product management, the best thing I've found is redmine [demo [redmine.org]]. I implemented it for the small company I do part time work for, and it's worked well so far. At my full time job, we use Mercury Quality Center. It's better in some respects but worse in others.

Re:

I use dotProject: http://dotproject.net/ [dotproject.net]

It's not exactly an application or linux only, as it is a web app, but it is free and open source. And it allows many users to input into a process. Currently our project manager manages everything with MS Project using some of its features. This type of product allows managers (or at least in our case) to offload some of the updating to the workers since they can log their own progress.

I've used a few other web app managers but dotProject seemed to have the most f

Would love to...

Would love to save $$$ with OSS, but the software I need (robust, full-featured POS system) is non-existent. Bummer.

Re:Would love to...

I'm not convinced yet that money is saved for small to medium businesses. We are supposedly an open source shop and productivity is severely hampered by the constant maintenance required. We have twice the IT staff for half the people that were being served in my previous job, which was MS based.

In addition, the open source IT staff seem to just want to constantly be changing everything when something newer and flashier comes out (read that as closer to functionality to a purchased project). In one year we have had 3 different email servers, with the associated problems of swapping over. Or the IT recommended web casting software works on MAC and windows but doesn't have full functionality on the Linux boxes. I was hoping that would change when we change the IT staff lead, but the new guys seem the same.

I also find it amusing that the anti-MS IT staff bitch about things like MS Outlook, but then celebrate when Thunderbird adds a function bringing it closer to MS Outlook.

Over half the company just use their own personal laptops due to the hassle, which ironically, defeats the crippling obsession with security that the IT guys have.

Re:

It sounds more like you have an issue with management and leadership in your IT department than issues with OSS.

Re:Would love to...

Just goes to show that anything can be implemented badly...
Where i work we have 2 separate networks serving different parts of the company, one is all OSS while the other is primarily MS based.
The OSS one is faster, has better uptime, cost very little to build (runs entirely on hardware that was discarded by the MS oriented staff), and requires minimal maintenance. Users don't really notice any difference until something goes wrong, which happens far less frequently on the OSS network. The bean counters notice because of how under-budget the OSS based network is.

The MS guys are jealous of some of the fancy kit we have to play with, but we've still spent a lot less overall.

Re:Would love to...

"Would love to save $$$ with OSS, but the software I need (robust, full-featured POS..."

With that requirement, it would be hard to beat Microsoft's offings.

Re:Would love to...

Hire some developers and put them to work then release the software under the GPL.
Free doesn't always mean free as in beer.
The idea is that once you make the investment you will get others improving your software.
But for somethings like CAD I just don't think you will ever find a FOSS solution as good as what you pay for. But I think ProE run on Linux :)

I wonder

Besides Slashdot how much FOSS does Slashdot use?
Do they use Asterisk for it's phone system? Or does it's parent company do all the "business" stuff for them and just let write perl and post articles?

Re:I wonder

You use it where it is feasible and where it can be supported. At the financial company I work at, we are about to move to Asterisk (mainly because conferencing calls cost the company thousands of dollars each year). We have started dynamically creating our PDF's through a LAMP app instead of using a Windows app and closed source BIN for PDF generation. But all of these are supported and maintained in house. If they have the STAFF to support them, then I say do it. If they have the money to get someone else to support it, then I say do it. Otherwise, as a business, their best bet is to stay where the support and maintenance is... not even open source supporters can be all open source; we'd like to do everything ourselves but the fact of the matter is there just aren't enough hours in the day.

TCO not always lower

I used to think the TCO argument was rubbish. But then I did some research this year on bug tracking software for my company. At least in this one area, it was obvious that while you'd save a few hundred initially on open source solutions, these solutions were much less polished and supported than their commercial competitors. I would have had to do a lot of additional installations and customization to get things working right. And there was no quick answer from a tech support email address when I would have trouble. And in another recent purchase of music production software, the open source versions were an absolute joke in comparison to commercial varieties. Open source is great. I use Firefox and Open Office all the time. But for business and specialty applications, commercial applications are still often much more solid and cheaper in the long run.

Re:TCO not always lower

I think the source of this trouble is that when you use exceptionally popular programs like FireFox or 7zip you're seeing software that really isn't representative of FOSS. These are definitely in the top 99%.

When you start digging down into niche software that serves a tiny market segment you're getting into an area where few people are interested in using it and even fewer are interested in contributing. I do agree that these areas are currently best served by commercial apps. The whole FOSS thing works because so many people are contributing and it's easy to get support from one of the masses of people using it or working on it. On smaller projects you find yourself doing your own support - which isn't necessarily awful, it's just a real time sink.

Tech support? What support?

And there was no quick answer from a tech support email address when I would have trouble

Obviously, you've never worked for a corporation using commercial software. Try emailing, for instance, Oracle's tech support. At one time, it took me *two months* to get the response I needed from Oracle. Or rather, a response that *didn't* solve my problem: "that feature has been deprecated since Oracle 8i". It took them two full months just to find that an obscure feature that was essential to my work wasn't supported anymore.

Based on my 25+ years of experience of using software, both commercial and free, today I'd rather have Google and the source code than any paid tech support.

Obligatory question

And what about the _total_ cost of ownership?

I'm all for open source software, don't get me wrong, but switching from a known solution that Works For You(tm) even though it's horribly expensive to a $0 one but with a steep learning curve can be disastrous.

Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?

I know, this is one example, others may not be that extreme. But taking this kind of decision has to be done with some caution.

Re:Obligatory question

Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?

I'd view that as being similar to replacing AIX or Solaris with Linux -- and that's something that plenty of companies have done successfully.

It does require retraining, it may involve buying support contracts, but it's proved worthwhile for many companies.

Re:Obligatory question

Good point. This is why the ultimate cost saver is to switch from commercial software to pirated commercial software.

What non-free software do you have?

Without telling us what non-free applications are currently being used, it's a very difficult question to answer.

If I were starting a business tomorrow, I can't think of a single piece of commercial software I'd standardise on.

Partly because I'm stingy when it comes to software. Partly because I don't want license management to become a headache as the business grows.

Works for me

Ever since I started using Nagios, I've been able to slowly help the rest of the IT department consider open source when starting projects. Now we use Nagios, Backuppc, MySQL, Perl, Splunk, Snare and Ubuntu LTS for servers. The clincher was not having to pay for licensing for a SQL server, OS and all. We're all so tired of dealing with the behemoth of a licensing scheme that Microsoft uses, and that's really what pushed us to alternatives.

Re:

The agreement was that his web-surfing was not to be filtered.

Re:

Time was, MySQL was an open source alternative to 'non-enterprise' DBs like FoxPro. Now it's a viable alternative to Oracle or DB2 in certain circumstances where the high end commercial features are overkill.

Re:

A spoon is a viable alternative to a shovel in certain circumstances like eating soup.

Re:Migration doesn't sound like cost cutting.

Linux/F/OSS is mostly supported by angel investors and Sun Microsystems

This is just completely wrong. Most open source projects have no outside investors at all, but are either maintained on a developer's free or salaried time. IBM, Apple, and Google, for example, have hundreds of employees who contribute to open source projects on company time.

I don't know why you would think so many projects would be backed by angel investors when those projects would return nothing financially on their investment.

Re:How about GIMP?

Sorry for the bluntness, but... holy crap! not The Gimp Thread Again. It boils down to:

1) Gimp is nice
2) Gimp gets better with time
3) Gimp's interface is horrible
4) Gimp's interface gets better with time
5) Gimp doesn't have CMYK support
6) This is not important to a whole lotta people
7) But it is a show stopper for some
8) iterate until hell freezes over

There, one less gimp thread!