Open Source More Expensive Says MS Report

doperative writes "Much conventional wisdom about programs written by volunteers is wrong. The authors took money for research from Microsoft, long the archenemy of the open-source movement — although they assure readers that the funds came with no strings attached. Free programs are not always cheaper. To be sure, the upfront cost of proprietary software is higher (although open-source programs are not always free). But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software"

Out of context

[Verdatum]

Am I the only one who see's this summary as picking the most incendiary portion of this article, and elevating it by taking out of context? The latter part of the article discusses choosing carefully, and promoting open standards to allow for more compatibility in open source software. Plus, this is a partial book review...what's up with that?

Yeah, closed source is waaayy better

[bl8n8r]

The benefits of vendor lock-in and proprietary file formats cost me way less money every year.  The ROI of adopting the latest and greatest version of my proprietary software gets faster every year too. I really like the way my choices become more and more limited, and dictated by a governing body focused mainly on capital and politics. Not to mention that secure feeling of having a digital noose around my neck, dragging my head towards a grinding wheel with each revision of my server software.  The benefits of meeting new and exciting people is a big plus as well. Just last month, I upgraded my proprietary mail server software only to find out there was some sort of misconfiguration error on my part which was causing my users to be unable to log in.  I was on the phone with so many people from so many third world countries that I actually managed to learn a new language!  We didn't fix the mail server issue, but for now, we use a Swingline stapler balanced on the spacebar to automatically close the error message dialogs to keep them from taking all available memory over night. What a creative solution!  And it only took two weeks to figure it out!  The vendor of our proprietary system promised us they will have it fixed in the next release.  You can't get that kind of commitment with open source.

Re:Learning to use them?

[WrongSizeGlass]

You're a lucky man to have a wife who focus her anger on the source rather than bringing it home to you ;-)

The Office 2003 upgrade issue is something I'm dealing with with a few of my clients. Some employees have a newer version at home and are OK with the thought of upgrading but the owners are dead set against learning "the ribbon thing".

Re:My psychic prediction

[number6x]

Just ask the London Stock exchange what the true cost of implementing their trading system using MS tools [google.com] was. Be sure to include the cost of lost business as well as the loss of brand integrity, not just the licensing cost. I prefer real world examples to paid for studies.

Re:Turning the table

[serviscope_minor]

Even that I am a programmer, I do not know how to fix it.

I too spend much of my working life programming. It's really not that hard.

1) Download the source.

2) Compile with all debugging symbols and perhaps -fmudflaps

3) Run the program (with valgrind or mudflaps)

4) Go to the line number of the first error, and have a look.

Most of the crash causing errors are simple things, like uninitialised pointers. Some require some digging. But I have successfully fixed bugs and added fearures to a few projects and it's often not as hard as you might expect.

The modern tools available on any decent linux system are feally fantastic. Evil, nasty bugs like subtle memory corruption can be caught much, much more easily than before and therefore require much less in-depth knowledge to fix.

But for some reason, a number of high profile distributions don't have a package with the mudflaps helper files, even though they enable it in gcc.

Re:My psychic prediction

[Ciggy]

What the research actually concluded was that the total cost of ownership can vary...training and support.

My one objection to most similar studies...is that switching from, say, MS Office 2003 to 2007...is considered to take little or no training...but switching to OpenOffice is projected to incur significant retraining expenses...

A few years ago a large UK retailer upgraded their staff laptops to Windows XP. All the [laptop] staff went on "XP training". Changing to "what you know" doesn't necessarily mean no training costs; proves your point, and that was in use of WIndows itself - which I seem to always hear as touted as not needing any training when "upgrading".