SAS Mocked For Recommending 60% Proprietary Software, 40% Open Source (infoworld.com) 161
This week SAS wrote that open source technology "has its own, often unexpected costs," recommending organizations maintain a balance of 60% proprietary software to 40% open software. An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
How they arrived at this bizarre conclusion is hard to fathom, except that SAS sells more than $1 billion worth of proprietary software every year and presumably would like to continue, despite a clear trend toward open-source-powered analytics... In a Burtch Works survey of over 1,100 quant pros, 61.3% prefer open source R or Python to SAS, and only 38.6% opting for SAS, with that percentage growing for open source options every year.
Worse for SAS, a variety of open source data infrastructure and analytics tools threaten to encroach on its bastions in data management, business intelligence, and analytics... Nearly all innovation in data infrastructure is happening in open source, not proprietary software. That's a tide SAS can try to fight with white papers, but it would do better to join by embracing open source in its product suite.
"In the paper, SAS correctly argues that open source versus proprietary software is not an either/or decision..." writes InfoWorld, but they note that the report also "put the percentage of open source adopters at a mere 25%, which is pathetically wrong." The article suggests a hope that the report "is the product of a rogue field marketing team, and not the company's official position." Adobe's vice president of mobile commented on Twitter, "I just wonder who in their marketing dept thought this was a good idea."
Worse for SAS, a variety of open source data infrastructure and analytics tools threaten to encroach on its bastions in data management, business intelligence, and analytics... Nearly all innovation in data infrastructure is happening in open source, not proprietary software. That's a tide SAS can try to fight with white papers, but it would do better to join by embracing open source in its product suite.
"In the paper, SAS correctly argues that open source versus proprietary software is not an either/or decision..." writes InfoWorld, but they note that the report also "put the percentage of open source adopters at a mere 25%, which is pathetically wrong." The article suggests a hope that the report "is the product of a rogue field marketing team, and not the company's official position." Adobe's vice president of mobile commented on Twitter, "I just wonder who in their marketing dept thought this was a good idea."
Elite (Score:5, Funny)
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Heck with that - what do the cybers use?
Re:Elite (Score:5, Insightful)
Donald Trump: "The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe, it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better. And certainly cyber is one of them."
Yeah, we gotta do better at "cyber", whatever that is. Has this fucking idiot ever even seen a computer?
Seriously, Trump has the speech patterns of a classic sociopath- the fractured, awkward grammar, the inability to finish most of his sentences, the veering off to side topics and never returning to the original subject, the hazy references to things he clearly has no idea about...and on and on and on. He pretends to know stuff when it's painfully obvious that he's ignorant of the subject, kind of like a kid giving a book report on a book he hasn't read.
"War and Peace was about some war, and then the people wanted peace so they went to war to get the peace and there was a lot of stuff and things that happened. I highly recommend this book. In conclusion, we have to do better at cyber! The End."
Re:Elite (Score:4, Interesting)
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Trump's personal knowledge of computers is probably similar to his contemporaries
Maybe, but this is a guy who brags about not using email, nor knowing how to do so. Not exactly a ringing endorsement if you ask me.
As for the whole "cyber" thing, I doubt Trump is so sophisticated as to mimic the way intelligence professionals use the term. He sounds as though he really, truly has no fucking clue. Maybe to him "the cyber" is a box on his desk with some blinking lights. He doesn't use the term in context the way you'd expect a knowledgeable person to- he sounds too uncertain and contrived.
B
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Ah yes, this is like how everyone calls IT, IT, but UK government, schools etc. decided to try and start a trend to rename IT to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as if communication wasn't in itself an information technology and hence IT already a perfectly sufficient acronym.
It never took off, to this day I never see anything other than IT in private sector (except when trying to attract the odd bit of public sector business), whilst schools and some UK public sector departments still despe
Re:Elite (Score:4, Funny)
Last time I checked, seals seem to run mostly on fish, with the occasional penguin thrown in for the sake of variety.
They however seem to disregard licensing entirely, supposedly because they share the same environment with pirates.
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What do the other elite forces think - what do the seals use ?
SEALS are at best in the top 5.
1) French Foreign Legion 2nd REP GCP
2) Guatemalan Kaibiles
3) Mexican GAFE
4) UK SAS
5) US Navy SEALS
Actually, many SAS and SEALS train with the Kaibiles, and after their stint in the US/UK military they end up joining the French Legion to see real action.
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Hey, you forgot about the Keyboard Warriors! Surely they must be the fiercest of them all.
Kaibiles are required to raise a pet and then kill it. Elite Legionnaires are thrown handcuffed in a small cage with a live chicken and are only allowed out once the chicken is dead. Spetsnaz used to be handed a shovel at the end of the training day and only had a moment to dig a hole and jump in it before officers started shooting at them.
But yes, those guys have nothing on the fierce keyboard warriors, such as PTA moms putting up outraged Facebook pages or male feminazis joining twitter mobs.
Re: Elite (Score:2)
I live just down from the Australian SAS regiment base and was at the pub once with a couple of DBA friends talking about databases and was talking about SAS VS Oracle, and some drunk meathead walked over and said "Listen yo fuck don't talk about what you don't know about. Oracle? Maybe come up with a better bad guy name. How about commies we DID fight them".
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Re: Elite (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand some of you people. SAS is one of the largest software companies on earth. If you don't know who they are what the hell are you reading slashdot for?
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I'm not enough of a frood to sass SAS, apparently.
(Also, why the hell would I have to know about a company selling some bizarre software merely because the company is large? No matter how large it is, the world is even larger.)
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(Also, why the hell would I have to know about a company selling some bizarre software merely because the company is large? No matter how large it is, the world is even larger.)
Being unaware of the existence of SAS is like being unaware of the existence of Oracle, or Microsoft.
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I quite often fly SAS [flysas.com] to and from Stockholm, myself.
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I quite often fly SAS [flysas.com] to and from Stockholm, myself.
They make some pretty good shoes [sasshoes.com], too. I own a couple pairs and I recommend them.
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SAS is one of the largest software companies on earth.
Hardly a household name. Sure I have heard of them, but the Special Air Service and Scandinavian Airlines are much better known and thought of first.
A quick check with google returns results in the same order.
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Yes, but this is Slashdot, a site for people who know at least the fundamentals of the IT industry.
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Yes, but this is Slashdot, a site for people who know at least the fundamentals of the IT industry.
You can spend years working in engineering and network management, and be unaware of that side of the industry.
I thought SAS was the sort of software that possibly lived on with COBOL and mainframes in cold basements of banks and insurance companies.
Did not know it was still a thing.
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Advantage of proprietary software (Score:1)
You might get tickets to a playoff game, courtesy of the vendor's sales guys.
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If you have a decent budget, call Red Hat or Hortonworks and you'll see that open source vendors can also wine and dine you properly.
As unpopular as it will be to hear... (Score:5, Interesting)
...they're quite right. Open Source is not magic pixie dust. As long as software is made with the same broken techniques, the same broken tools, by the same broken people, it will continue to be just as broken as proprietary software. I think after a decade and a half of pro-FOSS FUD it's finally gotten to the point where people are ready to admit that the promise of FOSS has fallen well short of the mark due primarily to a lack of market incentives to ensure software is produced using best current engineering practices.
Consequently, whatever your particular need, you may find that a FOSS application fits the bill where a proprietary one wouldn't, or vice versa. It just depends on exactly what functionality you want, and there's no hard and fast rule to guide you. You literally are forced to try different packages, see which ones are buggy, and then pick the one that's right for you.
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So what if open source has the same issues as proprietary software. Faced with the choice between open source software which I can purchase support for on an open and competitive market from my choice of consultant, or proprietary software with licensing traps set to catch me out with massive unexpected costs when my server has one too many cores
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At the end of the day it comes down to being able to use the software. If a product works, whether it's open source or not, you'll use it. When both open source and proprietary products are equally buggy and for the same reasons, we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss either one. Instead, we should carefully investigate what's available and choose what actually works. For most consumer needs, open source will still get the job done, bugs and all. For more specialized needs, proprietary may be the only game in
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Well all else being equal, the open choice is almost always the better one..
When both options are buggy, at least you have the chance to fix the source yourself, and you'll always be able to maintain it and migrate your data out of it if you need to use something else in the future.
Companies often spend a LOT of money on acquiring, customising and managing closed source, why not spend some of that money on bugfixing open source and returning the fixes to the community? If everyone did that then software wou
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It still depends. There are a lot of factors. And quite frankly how the product is licensed is way down on the bottom of conserned. Most organizations are able to negotiate better contract with these companies. Do you think a 1,000+ employee companies will be using standard windows licenses? No they will negotiate with Microsoft for a license and conditions that fit there needs. With FOS it is what you get that comes with it. If it is GNU you better be sure that you don't use it in your product if you
Re: As unpopular as it will be to hear... (Score:1)
Re:As unpopular as it will be to hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
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How dare you bring up common sense in this emotional discussion
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Yep, but the idea you can recommend a particular configuration by a simple percentage is just silly.
Damn straight. Anyone with sense can see that you need a complex percentage. Otherwise you have no idea how much of your imaginary software should be proprietary.
Re:As unpopular as it will be to hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
It just depends on exactly what functionality you want, and there's no hard and fast rule to guide you. You literally are forced to try different packages, see which ones are buggy, and then pick the one that's right for you.
The difference is that when you find the software package you want, if it's open source then you can improve it and squish the nasty bugs but if it's closed you are stuck waiting for someone to fix it for you. If you don't want to put the time/money/effort into improving the software then I believe the saying, "beggars can't be choosers" comes into play.
TL:DR: Put the money you would have paid for getting closed source into improving open source and everyone will have much better software. Simply whining about it not being perfect helps nobody.
This is such a bad argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time there's a story about OSS software being less than perfect, someone always trots this tired crap out. "Oh if it isn't want you want you can just fix it!" That is complete bullshit and you should know it. If you don't, you are hopelessly naive.
First off, most people are not programmers and many do not even have the request problem solving, analytical, and mathematical skills to become one. If you aren't a programmer, you can't just go and fix software. Becoming a programmer isn't magic either, you
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The difference is that when you find the software package you want, if it's open source then you can improve it and squish the nasty bugs
No, the difference is *YOU* may be able to do that, but 99.9999% of open source software users are not capable of doing that regardless of how much source code is available.
In a more corporate world you could pay someone to do something, but then just like with the proprietary vendor when you pay for support you can hold them to account on their bugs too.
TL:DR: Put the money you would have paid for getting closed source into improving open source and everyone will have much better software.
Throwing money at what is in the large part hobby / side projects may squash some bugs but you're equally outta luck if your idea of good differs with what
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Paying for support doesn't mean you can hold them to account for bugs or that these bugs will ever get fixed either...
You might get their assistance to implement some kludgy workaround, but that's usually all you'll get.
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Paying for support doesn't mean you can hold them to account for bugs or that these bugs will ever get fixed either... You might get their assistance to implement some kludgy workaround, but that's usually all you'll get.
That depends entirely on your support agreement, and if you're a company large enough to waste money on the likes of SAS then you're a company large enough to sway and negotiate the terms of your support agreement.
If you have enough buying power you can even get the world's largest software vendor to write a custom version of their OS for you. Not every battle is David vs Goliath. There are quite a few Goliath vs Goliath battles.
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The terms of support agreements have to do with how fast of a response you get, and when you have to pay extra, and when you get refunds because something took too long to fix.
What you don't get is magic, or a satisfaction guarantee on bugfixes or workarounds.
Even if they agree to write a custom version of their OS for you, it doesn't mean you'll be happy. It might be an awful idea that means now you get security patches for zero-day exploits a couple months after everybody else. It might mean you hit EOL b
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but users of open software get that same ability by default
Nope. Again with the standard fallacy that because it's open means we can do what we want with it. For most people that is out of the realm of possibility and you're just as dependent on third party interest as before.
Sure you could be a completely non-IT house and suddenly decide to employ a bunch of coders to throw at the problem, but businesses who diversify like that don't typically last in the long term. Open source isn't some magic panacea.
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You are still dependent on third parties in most cases, but you have lots more competing third parties to choose from so you don't need to be a huge company or government before someone will be bothered to lift a finger for you.
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And there is your strawman. Nobody was recommending anything of the sort and you know it.
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I know it's not trendy to read threads for context, but what you were replying too was literally prefaced by "TL;DR"
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You can spend that much on developers, but why would you? He said spend the same as you would have on proprietary licenses... Same price, but probably much better results especially if others do the same.
When implementing many large proprietary applications (sap, sharepoint etc) its often necessary to hire developers anyway.
Re:As unpopular as it will be to hear... (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh, I'd say the people who write open source software on a non-commercial basis generally have a passion for it, make more effort in making it work correct and work harder to hone their skills than coders just looking for a paycheck. What's missing is usually the time and resources, sometimes it amazes me how much gets done with a skeleton crew. Projects and packages where it turns out there was really only one maintainer and he suddenly got other priorities and things go into limbo.
Most projects are not like the Linux kernel where there's several candidates and a nomination process. Often it's more like if you want to write code or take ownership then tag, you're it. Or it's just nobody who is going to write that kind of software or functionality in their spare time. Or it just reaches a level of mediocrity that's good enough to get shit done and not enough care about polish or user friendliness or niche features. It's 2017 and MS Office and Photoshop is alive and well. I think I've heard since '97 that Office was pretty much "done", well shouldn't we be catching up then?
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This is probably true, but I'm not really sure.
The reason I'm not sure is that it has been over a decade since I had document compatibility problems. Is one better than the other? How would I know?
I had to work with MS Office in the field last year, and things were in different places but that might have just been the difference in OS.
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Just open the file in LibreOffice, save, and open it again in MS Office. ;)
Sure, sure, when both sides are MS, you still have compatibility problems. But when one side is something else, problems should be rare and solvable.
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The ridiculous part is the 60/40 recommendation.
It is turning statistics over its head.
A conclusion that says that 60% of cases are better served by proprietary software can make sense. They are obviously biased but why not.
But saying that companies should make 60/40 a goal is like saying that because 60% of cars work better with gasoline and 40% use diesel then all cars should run with a 60/40 gas/diesel mix.
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SAS always wanted to kill R, since forever, and Dr. Goodnight hung on to the goal way past the point when it was clear that this was a losing battle.
As somebody who used to work at SAS, I can attest that their older core products are rock solid but the new stuff is often (if not always) over-burdened with issues, and released too early. I used to work with some R&D teams, and my impression was that they are spread to thin, over too many products.
Don't get me wrong, they are committed to fixing things an
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As long as software is made with the same broken techniques, the same broken tools, by the same broken people, it will continue to be just as broken as proprietary software.
Bitter, are we?
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well, it's also true, at least in the fields SAS deals with.
"Despite substantial work, none of their Scala model translations match the results from their Python model development, and nobody in the company knows how to fix this problem."
i can attest to this. i suspect, based on "Scala model translations", that they are using Databricks, which is a broken platform despite being an industry golden boy; everyone uses it, mostly just because everyone else uses it. Databricks is for open source what fucking Ora
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On the surface I agree with you. In practice, I've gone the other direction and have become more pro-open-source over the years.
One example is MATLAB. I like MATLAB, and consider myself fairly good at it. People come to me to ask MATLAB questions. With that said, my company has floating licenses and these are a pain. Mathworks is very responsive in their customer service, but when you find a bug, you have to work around it or wait until they fix it. On the odd occasion where you want to actually distribute
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Consequently, whatever your particular need, you may find that a FOSS application fits the bill where a proprietary one wouldn't, or vice versa. It just depends on exactly what functionality you want, and there's no hard and fast rule to guide you. You literally are forced to try different packages, see which ones are buggy, and then pick the one that's right for you.
In other, shorter words: "FOSS could be good; could be bad. Proprietary could be good; could be bad. Just depends. Use what works. Meh. Wishy-washy-whatever-man."
What was this post modded "interesting"?
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Exactly... Proprietary code could be all kinds of legacy cruft hacked together, and based on the code i've seen it usually is. Rewriting the code to current best practices is time consuming and costly, no commercial business will take that decision unless they have no other choice.
On the other hand, rewrites happen quite often with open source which may result in a better end product, but often causes significant delays or new versions coming out which lack features from the previous versions etc.
Open sourc
Seems about right (Score:5, Informative)
This seems about right. Once you've introduced proprietary software into the mix, a huge amount of your time is going to be spent fighting with the software vendor, waiting for updates from the software vendor, working around the idiocy of the software vendor, etc. So, even though 90% of the company runs on open source software, you still need 60% of the workforce to deal with the proprietary software.
Re:Seems about right (Score:5, Informative)
This is however also true of open-source software. There are some very large and mission critical software tools in usage today that I've found bugs in, debugged them, wrote patches, and then had to argue with maintainers to get them pushed upstream. This process often times takes MONTHS after the patch is available and ready to go. The only other option is to literally manually build the package each and every new release with the small patches in place rather than using distribution pre-built packages, which takes considerably more time to deploy to an entire cluster than a simple "update" from apt, yum, pkg, whatever. So yes, even in F/OSS, there are costs with dealing with the software.
Re:Seems about right (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I usually do a work around and keep using upstream packages... Then file a PR/patch and when/if that lands go remove my workaround.
Just because open source software gives you the option to fix it yourself and roll our own patch packages doesn't mean you have to choose that road.
It depends on the situation.. But at-least you have the option!
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But at-least you have the option! :)
Amen to that. For years every time I've used Python on AIX I commented out a line of code in one of the core Python libraries to make it work better on that cursed O/S. I couldn't do that with Powershell on Windows.
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There is a huge distinction between what you've described and how that process would work in a proprietary software environment. The moment you discovered the bug, you had the resources to debug it. The moment you debugged it, you had the resources to at least deploy it in a fashion that would allow you to continue to do work (admittedly in a possibly haphazard way). At some point in the future, your fix (or something like it) will be integrated and away you go.
Contrast that to proprietary software. You
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Re:Seems about right (Score:5, Funny)
This happens to me too. With one such software, I was trying to discuss my bugfix in the forum when the admin deleted my comment. I asked why, and he said disclosing my fully-original modification that made the software work was a violation of the license agreement.
So I asked if Google was in violation of their license for distributing the code they ripped off and removed the Apache license from, and they deleted the whole post.
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So, even though 90% of the company runs on open source software, you still need 60% of the workforce to deal with the proprietary software.
The biggest and most complex piece of application software most companies run is their ERP system(s), which doesn't really have an open source alternative except for at the smallest levels.
Percentage doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Fifteen years ago, that wouldn't have happened: open source was a communist virus.
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The only reason Microsoft changed their language on that was because they recently learned people didn't care about them for many server-side activities including web hosting and what to run in VMs (two areas where GNU/Linux is popular). Microsoft wants to frame things in terms of popularity because it can't compete on software freedom. When Microsoft failed to show high popularity in those markets they figured they'd rather have organizations include them somewhere in the system than totally exclude them.
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Oh, I think the percentage bit is significant. It shouldn't be news that they've acknowledged reality; but it's remarkable that their responses is so meaningless.
It makes me wonder whether this is just marketing BS or whether they're really that incoherent about strategy.
Many proprietary software companies have prospered in an era of open source acceptance -- even when very good free software alternatives for their products exists (Microsoft, Oracle). But although we don't tend to think of them that way,
Software for sale... (Score:2, Informative)
What you are is clear, sir... (Score:2, Flamebait)
When Adobe writes "I just wonder who in their marketing dept thought this was a good idea." let's be clear about this—Adobe's main source of revenue is user-subjugating software (proprietary software) just like SAS. So Adobe isn't arguing that a user ought to prefer FLOSS, even reject proprietary software. Adobe's objection comes down to either quibbling over percentage points in SAS' recommendation or rejecting the recommendation altogether on the basis that any discussion of this is likely to bring
The same old bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard before about the "hidden costs" of open source software. What utter crock. Closed source software has:
1) The same or worse hidden costs:
Their support largely consists of other users in support forums, with the majority of the cost absorbed by the client organisation.
Licence management costs are compared to zero as a baseline, and litigation for accidental breaches of licence is a real and catastrophically expensive danger for closed source only.
In terms of the effectiveness of the software, commercial software is largely chosen by those ill equipt to make the choice, based on marketing rather than any sensible criteria, so it LESS likely to be effective (and no, your favourite example of photoshop being nicer than GIMP or whatever doesn't change this general point, because that is consumer software in a completely different domain).
Lock in! Your bosses subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy. If you work out that it is worse than open source alternatives, you're still stuck with it because "we bought it so you better use it!". Then when it's time for contract renewal "we don't have time to swap" so you have to renew. Bullshit.
2) More up front cost:
Again, open source sets the standard at $0, and to take my most hated example of business software that is shitter than numerous open source alternatives (ClearCase), you can start the bargaining at about, what was it? $4k per head? They don't make it easy to find the cost but I think that was it. And if you are one of those people going "oh I don't understand why all of my co-workers hate clearcase because I have no trouble getting it to work and it has this one feature that is really nice in a particular use case, so..." do you actually imagine that to be worth the cost?
The sad thing about all this is: I'm not an open source / free software zealot. I don't have a problem with the idea of paying a fair amount for something that is good value for money. My problem is that IT IS NOT THE CASE, in general, for closed source software from large vendors, and SAP, in particular, is shithouse in most cases that I have seen.
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...Their support largely consists of other users in support forums, with the majority of the cost absorbed by the client organisation.
In most cases I'd agree with you: vendor support is a dumbed down user forum much inferior to Stackoverflow.
However, it has been a couple of years since I last managed larger teams using this software, but the support from SAS was simply outstanding. Nothing like it anywhere else. You call, they answer and you speak immediately to someone really knowledgeable in the tool, in stats (the main use case for SAS), and, more often than not, in your industry. Never had to do more than one transfer to get anything
Sorry I'm late (Score:2)
I read the summary, then decided I wanted some popcorn on hand before I started reading the comments.
Carry on.
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I wanted some popcorn on hand before I started reading the comments.
Are you currently leaving smudges on a touch screen or on a keyboard?
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What is SAS? (Score:3, Insightful)
SAS software's primary focus is on getting maximum value from analytics. A reliable, open analytics platform underpins that focus. Combining the power of SAS with open source technologies enables you to unify disparate toolsets, eliminate silos, increase productivity, foster collaboration and facilitate business agility.
Ah, a buzzword generator. Are these people relevant to policy wankers?
SAS is expensive shelfware (Score:5, Informative)
A former client of mine was paying SAS $10,000/month to host a shitty dashboard that was updated once per quarter. It didn't even come with a vanity URL. That's the typical SAS market: gold-plated clients with unlimited budgets and almost no actual needs.
We spent an afternoon rewriting this piece of shit as a HTML dump from matlab and "deployed" it on the corporate intranet.
When you don't provide added value, you quickly become obsolete.
Farewell, SAS.
SAS get sued so often it boggles my mind (Score:2)
When I see a company deploying SAS, I usually am seeing a company that has recently been taken over by MBAs. Maybe a big family company that is moving on to the third generation. Maybe a company where the
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And ... MBAs? WTF? Seriously, SAS is one of the most comprehensive, technically oriented languages out there. It doesn't support the 'McDonald's Burger-Flipping Developer' approach like many other languages - it requires someone with more than a one-or-two year college course to work effectively in it.
It i
60/40 is exactly right. (Score:4, Informative)
I have experimented with many mixtures of proprietary and open source software and discovered the ideal ratio when creating a document is: six pages in MS Word, four pages in Libre Office. Harmony and balance. However, it does slow down our team workflow. And making every document exactly ten pages doesn't speed things up either.
Swapped? (Score:1)
Since I left IT and joined academia... (Score:2)
Yeah, it's been many years since I worked in IT. I can see it now that it took me several minutes to decipher "SAS". In academia we use and love open source, and abbreviations such as "SAS" mean little to nothing. At first I thought "the British SAS? Or is it the Scandinavian Airlines (that would be more plausible)?" I guess it's not only me having left the world of IT industry but also the arbitrariness of the statement of 60% proprietary + 40% OS. I haven't had to deal with such BS in over a decade.
Open source statistics and computing (Score:1)
Wrong Focus (Score:2)
As a community we have had the wrong focus with the fight over open versus closed software. It doesn't matter. While I prefer my software open source there are times when it just won't be made unless a commercial entity sells it under a closed source model.
However the important fight that we have long neglected, and continue to do so for the most part, is for the open access to our data. I don't care how I created my data. It is mine and I should never be held hostage to access it. When an application is
Shocked they recommend ANY open source. (Score:2)
Look, they are selling closed software. Frankly it's shocking they recommend any open source. The numbers seem random to me, but then I did not read their so called report.
Shocked I am.... (Score:2)
Problems (Score:2)
I had a problem, so I hired SAS. Now I have 2,174 problems and no money to fix them.
SAS' motto should be, "Our Cure Is Worse Than The Ailment"
SAS used here (Score:2)
My company HEAVILY uses SAS. They use it for the predictive model. They just recent upgraded to SAS Visual Analytics. That requires Python and runs (no shit) 39 web applications on one Tomcat instance. It literally takes the server 45 minutes to boot up! It's ridiculous. It's purely a Java system that uses Flash for gods sake! It's cost is UNGODLY! for two servers (test and production) each with 24 cores was $100K+++++.
No, shit (Score:2)
sometimes software has unexpected costs. Never heard of that before.
Mockery is evidence? (Score:1)
tl;dr (Score:2)
^ for those who didn't want to read that wall of text, the guy basically says "it depends"
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<-----[attention span] ............. [you]----->
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"Attention span" is a metric, not a value by itself. It's like writing "mph" or "flavor", there's no implied quantity or quality.
If at least you had put me on the left side one could have argued it was some kind of axis and I was on the short side. But as it stands your chart makes no sense.
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It's not a graph, but rather a diagram illustrating the wide gulf between two things.
It's also not especially original, but rather a fairly old and (I thought) well-known Internet meme.
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Then I will take your word for it and officially retract my disparaging comment.
For the record I don't have a short attention span, I just severely dislike people who write long paragraphs. They remind me of those people who chain their sentences together when they speak, just to make sure you have no way to escape the discussion. Paragraphs are a courtesy to readers, a subtle way to let them off the hook if they want to skip ahead and see if there's a point in continuing reading.
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Not me, in case anyone's wondering.
I would have put it more politely, perhaps in terms of "spending quite a lot of time trying to appear clever rather than actually being clever".
WARNING: PARENT POSTER IS A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER (Score:2)
If you want to make a graph to support your insults, maybe you should make sure the graph itself is not stupid. Being a self-righteous cunt is not enough, you need to dot your i's and cross your t's. I'm sure you'll do better next time now that you are aware of it.
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