

Open Source vs. Proprietary Software: There is No Clear Winner - Ashuu
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/open-source-vs-proprietary-software-there-is-no-clear-winner-021752.php

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taylodl
The very first sentence gets us started on the wrong foot: focusing on OSS for
its "free as in beer" promise. No. It's all about freedom. Something Gartner
isn't concerned with-it's simply not one of their metrics. Gartner analysts
are also influenced by vendors. The marketing folks send their material to
Gartner. They can have in-depth discussions of product roadmaps and so forth.
This all influences who makes it into Gartner's "magic quadrant" and it's
typically not flattering to OSS projects.

On a related note, many organizations won't use tools and technologies not
endorsed by Gartner. This is why OSS offerings have a difficult time getting
traction in the enterprise.

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VBZ
he "free" refers to the perception that most people have about Open Source
Software. Commercial OSS vendors reinforce this belief when they use price as
a selling point. Consider this tweet by Alfresco Software (which is an OSS
Content Management vendor: The City of Denver saved $1.5M by migrating from
Documentum to Alfresco"

OSS vendors need to sell "freedom" as well as price if that's how they want to
be perceived.They are the ones sowing the seeds.

Also, if you read this article more closely,and to the end, you'd see that it
cites a study by Coverity (a huge proponent of OSS) that found that larger OSS
projects aren't as of high quality, that they need commercial vendors behind
them and so on...

It also mentions that Drupal has 650 distros, 20,000 modules etc...that should
speak to the argument for "freedom".

Read on, and it says that commercial vendors who want to offer Big Data
solutions can't make it without adding a flavor of Hadoop or NoSQL into their
mix. Doesn't that speak well of OSS?

Further on it quotes Kevin Cochrane, OpenText's VP of Marketing (who made his
career at two commercial OSS companies); he makes an argument for how
enterprise-grade proprietary software can offer some of the same benefits as
OSS "We can give a safe, secure, and compliant platform to our community so
that they can focus their initiative on what's most meaningful to them:
unleashing the power of information to transform line of business functions to
gain faster time to innovation, faster time to market, faster time to revenue,
faster time to customer success.”

Want to know what OSS developers can do better? Cochrane's comment offers an
answer: "provide a safe, secure, and compliant platform". That is, by the way,
exactly what many OSS commercial vendors are trying to build.

Later the article talks about how OSS appears to be risky to Enterprises whose
businesses aren't technology and/or whose engineers aren't project commiters.
Consider that if Netflix has a problem with Cassandra, and that for some
reason Datastax disappears, they'll be OK because they have engineers on the
Apache project.But if Consumer Products Company XYZ has a problem and no one
knows Cassandra well, they'd likely think that they're up a creek without a
paddle.For them, OSS may be to big a risk. Oracle, as much as it may cost and
stink, may be a better bet..until Oracle's offering can't solve their problem.

That being said, all of the points you two make and the questions you ask are
worth discussing. Maybe an article on the subject is in order. Until one is
written, and if you are truly interested, look at the different strategies
that MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and Pivotal are taking around Hadoop. Some
say that at least two of them are no longer OSS. Let that can be your case
study.You might see how freedom evolves to something that is no longer free,
in every sense of the word.

Finally,and this could be the subject of still another article, what do you
say about a project that has 15 committers. Is a CIO not to take into account
what the future might look like if the commiters get into a fight, move on to
new projects. or lose interest? The perception is that the Enterprise might
end up with an abandoned technology and without support.

To be frank,on an ideological level, I lean toward OSS but, in practical terms
at the Enterprise level, there are still many questions that OSS vendors will
need to have answers for.

Finally, the article concludes by saying that Enterprises shouldn't be asking
"Proprietary or OSS" but which solves their problems best. There are many
considerations and many arguments for each.

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volume
I wanted to say this is poorly titled because it's not about all software, but
content management since this is on CMSwire. But let's get to the point:

This is a weak article that only adds to the internet noise.

What insight was shared here other than regurgitating what Gartner said? Why
not just link to Gartner and be done with it. Why aren't the following
questions answered or tackled:

* "doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be displaced by other vendors, proprietary or OSS, anytime soon." ... why?

* what steps could companies/projects take to rank better in the Magic Quadrant?

* what threats are there to the current incumbents?

If CMWire's goal is to "focus on intelligent information management" this
isn't doing it.

