

The Death of Licensed Enterprise Software? 234
tfsm writes "Andy Singleton wrote a short, interesting article about the looming death of traditionally licensed, proprietary, enterprise software over at The IT Manager's Journal. In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel. There are several causes, but one, he suggests, is erosion from Open Source offerings."
TrueCrypt (Score:4, Informative)
Re:TrueCrypt (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're talking about boxed software then support is limited to a "knowledge base" database and rudimentary and usually dire scripted phone support.
Support for customised applications is expensive and no different to the support contract you are likely to get from a good consultancy that has built your enterprise application on an open source platform.
"Support" (Score:5, Informative)
Out of the box commercial software pretty much like this. However, if you're talking enterprise solutions from Oracle, SAP, IBM, EMC, NetAPP, and even Sun (unfortunately, whose support quality has declined recently IMO) then it's a different game. Pay for a contract and you will get highly knowlegable engineers to solve whatever problem that crops up within the confines of the contract. I've been very impressed by IBM in the past. DEC used to have pheonominal support. So, while your copy of TurboTax may not get you the support you feel you deserve, it's not the same with big iron hardware and enterprise software. At least, not in my experience. --M
I beg to disagree (Score:2)
Two of your examples have been big disapointments for me, and are one of the main reasons why my company is moving away from commercial software.
We had a customer database in Oracle, with some engineering applications, developed by our engineers in Fortran. We had to upgrade to Oracle 8 because the hardware was replaced. Then we found that Oracle had dropped support for Fortran. Worse, we had a sup
Re:I beg to disagree (Score:2)
i am maintaining [glug.org] a port of GNU [gnu.org] emacs [gnu.org] (which is written in C at its core) to VMS [glug.org], and am interested in learning about the bug you mentioned.
is the bug report (and more interestingly, the 50-line piece of C code that demonstrates the bug) posted anywhere public? (do you have a link handy?) thanks.
back on topic: i wonder if emacs is considered "enterprise software".
Re:I beg to disagree (Score:2)
It sometimes works that way in open source too, though there's a decent chance support can come back. Case in point, fortran support in gcc: it looked like it was going to languish as a cheap F77 implementation forever, but only recently came back in force (still don't know how well it optimizes tho).
Re:OK (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but look at the price you pay. We didn't want to renew our support contract with Oracle, but they said we had to because other departments in our company had support contracts with them. Apparently they fear that a company may have only one contract and redirect problems from all databases to the one with support.
We also have an Ingres database running in an HP-UX server. The server had a
Re:OK (Score:3, Interesting)
The people who directed the reaming, of course, have long since moved on to other employm
Re:OK (Score:2)
Oh, here we go...
Another guy who thinks a corporate manager is "God" whose decisions should never be questioned.
Bend over, I'm sure there are some people here in San Francisco who'd like to ream your butt, too.
You wouldn't be a vendor, would you? Thought so.
Re:OK (Score:3, Interesting)
It's calling "screwing the customer after they've committed to your product".
City College of San Francisco is replacing their Integrated Library System with another vendor's. They explicitly wrote into the contract that the new system had to be able to access the SCT Banner college MIS system. This is not a huge technical problem, but software companies don't like having to modify their product.
The vendor proceeded to send them train
Re:"Support" (Score:2)
A document workflow system developed with OSS or by a proprietary company is only as good as the support it will get.
I know a large HR company who can't get Adobe to give it the time of day for what's, to them, an urgent feature request. A consultancy that developed the workflow system using OSS might be equally reticent to respond but at least the HR company will be able to hire in someone else to deal with it for them.
It comes down
Re:"Support" (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the key point of your argument was this:
Pay for a contract and you will get highly knowlegable engineers to solve whatever problem that crops up within the confines of the contract.
This is true whether the software in question is a based on closed-source or open-source. You need to find a vendor who will meet your business needs first; whether that solution is closed- or open-source should be a secondary consideration
Open-source software allows more businesses to get into the "Enterprise Software" business by using existing (Free) products that they're free to tailor to customer requirements, and the customer is free to find a new consultancy if the old one goes under / is bought out / starts to suck.
Not my experience (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TrueCrypt (Score:2, Informative)
With enterprise features you're looking for administration tools so that the IT department can manage software installations and deal for instance with lost password issues. This is completely lacking with truecrypt and as such couldn't even be considered as an enterprise encryption solution, employee drops dead, quits or forgets password and then all the data is lost.
It also does not allow you to easily encrypt your operating system volume, nor does it su
Re:TrueCrypt (Score:2)
I think you've got it backwards - if you're a $4bn+ healthcare operation, you've gotta have someone to sue - you!
Re:TrueCrypt (Score:2)
Wonderful article!
And utterly true!
I'm sending it to the head librarian at City College of San Francisco who has just been screwed over by a vendor.
Lacking details (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lacking details (Score:3, Informative)
In a nutshell, they came in and promised the world and ended up delivering something like the nastiest part of New Jersey.
Ironically, our inside developers created a Cold Fusion app and were able to solve all the problems Siebel wasn't.
So, I don't think licensed enterprise software is dead. Only poor quality half assed licensed enterprise software. Granted, I've had m
Re:Lacking details (Score:2)
Can you imagine telling Linus himself he needs to have kernel 3.0 out in a week because some customer who doens't know dick just wants it. Because the customer has money,
Re:Lacking details (Score:2)
Gateway, which we ordered warranty parts from using a siebel database, started having parts ship within weeks or months. Their old way got us warranty parts ordered before 3pm there the next day by noon. AFter about 6 months to a year of this, most of our clients switched to dell (which we also have a contract on) and it was
Re:Lacking details (Score:3, Informative)
The point of the article is that OSS alternatives like SugarCRM now exist and are likely to erode the non-OSS sales eventually.
It didn't say "right now."
Re:Lacking details (Score:2)
Re:Lacking details (Score:3, Informative)
Seibel ruins any company it trouches. In fact they are given credit to the takedown of Gateway Computer and AT&T Wireless.
Both companies were forced to sell their stock within 1 year of switching to siebel. Both credit their loss in revenue to a lack of response time in customer support due to problems with their new database.
With Gateway, it was with their delay time in sending out warranty parts (on the order of weedk&months, not hours after the siebel switch). With AT
What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2, Insightful)
A company which purchases the infrastructure it requires to operate and expand, isn't an enterprise. It's, at best, half of the solution.
If you have a business scenario which is driven by software processes, confronting the software creation, and being fully responsible for the continued evolution of that software, is the only way to guarantee continued survival as an enterprising solution to your customers. Buy something from someone else, and you put the majority of the
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't run a business, do you? Any business person can tell you that this is 100% wrong. You should only design your own software if 1. Your needs can't be filled by off-the-shelf stuff 2. There's some kind of value or competitive advantage to doing it yourself 3. You can afford it.
Unless you're a software company, software is just a tool like any others. You may as well have said that the only way to success in any business is to build your own trucks instead of simply bying them.
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, even if you *are* in the business of building software, you may well be better off buying it in instead. My company is a software house (we do web-apps), there's no way we'd write our own web server or RDBMs, we'll get one from a third party (be that mySQL, MS SQL Server or Oracle, etc).
I beg to disagree. (Score:2)
UPS builds their own trucks, or rather has trucks designed to their specs built by Morgan Olson [grummanolson.com]. The original Checker cab company [wikipedia.org] used to build their own cars. Anyone who ever rode a Checker cab knows how comfortable they were.
If software plays a big role in your business, then rolling your own may give you an extra competiti
Re:I beg to disagree. (Score:2)
It's a cost-benefit thing - can you afford to devote x months, y developers, and z dollars to developing software which could be purchased for much, much less? Now I must admit that sometimes the answer is yes. But I also spend a good deal of my time convincing managers and small business owners that they shouldn't always "do it in-house" because being able to do it is not the same thing as bein
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
On one of them, a loooong form is split up in several tabs and pages- and the "next", "previous", "submit" and "void" buttons all sit next to each other with the exact same icon.
Even a barely competent dev should be able to spot that as a show-stopping UI bug. The cost in wasted time by operator mistakes is at least an order of magnitude larger than the annual license fees.
I'm not saying your a
Re:Can't help but wonder (Score:2)
What kind of acceptance testing was implemented that allowed this kind of UI bug to slip through? And, considering the fact that you are paying them to deliver a reasonably competent product, why wasn't this fixed?
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
It really depends on the size of the business (Score:2)
Actually, no. The market will tell you different things, depending upon what you're looking at. For small businesses, yes, you are right. They usually buy COTS stuff and can't affort to write things from scratch.
As the business grows and gets more complex, then they DO start writing things from scratch. Things like custom spreadsheets and what not. They do this because they need to tune the COTS stuff to their business needs.
As the business
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
Let's not forget 4. It's more economical to roll your own and support it than to buy someone else's.
I've been in several situations where it made more sense to built my own than to buy someone else's.
This isn't the case in every scenario, but it should always be considered as a viable option with pros and cons, j
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
Not quite. If your business is information, you should build your own software. This is where things like banks, insurance companies, perhaps ISPs, etc... fall. Your business is information, if you outsource all the actual "information handling", then what exactly are you adding to the equation? The company that makes the uber bank software package that gives you everything you need to be a bank will, in short order, become a bank itself, or be bought by one.
Same goes for places like boeing and Ford. For
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, I run a retail store. Are you suggesting that, instead of buying a working POS solution for about $800/workstation, that I should make my own? You can't really be serious...
if your business is selling pigs, and you need software to control the sale of those pigs, it is far better for you to have your own, purpose-built, customized software for the selling of pigs, than it is to 'copy someone elses model'.
Why?
it shouldn't be more expensive (even though, in the past, it has been). and the point of this article is that, in fact, software is getting easier, or else there wouldn't be so much open source software supplanting 'old-school solutions' in the first place
Fine. Who do I contact to write a point of sale system that handles inventory, purchase orders, vouchers, printing tags (multiple formats), printing receipts (multiple formats), supports all major POS software, has integrated credit card processing, tracks customer purchases, and seamlessly transfers data to/from Quickbooks for $2400 (we have 3 workstations)?
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
As my econ professor always said, you can make money working 10 hours a day on your own business, but capitalism is biased towards big companies.
Wal-Mart didn't get where they are today by outsourcing everything. They write everything themselves, pay only for what they need, and take advantage of the fact that they can write an application once and deploy it at a thous
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:3, Insightful)
My point exactly. I've looked at all of them. They all suck compared to traditional, proprietary packages. Not a single one has the feature list I'm looking for. And who's going to make these changes to a lackluster OSS solution? Me? No, I have a business to run. Do I pay a developer $50-$100/hour? Why would I when I can spend a lot less, and get exactly what I need? You still haven't provided a real reason to back up what
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
No, you should go right ahead and use the off the shelf solution for now.
But that will change. Maybe next year, maybe the year after, maybe five years from now - but the OSS solutions improve all the time, and the pool of developers qualified to customise them for you is only getting bigger. So keep an eye on it, and the moment that you can gain a competitive advantage by switching, do it quick.
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone can build an OSS payroll/finance system that *works* and you can get support for...it'll take over corporations very quickly. Everyone I've talked to *hates* the one they've got presently.
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
How much is not hating a solution worth, if the mediocre solution gets the job done? Is not hating the program worth several programmer's salaries? Most companies would answer no. Things have to be *really* bad before the cost to the company is worth more staff to fix. That's why they don't roll their own.
The fact that they hate these programs just means that they have very little loyalty to them. If another program comes along
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now pull out a B-to-B phone book (or a Thomas Registry.) Betcha find at least one entity that does that service as their primary line of business for just about every function you perform.
Are you so sure of your competence that you think you can 'do it' better than those people who OTHER people are paying to do it?
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
There can still be perfectly valid reasons why a company would want to go with a commercial product to address a need -- or even (whispered) outsource that need.
FOSS is an enabler. It allows a company to answer the "build or buy" question and remove a large component of the upfront cost from the equation, at the expense of (perhaps) a slightly greater in-house support burden (if you have source code trees that need to be maintained, for exampl
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
Or take the plethora of COTS conte
Re:What is True Enterprise ... (Score:2)
If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house
One of the goals of any business is to keep their operating costs and critical resources to a minimum. If you have an in-house application designed and maintained exclusively by a single engineer and he leaves to another company, you're going to take several months to get the replacement up to speed. If you have an off-the-shelf and/or an open-source solution, it will be much easier to f
He [torpor] makes a very good point. (Score:2)
torpor: What is True Enterprise... if it isn't "Roll Your Own"? A company which purchases the infrastructure it requires to operate and expand, isn't an enterprise. It's, at best, half of the solution. If you have a business scenario which is driven by software processes, confronting the software creation, and being fully responsible for the continued evolution of that software, is the only way to guarantee continued survival as an enterprising solution to your customers. Buy something from someone else, a
I thought software was a service (Score:5, Insightful)
Markets require a supply and a demand, to make any information a product rather than a service you have to find a way to limit supply of something which isn't naturally scarce, licenses, keys, dongles etc. Without these, limitations the supply increases to infinity and the price therefore tends towards zero.
You may not like him, but Richard Stallman is a bloody clever bloke. The GPL and similar basically eliminate the artificial scarcity limitations imposed by most commercial software vendors.
Re:I thought software was a service (Score:2)
Re:I thought software was a service (Score:2)
Not in business they don't. Markets take time to react and it does cost to switch, I wouldn't read any more into it than that.
"New economic models probably need to be created for software."
LOL. Yes, that's it.
I get the impression you're an employee/shareholder of a software company. You can't say you haven't seen the warnings.
Re:I thought software was a service (Score:2)
Re:create!=copy. (Score:2)
The real reason.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Typically they are low quality with bad quirks. So the company finally get's sick of it and has the replacement software written in house to replace them instead.
Now the company OWNS the app they rely on and pay's less in "annual licensing fees" for the maintaince of the software and codebase by having on-staff programmers that are NOT dedicated programmer positions.
I.E. the IT/Programmer is very common today. you change printer toner, install a new PC and add a feature to that Billing application, or squash a bug in the shipping application.
Corperations are now demanding IT and IS people that are capable of all aspects and are expected to perform all aspects. That "programmer" is expected to be at the office at 3AM to deal with a crashed database server.
It's silly to pay $60-100K for a programmer that you have to try to keep busy when you can hire someone that has good programming skills, good IT skills and actually understands Electronics at the board level for the $50-$90K. and usually get an employee that will happily work his butt off because of the diversity of the job.
This is my observation from work here. All new hires in the IT department MUST have some programming skills in C, Java, python and PHP. We intentionally do not hire anyone that has been a "programmer" or "developer" except those that have experience in OSS as a developer. But they also must show a proficiency at IT skills and prefer that they have some EE background.
this has lead to over 15 enterprise apps being replaced with in-house versions that work better and are far FAR cheaper in the long run even when ignoring the fact that it is an asset now because the company owns it instead of a liability when you "lease" or "rent"(buy) software.
The great part is that versioning systems like Subversion integrate so well with linux,OSX and windows that it takes less than 2 hours to teach a new recruit how to use our system and get them up to speed in checking in and out code.
Enterprise apps are starting to become in-house customized projects, and THAT is the biggest threat to that "business model"
Re:The real reason.... (Score:2)
I am seeing this today in the small New Hampshire town where I work. There are two of us in the Computer Services department, so we can cover for vacations, etc. We
Smaller Companies definitely turning to OpenSource (Score:5, Insightful)
This trend is definitely true in smaller companies. Why spend thousands of dollars on proprietary software when you can get an open source project for free that you can modify to your heart's content? Granted, you're going to spend time and money to make those modifications, but it can be worth it when you get exactly what you want/need.
Compared to 5 to 10 years ago, the number of open source software apps available now is mind-blowing. So much so that whenever we are researching and deploying a new application, we immediately go looking for the open source one. The proprietary version is a last resort.
Re:Smaller Companies definitely turning to OpenSou (Score:2)
This small company has been waiting for a working open source accounting package for a loooong time. I mean, there's not even a Quickbooks alternative, and you can buy that in Wal-Mart. Open source for businesses still has a long way to go.
Re:Smaller Companies definitely turning to OpenSou (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. It doesn't do payroll.
Here's an idea (Score:2, Informative)
The future is not here today. (Score:3, Interesting)
While OSS has inherent advantages, the non-savvy end-users of business systems prefer lack of change to robustness of operation. If they didn't, OSS would be more prominent on the enterprise level. We tried to implement various builds of *nix and X window system on workstations at my place of work, and there was REVOLT IN THE AISLES.
The business world is not yet ready for the intellectual (not to mention monetary) cost of full transition to OSS. As much as I love it, the end-user isn't ready. It should remain the goal of all OSS developers to give these people more and more reason to change their minds.
Let us keep in mind: there are other reasons for the drop in revenues for these proprietary software vendors as well.
Re:The future is not here today. (Score:2)
Re:The future is not here today. (Score:2)
It's simple really (Score:3, Interesting)
At my old company, we were using Siebel on Oracle that ran on a big fat Sun system. We were still in "startup" mode and spent over $300k on that bullshit. The CEO had a grand "vision" for taking the company to a new level and we had to build our IT infrastructure aggressively to support it. Well, a year later we had a E350 with 4 procs that spent most of its time idle and 20 people working in the call center. I had argued that what we needed to "plan" aggressively instead of "spending" aggresively and had been laughed outta the room for being "short-sighted".
A year later it was satisfying to go to their bankruptcy auction....
Re:It's simple really (Score:4, Interesting)
Another employer, another year - I built a "Work in Progress" system using Oracle Power Objects. - Oracle scraps OPO because of major Y2K defects - project dies.
Now I use PHP and Postgresql - No chance of this happening to me again.
I have used other proprietry software since - and guess what - the so called "support" consists of some fool in Bangalore pretending he has an English name, and being unable to understand the problem I am reporting, consuming more of my time than it would take to fix the software myself. (Ten hours of my time, two weeks to NOT fix a misaligned columns in a report listing is what you get from paid support!)
Use proprietry software - get shafted! Yeah, that will make us buy it!
Re:It's simple really (Score:2)
Yes, although I am entitled to support, since we pay dearly for it. You're being a bit disingenuous by saying there's not online resources. For just about any popular product you'll find plenty of webpages dedicated to it. You'll also most likely find an active usenet newsgroup or two. In the case of Oracle, you've got OTN, which is quite comprehensive. There are others out
Re:It's simple really (Score:2)
Nothing beats IBM's db2 service, either for price or quality. If price is no object, db2 has no competitors, but in my books Postgresql beats Oracle regardless of cost. And Oracle aint cheap (Hell, even at $5 for a pirate copy, vs free download, th
It's okay.. (Score:4, Funny)
In a rising tide, learn to float (Score:5, Insightful)
Siebel, like many big software firms, are unable to float. They don't use open source for their processes, so don't benefit from it. They are stuck in a niche, so are basically anchored to the sea floor while the water rises around them. Their customers have the choice of remaining anchored with them, and drowing as well, or cutting free and floating.
It's a bit sad if you're in the position of the drowing man. But it's been the same in Big Auto, Big Steel, Big Textile, Big Science, Big Pharma, Big Business... competition is a tough game.
The smart money is on those firms that learn to float. IBM, CA, Novell, Apple. Maybe Sun and SAP. Apparently not Siebel, definitely not Microsoft.
Re:In a rising tide, learn to float (Score:2)
The smart money is on those firms that learn to float. IBM, CA, Novell, Apple. Maybe Sun and SAP. Apparently not Siebel, definitely not Microsoft.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has the resources to divert the sea for a while, and convince people that it's fine to hang out with them on the sea floor. They can build barriers, etc., while they're not drowning.
For a while, at least.
Re:In a rising tide, learn to float (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I work with a college career services office and, 3-4 years ago, all of the college office specific online systems were handled by centralized inflexible giants like eRecruiting and Career Connections. They offered very little if any direct access to data. No one was
Death to site lic's (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, software should be lic'ed to an individual company based on the total number of deployments that they have used the past year. That way its fair to the developer, and fair to the end user. Flexable lics would be a very nice thing indeed, getting rid of them all together
Both Open Source and inexpensive web services (Score:2, Informative)
On the Open Source side: systems like SugarCRM are free to implement and very high quality. On the inexpensive web services side: systems like Basecamp provide a great service at a price point that looks almost free.
Anyway, SugarCRM and 37signals (Basecamp) are two companies that I am watching as examples of a new business model that works.
Don't forget (Score:2)
"The Siebel board fired Lawrie and installed George Shaheen as CEO. Shaheen was formerly the president of Accenture, and he has never run a business that depended on selling licenses."
After leaving Accenture, Shaheen was CEO of Webvan, a short-lived dot.bomb that burned through a couple hundred million dollars before going out of business.
Yep, that's just the guy I would as my new CEO.
Re:Don't forget (Score:2)
Interesting example (Score:5, Informative)
For example, when one clicks on a drop menu, there is a noticeable delay (up to 2 seconds) before the dropmenu is populated. The only reason for this that I can think of is that the app runs a DB query each and every time a dropmenu is clicked, even though the contents change very rarely. This is quite possibly the worst possible way to fill a drop menu, ever.
To add insult to injury, the thing is a "web app", but it makes such excessive use of ActiveX and other Windows-specific tools, it eliminates one of the primary advantages of web applications: Cross-platform compatibility.
To their credit, a rep from Siebel did say that this particular product was once a locally-run binary program, but Siebel was losing sales to competitors simply because their tool was not a web application. That is the only reason! Apparently, it didn't include a sufficient number of buzzwords, so they rewrote it to do just that.
How much do you want to bet they'll switch its data storage medium from a proper relational database (even if it is MS SQL) to a purely XML-based system? I am sure that will be plenty fast.
The irony is that this system was used to replace two systems that actually worked well--a OpenVMS-based control system and a Tandem-based logging system. Whomever implemented the old systems clearly valued uptime (neither OpenVMS nor Tandem/HP-Nonstop systems crash; at least, I have never seen it happen, and I've worked on such systems that have uptimes of decades), though admittedly both are rather proprietary and dated.
I've only used 2 or 3 Siebel products, so my experience with them is somewhat limited. Perhaps some of their stuff is non-crap.
Just goes to show--never let PHB's dominate your design decisions, at least if quality is a concern.
Re:Interesting example (Score:2)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
What's killing enterprise software? (Score:3, Interesting)
Over the years their prices have risen out of sync with target client business revenue, activity, and need not to mention the changing economic scene.
Their software often seems written explicitly to confound the most experienced users and administrators and effectively prevent any ease in enterprise-wide roll-out, installation, upgrading, and administration.
Their licensing models bear no relationship whatsoever to the realities of the usage of the target businesses, and frequently are outright hostile to newer technology usage such as multiprocessor workstations and thin clients.
For instance, I have yet to have a single installation of any Computer Associates offering go smoothly, or anything that might be mistaken for semi-smoothly. A demo copy of Unicenter once hosed a workstation I tried it on. Given the models, methods, and practices currently standard in the world of Windows programming, and the prodigious resources of CA, that takes Herculean effort to do.
Remedy ARS anyone? I'm sure this can't be the only software with an interface that would make a sadomasochistic OS/2 2.1 adherent's blood curdle.
Siebel? I worked for a company that tried their code. We lost 500% productivity almost overnight. Everyone rebelled by continuing to use Remedy ARS. You have to write some horrendously bad stuff to make people prefer RARS to your offering.
Open Source is of course, NOT a solution. Any corporation that isn't run by some weird eccentrics is going to avoid paying a code cowboy team to customize apps of all kinds, in all places in the business, and then pay their legal people overtime to make sure they are in compliance with three or six different open source-ish licensing models. As it is, there are major corporations shovelling massive greenbacks into Redmond to get Windows source access to get custom builds for their desktops. Or were when 95 was the standard. Now they might just put up with the comparatively less quirky WinXP Pro and pay a few junior desktop nerds a whole lot less.
Many companies today, trying to cut costs everywhere, are removing a lot of very useful software that their people got very comfortable with and were very proficient with, further eroding productivity. How sad is it that the vendor of the gui has overpriced it to the point that their client would rather do without and simply make use of the command prompt interface of the routers and switches instead?
All in all, things are not in the same way they used to be seven years ago. That does not mean however that Open Source is going to be the magic solution. OS still costs money. Programmers and support personnel and trainers do not work for free. I think neglect of taking that into account is the single biggest blindspot of the OSS boosters and if they don't stop acting as though the fruits of others' labors should be free on a silver platter and come with no cost, they will blow a golden opportunity to expand the usage of software in big business and simply hand it back to Microsoft, Siebel, etc.
Re:What's killing enterprise software? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't redistribute your changes, and you are not in violation of any licenses. GPL/BSD/MPL are _all_ about distribution of the source, not about its use.
You just happ
The laws are constantly changing... (Score:2)
Open Source will eventually catch up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Mostly due to two factors.
1. Last programmer base. Lots and lots of people are coding open source software, and it seems the more people who code it, the more people who want to code it. So slowly, the curve grows more and more vertical with development. As well, more and more companies are actively supporting Open Source and adding a lot of umph to the movement.
2. Open Source code that is being used never goes stagnant. If people are using it, it's getting updated and modified and cleaned up. Unlike Windows XP, which has not significantly changed since it's release, there have been many significant good and useful improvements to a variety of good Open Source projects, and if the project does the job you need for free already, you may as well use it. Case in point: CuteFTP Filezilla. I used to use CuteFTP until Filezilla became significantly more stable and had better features.
You cannot beat Open Source using any corporate strategy, unless you are willing to put as much money as they have people. The best strategy right now, from what I can tell, is to do something similar to Net Integration, or other companies like that. Take an existing open source project, and make the saleable feature something truly new and revolutionary. Competing against open source is truly an uphill battle. Especially when you can just use the open sourced code, and make it work well for yourself.
Just my thoughts.
F/OSS = Popularity (Score:3, Interesting)
To create a solution for somebody for nothing, I would guess you would need a bunch of qualified people to write and test the code. Since these people are not getting paid, then it would have to be something that these people are interested in solving.
Since these people by definition are programmers, they're going to be interested in stuff that programmers are interested in. So the evolution of F/OSS will continue along the lines of stuff programmers like -- encryption, database, file sharing, photo editing tools, etc.
It's going to be awful hard to get groundswell support for some new system to categorize ear wax, for instance. You can make the argument that so much of software is just the guts and not the business logic, but that's the whole point of software abstraction to begin with, so it's a non-starter.
So to me the question is: who's going to care enough about mundane, boring, business-rules based code to keep it up to date? Certainly not me -- not for free. And therein lies the limits of F/OSS.
Re:F/OSS = Popularity (Score:2)
That's the flaw in your argument. There are plenty of F/OSS projects that have a commercial component, thus paid developers. Look at the Linux kernel for example - many of the key developers are paid for what they are doing.
Re:F/OSS = Popularity (Score:2)
Ironically if anybody is going to grow OSS, it's large businesses. Some businesses see value in using some OS code for their own use and returning some of their own code to the wild. Open Sourcing some software allows it to be developed without having to pay programmers for all of the work. Or perhaps the co
Re:F/OSS = Popularity (Score:2)
Re:F/OSS = Popularity (Score:2)
There is no reason that FOSS has to be written by people without a profit motive. So who's going to write the boring business-rules code? The businesses who need those rules coded.
If there are X companies in the same business, it behooves each of them to contribute resources towards FOSS products to be used as the standard in that type of business. Each business benefits, while
biased source (Score:4, Insightful)
Read the author's bio:
Andy Singleton is president of Needham, Mass.-based Assembla, which brings "inspired by open source" applications and development processes to enterprise software.
His business is implementing enterprise open source software. Of course he's going to say that that's the future.
GPLed software is licensed software! (Score:2, Informative)
What about... (Score:2, Funny)
Bad underlying database structures (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to make a better tool, allow one to model the particular company, sticking with certain conventions for hooks into the package.
Or better yet, sell development and expertise to help companies build one to fit their own company. In other words, become a domain expert company instead of software box company, and market that expertise. "We know how to build sales-force systems" instead of selling a pre-packaged blob of software. Such a company could still sell software, but in bits and pieces or as part of a bigger semi-custom-built package. Build a Lego kit that fits sales-force software (for instance) instead of the whole deal itself.
Domain specialists seems to be a missing software-related niche.
Re:OSS rules (Score:2)
Isn't going to happen, at least not in the next 20-30 years. Here's the deal: OSS has been around quite a while now, and all it's provided competitive options for are either tools that pretty much everyone uses, like text editors, or stuff that's of interest to programmers, like computer operating systems and associated tools.
There are lots of areas that are more specialized where it's just hard to imagine that there wi
Re:OSS rules (Score:2)
I would have put operating systems in the class of stuff that pretty much everyone uses. How many computer users do you know who don't use an operating system?
Re:OSS rules (Score:2, Insightful)
Not really. I've seen plenty of code written by that "almost anyone who can be a programmer" person you speak of. 99 times out of 100 it is complete crap and I wish I had the time I spent dorking with their crap back.
Re:OSS rules (Score:2)
Re:OSS rules (Score:2)
And, why on earth should the government be responsible for creating software? I do not see free software being used for the defense of a country or for public safety.
Why don't you start a company that charges a yearly flat fee, and gives access to the software that your company produces?
Yes it is (Score:2)
And why the replicator in Star Trek is the truly disruptive technology. Something similar in our society would devastate world markets.
You could look up stuff on 3D printing and nanobots.
Re:Yes it is (Score:2)
And why the replicator in Star Trek is the truly disruptive technology.
The big step is when you start replicating replicators.
Re:lunch (Score:2)
Re:Well you are just going to have to innovate! (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on which side of the coin you are on. If you are on the consumer side, choose F/OSS and it can be a free ride. Unfortunately, shrink wrap software companies probably are going to have a hard time paying salaries of programmers so if you program, you'd better start liking jobs where all you do is tweek F/OSS for "customization" for your site.
So let's see you hire some high IQ people and start thinking up new ideas and industrial progress will be off and running again after a short stall!
And if you're a shrink wrap house, you'll pay these high IQ salaries with... what exactly? If you *do* come up with something great, you'll have 100 SourceForge copycats within a month and they will erode your market.
F/OSS is the great poison pill of software. If anyone comes out with something that is good (and it isn't you), then just put some effort into a F/OSS "alternative" and poison the whole market... basically make it where if *I* can't make any money in that market, then no one will.
Well put (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a love hate relationship with F/OSS.
I worked for a company with a proprietary software that had problems competing with *free*.
I love fiddling with F/OSS as a hobby and I smile smugly when Linux makes Microsoft squirm.
What hypocrasy on my part.
The one advantage that I can think of is that F/OSS counteracts outsourcing to India.
The work that moves to India is large proprietary software projects.
Customization of free software packages stays in the West.
The b
Re:Well you are just going to have to innovate! (Score:4, Insightful)
That isn't quite correct. If someone comes up with a nifty utility to base their business on, then yeah, the OSS community will duplicate it in no time, but then, so will commercial vendors.
It seems most of these complaints come from companies who charge money for the most trivial of crap, such as this password generator [segobit.com]. Nevermind that it has one of the worst user interfaces ever designed (look at that screenshot), it's a freaking PASSWORD GENERATOR! Trivial software is trivial to reimplement. It's offensive that someone would even charge money for this.
Now if a company develops something non-trivial, for which there aren't already a thousand similar products, this shouldn't be a problem. For example, just try finding an F/OSS product that can compete with 3D Studio Max or Maya. Blender isn't even in the same league. Photoshop? The Gimp is neat for web logos or hobbiest graphics, but doesn't even fully support the most fundamental Photoshop features such as native CMYK color.
Siebel Systems makes non-trivial software, but it is only non-trivial in that it is large. It isn't innovative; it's just a lot of work. I don't know of any OSS products that compete with, for example, their customer management software, but if there are, I would not doubt that it is because Siebel's stuff sucks (I've used it), and some smart developer got fed up and decided to show Siebel how it's done. If they do a better job, should we feel sorry for poor Siebel for losing revenue to the F/OSS guy, or should we root for the OSS project because any multi-billion dollar company which can't make a better project than a handful of F/OSS programmers needs to die?
Another example is the game market. There are neat OSS technologies such as the Irrlicht engine, but Itari and Blizzard aren't exactly concerned about F/OSS games taking over their market. When's the last time you played an open-source game which was even comparable to Farcry, Starcraft, or Alpha Centauri in terms of refinement, scale, and fun factor? [sourceforge.net]
With all that said, I don't see how F/OSS is any different than another commercial competitor. An intelligently run business targets their product to account for competitors' weaknesses and tries to downplay its strengths. Seems to be working for Microsoft, and every single one of their core products have powerful and mature F/OSS competitors, yet their revenue has grown every year.
Specifically, the F/OSS community may be great at making low-level technical stuff, such as libraries, web servers, and DBMS software, but it isn't very good at polishing user interfaces (compare Visual C++ to KDevelop or Anjuta, though this being Slashdot will probably prefer the latter two regardless), at making high-end enterprise software (MySQL is neat but it can't even touch Teradata), or making the absolute highest-performance software (Apache is sort of fast, but Zeus and even recent versions of IIS can blow it away, especially in static page serving [That said, most corporations are even worse at making performance software, using bloatware tools such as MFC to make bloatware apps such as Norton Utilities]).
In short, the reasons given sound like the kind of reasons given by the kind of companies that make password generators or horribly poor quality customer management software and then complain that the F/OSS community is stealing your marketshare. Hell,
Re:Well you are just going to have to innovate! (Score:2)
What's becoming harder and harder to do is to make money as what you so accurately called 'a shrink wrap house.'
So what's the problem? There isn't much of a market for horse-drawn carriages anymore either.
Either your company will adapt to the market or it will die. Either way, there's still plenty of demand for programmers. Just under the umbrella of different business models.
Re:Well you are just going to have to innovate! (Score:3, Insightful)
Picture the TV networks as a fisherman. The advertiser is the customer who buys the fish. The viewer is the fish, and the television shows are the net that he casts. The thing is, most diners want tasty fish, so you use the kind of net that usually get
Re:open source destroys jobs (Score:2)