Free Software, Get What You Pay For? 52
An anonymous reader writes "The Xooglers blog is running an interesting article on how big businesses may start out running free software but there is always the continued question of 'Should we go with something "real"?' at some point in their evolution. How often are technologies like PHP, Perl, and MySQL being pushed out once startups get managers who know nothing about the technology and only worry about name brands?"
sometimes that's the only criterion (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's unfortunate but in the IT world it is generally true there is no relationship between quality of software and cost . Some of the best software I've ever used has been free, some of the worst software I've ever used has been expensive.
IT and technology and particularly software can be (is) difficult to understand on many levels: functionality; efficiency; ergonomics; stability; etc. In a book (and God, I wish I could remember the title of this book -- one of my faves) talking about manipulating perceptions one of the discussions centered on the fact that when all other criteria are indeterminate or unavailable, it is human nature to assign credibility and worth based on price or cost. This is rife in the world of software.
Unfortunately, I see this as something taken advantage of rather that properly addressed.... sigh.
Re:sometimes that's the only criterion (Score:4, Informative)
shazbot, I hate replying to myself with followup, but for those who care, the book I mentioned above is: Influence: Science and Practice [amazon.com]. It's a great book, it's worth reading, it illustrates exactly why people choose things expensive when they have no other criteria by which they can determine value, and, it is on topic! :-)
Works for California Wineries, as well (Score:2)
In a book (and God, I wish I could remember the title of this book -- one of my faves) talking about manipulating perceptions one of the discussions centered on the fact that when all other criteria are indeterminate or unavailable, it is human nature to assign credibility and worth based on price or cost.
Many California wineries discover that they can't sell their juice at its natural pricepoint of $19.95, but if they add a few choice words to the label, like "Private Reserve", or "Luxury Cuvée", a
Go with something real? (Score:1)
Re:Go with something real? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Go with something real? (Score:1)
RHEL has a life of longer than six months, therefore it's real.
Re:Go with something real? (Score:2)
Re:Go with something real? (Score:2)
So has Debian, but I bet those people wouldn't consider it really "real". It is not corporate-backed, hence expensive, so it can't be "real".
And that's exactly this story's point.
with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2, Insightful)
Some of the comments here are pretty scary. I'd expect to hear this from a summer hire working on a content mangement syste
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:4, Insightful)
are these people for real ?
People who push the "no transactions" FUD also forget that transaction support often reduces the reliability of applications
this really threw me off the chair. come on people, if you mess up 10 rows in different tables along in 1 transaction, you can fix it all with 1 blink of the eye (rollback) if 1 insert/update/delete/whatever fails
The truth is that it's not the end of the world if you mess up a row or two in most databases
Google AdWords definitely is not "most databases", if you create zillion dollar bills for microsoft for advertising excel, you can't mix up this row. actually you can, but microsoft will sue your brains out.
Mysql people that think that messing up some database tables are not a big thing oftect excuse themselves with "to err is human". I'd like to see if you think the same way if your car building factory thought that "to err is human", and forgot to add brakes to your car.
You really don't need to expierence loss caused by ignoring transactions more than once in your life to get your fingers permanently burned.
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I hate it when users of superior databases fud over mysql. But even more do i hate that mysql zombies don't realize how mindless and incompetent their own comments on the issue are.
Sweet tiny mysql has kindof added the features but i have seen no sign "stable" anywhere just yet, so using the latest mysql versions and it's fresh transaction is a bit better than no transactions but it still isnt "it", and you shouldn't trust millions of dollars into it's tables.
If i need performance and can avoid transactions without causing dataloss, i choose mysql for speed, otherwise i choose postgresql which still is superior in it's features but a bit slower in speed.
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2)
MySQL has supported transactions via InnoDB and BDB for several years. Further additions scheduled for 5.1 and 5.2 will make it even easier to use storage engine supporting transactions or whatever other features you care about.
BTW, MySQL now employs several Software Architects (and o
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2)
But surprisingly it had completely broken the charset matching in the database. so the queries that mixed utf8/local character sets (that worked before and worked again in 4.1.15) were completely broken, and along with them a nice bunch of applications. I was quite pissed to get a bunch of errors from restoring my database from dumps of the previous version. If they had planned this, they should have added tools to overcome th
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2)
MySQL has supported transactions in SEVERAL YEARS worth of production releases
sry dude, that was the transaction engine of innodb itself, myisam tables had no transactions until this 5.x. if the mysql people didn't directly copy off the innodb people's invention in the transaction layer, then this is a fresh system, meaning that innodb's experience just doesn't count.
the character set example was just an example that mysql people can make really serious mistakes. if they make it in simple stuff like charact
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2)
The problem with doing things like that is that it is expensive to maintain (do you really want to dedicate programmer time to a transaction layer) and is bound to get crufty and harder to support as time passes. And when you're writing your custom transaction layer, you're tempted to add extra features that add some value, but creat
Is it really that much better? (Score:2)
I tried a fair number of recommended ways, but still got stuck with the disk writing at 2MB/sec even at the _start_ (which is not even the actual rate data is flowing into the DB). Not even got to the "slow down due to big index" part. Yes I did set the sync thing to 0 (sync max of once a second, instead of on every commit).
I was seriously considering putting the innodb log files on a ra
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2)
Seriously, read a database book someday. MySQL is a toy database which is great for things y
Re:with a DBMS, quality is more objective (Score:2)
People who push the "no transactions" FUD also forget that transaction support often reduces the reliability of applications
I think I can explain this howler. One common attribute I have found inexperienced programmers -- even the bright ones -- is failure to handle error conditions properly. Two things it seems to take experience to grasp are: (1) The problem isn't error messages, it's error conditions, therefore error messages are your friend. (2) Prominent and obvious problems ar
Free Software has already been paid for. (Score:5, Insightful)
Free and/or open source software such as Linux, the GNU tools, Mozilla, Open Office, GNOME, KDE, MySQL, Apache, Postgres, and many other wildly successful tools have been worked on for countless hours by skilled programmers and designers. Whether out of the kindness of their own hearts, desire for recognition, or a business investment, people have spent millions of hours designing, developing, testing, and documenting Free Software. Consider for a moment how much it woud have cost to pay each and every one of those people for their time. That's the amount of money that hass been put into Free Software.
If someone gives you a mansion, you don't assume it's worthless because you didn't pay for it. The worth is still there; someone else already paid for it.
Free or not, irrelevant. (Score:4, Insightful)
In small startups you may pick it because it's free. In giants like Google you pretty much disregard costs of software purchase and just compare features. "Does it do all we need, well?" is the first and ultimately relevant question. All the others are secondary once the only competitors in the field have been estabilished. In case of databases there is no competition here, and all discussions should have ended at that first question. Does it do all we need, well? Yes, NOW it does, all we needed was added, it works fine. Does anything else do all we need, well? HELL NO! MySQL is an absolute master in the field of speed, when properly optimized beats everything and everyone (at costs of all the quirks we had to fight in the meantime). Everything else is much slower, and most choices will be simply way too slow for the expected workload.
Free (Gratis) or not, doesn't matter here at all. Open Source matters, if it doesn't do what we need, we can get it to do it, but that's not essential.
Managers who don't get it, won't work long. Simply because they will keep failing delivering working projects on time.
Re:Free or not, irrelevant. (Score:2)
And if need more performance and ISAM is acceptable, I'll cut out the overhead of the MySQL engine and just use Berkely.
Re:Free or not, irrelevant. (Score:1)
Re:What the fuck (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. non-free misses the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm amazed that anyone would say this. Certainly MySQL didn't have certain features like views and stored procs pre-5.0, but these don't make for a "real" database. We've been using MySQL since 3.23 and haven't had a single failure and gotten every scrap of work done that we needed to do. We've leveraged the binary log files to make near-real-time replicas of servers on multiple machines and have yet to lose a single piece of data.
A database is NOT a stupid data container (Score:1)
Of course I'm not a SQL purist. I think that DBs exist as part of a larger system and play a specific role. I prefer my app-level logic and data where it belongs - in the application driving the db. Call me old school, but I can live in a world without views and stored procs just fine.
Where to implement your business logic (app vs. stored proc) is a preference question, granted. But having transactions and referential integrity constraints is not.
Transactions and constraints are your last line of def
Re:A database is NOT a stupid data container (Score:2)
I'd love to see that. :-)
I totally agree on the transaction side. As for constraints, we use them where they make sense. Usually they fall within some kind of logical boundary that is meaningful at an application level. For example, our billing system uses referential integrity to ensure consistency, but when the billing system references a customer record then we break the link. We do this so that we can treat our billing system a
And how often... (Score:1, Insightful)
are PHP, Perl and MySQL push out because they lack scalability and are hard to maintain?
I mean they are fine for small buisnesses, but when the buisness grows, so do their IT assests (databases, website, in-house software, etc). Large amounts of PHP & Perl code can be hard to maintain when compared to other languages like say Java. And as for MySQL... I'll let the other comments deal with that as I'm sure they will.
I should also be quick to point out that this doesn't mean OSS is bad, just that some o
Re:And how often... (Score:4, Insightful)
PHP is good for making DHTML and that's all. If you want something serious, get a backend in a mature lower-level language, launch it through PHP to get things done, post results to pages generated through PHP. Anything more in PHP is definitely dangerous, and always a hack.
MySQL - Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's not a toy/prototyping/testing database. Sure it's easy to use and gratis, so integrating it with quick&dirty hacks in PHP or Perl feels natural. But it's like recreational riding a thoroughbred horse, a smooth, easy fun ride. And if you try to put the thoroughbred to a cart, the effects are definitely poor. Jumps? Okay, not impressive though. Cross-terrain, endurance, dressage? Sucks. It's not a versatile horse, and MySQL is not a versatile database. Just put the thoroughbred to gallop and you'll be far first in the means of speed, same about MySQL. Give it a highly specific, simple task where speed is essential. Not synchronizing sales over the whole corporation, not optimizing routes for train schedule, not managing an air traffic tower, where the complexity requires really sophisticated solutions. You put it to pull a single random ad that matches a keyword from a database of ten millions and increase display counter on associated field by one. And do it ten times a second. That's the kind of work which MySQL is made for, and that's where all the alternatives suck.
Re:And how often... (Score:2, Funny)
Heaven forbid we actually get to use technology that is fun, Fun, FUN! Now get back to maintaining that Fortran app, you insensitive clod!
Re:And how often... (Score:1)
I assume you are writing this statement on a computer that contains a CPU. You'd be amazed if you saw the tooling used to build said CPU and all the other extremely complex, expensive and risky chips that make up your computer. A few very expensive CAD tools bought from one of the three/four established vendors for top $$$/year, and masses and masses and masses of Perl (or *hack spew* TCL)
Re:And how often... (Score:2)
Re:And how often... (Score:2, Insightful)
Perl allows
Re:And how often... (Score:2, Insightful)
I often seen this "Java is easy to maintain" meme being spread, but with little to corroborate it.
I guess the real reason is that Java is so difficult to use that companies must have big teams organized before they start doing anything with it. With Perl you can easily write a ten-lines script that eventually grows into a huge system that no one seems to be able to maintain. Java is so clumsy that, i
Re:And how often... (Score:5, Insightful)
Java is so clumsy that, if you are doing something with it, you always start by doing a lot of design before you code.
Come again? You code without software design ? Tell me exactly how do you write C or C++ code without designing, or python code ? (and who let you near a computer in the first place
Yeah you can definitely write a 5-line perl hack without designing, but if you write just about anything that is worth a dime, you better plan first and dont fix/patch/alter the stuff afterwards for years. Maybe it's just that i have not had 1-day or 1-week projects for a while, but i usually don't write one line of code on the first day at all. I prefer brainstorming, research and analyzing that will save me a headache and hopefully give me a few extra days at the end of the project to polish stuff.
Java is not slow when code goes into millions of lines, it's the coders who mess it up. I have seen working huge java code, i have written huge working java code which is fast. You are still being fooled around the fact that the swing gui used by java is slow and that java is often used along with oracle that is slow. Don't let this fool you. Java is as fast as C++ in pure arithmetics. If you really need some freaky speed boost, you can write the speedwhore code in C and JNI to it. You can also have your pointer tribble there if you need it, but Java is designed so that it would avoid the need pointers in the first place (all the regular objects in java are actually pointers). Besides, Java is the only thing that will work on almost any platform. And this is what counts in year 2005.
C and C++ are not platform independant and that is what you rarely want to use nowadays. You can never know if your stupid management wants to run this on windows or linux or even sun tomorrow. And once you get your code compatible with all major os's , the source is so #define'd that it's nearly impossible to manage. I won't even start about the library dependancies.
Just use every language where it belongs and don't go around bashing java or anyone else with accusations that can't take 1 mm of water.
Oh well, ok, you can bash php, i have nothing against that.
Re:And how often... (Score:2)
Then you aren't a very efficient programmer in an enterprise environment. A large proportion of programming projects today are related to some data mining / data recovery situations where you need to get some result quickly. You need to recover something from a set o
Re:And how often... (Score:2)
public Object data;
public TreeNode left;
public TreeNode right;
}
public class ListNode {
public Object data;
public ListNode next;
}
That's a textbook example of a binary tree. In real life one needs much more. For instance, how do you create a binary tree from existing data? Maybe you already have a very big structure, which you want to re-organize as a binary tree, without having to duplicate the data records. In real life you need to do both "shallow" and "deep" copies of data. Sometime
right tool for the job (Score:2)
C/C++ for really large programs - this gave us wonderful bugfree things like Windows, and Office. The power of the languages break down after a few hundred thousand lines of code as they turn into maintenance nightmares. Data dictionaries anyone?
Java hard to use? - This is the first time I've ever seen anybody say that. Java has its issues but, if you think Ja
Re:And how often... (Score:2)
I worked for one of the largest financial companies on the planet and one of the biggest Perl shops around and I can say without fear of equivocation that properly written, ma
Re:And how often... (Score:1)
I'm in complete agreement with you. I've too had experience with well-maintained perl code. I've also had experience with poorly maintained perl code and java code. Out of the 2, the perl code was far harder to understand. The reason for this was due to perl's free-formness. That's not to say free-formness is bad, just if misused it can cause nightmares for later maintainers of the code.
What I meant in my original statement was that while it's possible to have easily maintainable code in any language, it's
That is when they die (Score:3, Insightful)
That is when they die. Seriously. Look at these guys, what was their name again, ah, yes, Google -- kinda silly but you know these computer types -- anyway, where would they be if they had dumped their Linux and stuff for Windows XP or even OS X (the Unix of the great GUI but crappy thread performance)? Not trading at about $400, that is for sure.
Don't worry. This is evolution in action: The clever ones, the more efficient ones survive. Those who pay $400 for Microsoft Office instead of using OpenOffice for free are not efficient. If Open Source can keep the legal playing field level, the rest will take care of itself.
brand name? (Score:1, Redundant)
I'm Happy (Score:2)
that the question of when and why to migrate to and from free software to commercial alternatives is being asked, that it can be asked.
It means there are alternatives, that everyone can make a freer decision with more options, that free software provides a baseline commodity level that benefits everyone, and that commercial providers can compete on providing genuine value added on top of this baseline offering.