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Let's talk cheap software
10 comments- TAGS:economy, Linux, open source, propritary
- IT TOPICS:Business Intelligence, Linux, Management, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software
Want to know one of the things I really like about open-source software? The price.
Yes, I know, I know. It's 'free as in freedom, not free as in beer." Trust me. I get that. I also get though that open-source software gives you quality programs either for free or for a support fee that's often a fraction of the cost of proprietary software.
Of course, thank you, Robert A. Heinlein, TANSTAAFL (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch). If you're going to use any software, you're going to pay for it in one way or another. You need to learn how to use it. If you're in a business, you need to learn how to maintain it. You people know the drill.
But, one of the most important things about open-source software is that, once you have the knowledge, you don't need to spend any more money on it. I mean Novell or Red Hat will be happy to take your money for support contracts, but if you have enough people in your organization who know SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), there's no reason you couldn't run openSUSE, Fedora, or CentOS, which is based on the RHEL source code. Many companies already do that.
They don't pay support contracts. They don't worry about CAL (client access licenses). They don't sweat any of that stuff that makes working with Microsoft, Oracle or the like such a pain in the wallet. Instead, they use their own in-house expertise and sweat to get the job done. Which, by the way, they'd need to use anyway even on top of what they do pay to the proprietary software houses.
We're in an economy gone crazy. Am I the only one to notice that the Republicans have decided to, in effect, nationalize the investment banking business to the tune of perhaps more than a trillion dollars? And, rather than face the fact that top CEOs have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and take the harsh medicine of a market crash, Democrats are going along with this blank-check plan?
OK, regardless of where you stand on politics, I think we can agree on one thing: this is an extremely unstable time. For example, a top money market fund, the Reserve Primary Money Market Fund, dropped its net asset value below a dollar. That's unheard of. Money market funds -- for those of you who think in terms of savings as what you stick in the sock drawer -- have long been regarded as about the safest place you could stick your money. Well, maybe they're not now.
What all this has to do with software is that, whether you have money for IT or not, you must spend some money on it. No business in 2008 can survive without computers. Now, you can spend that money, what you have of it, in two ways. One is to keep spending money forever on proprietary programs, the other is to spend it on open-source software, learn how to use it well, and then just pay your IT staff to keep it going.
I don't know about you, but the math seems pretty darn simple to me.
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