Does open source make life easy??????

[Matt Sealey]

monteslu at cox.net wrote:
> ---- Matt Sealey <matt at genesi-usa.com> wrote: 
> 
>> I disagree. As someone once said, Linux is only free if your time has no
>> value. You may save money by downloading Free software (or even Free
>> Software or even open source software or Open Source software - take
>> your pick :) but sometimes, and most often, it takes a lot more effort
>> to get it to the point where you can integrate it into your organisation.
>> This is especially true if you are NOT on a Linux development team helping
>> to code and produce the software at hand :)
>>
> 
> And commercial software requires no time to install and configure? Once the cash is exchanged everything just works?

It depends what commercial software. When kids go to school these days they are
taught how to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. When they go to work
in the real world, unfortunately they don't seem to have real computing skills,
but just "how to use keyboard shortcuts and where the menus are in Word".

Training them to use OpenOffice, or building infrastructure to support their
weird needs in migrating from the defacto standard Office package to something
else costs money. You can buy Office 2007 and have them sit down and not whine,
or you can download OpenOffice 2.3 and they will be phoning you every 10 minutes
about which menu operation they're after and why you disabled X feature.

Commercial software like Lotus is another example; software which purposefully
wants to supplant Microsoft's - and it comes with rafts upon rafts of compatibility
features, help files and directions on how to make it act like Office apps
always did. IBM have pre-sorted it for you. And you pay for that privilege.

If you read PAST the paragraph above you'll see I said all that already. Different
strokes for different folks, everyone has a difference experience. I don't think
you can simply "correct" someone in a single email to say "open source is easy"
or even "easier", when it plain, matter of fact isn't for a lot of people.

To find out which camp you're in you have to spend the money and find out. I know
just as many companies and organisations who have successfully rolled out Open
Source replacements, than have decided it's costing too much and causing too many
problems and gone back to commercial licensing for very valid reasons (i.e. not
because Microsoft offered them a deal, although I do know a couple of those..).

> Linux is free whether or not you value your time. The other meme is counter productive flamebait. The "someone" was likely trying to sell something.

The someone was a Netscape engineer in times gone by, he wasn't trying to sell
me a thing.

Linux is free as in freedom, it is not free as in beer, not even the download is
free (you do pay your ISP don't you?) and the time spent compiling the kernel
costs money, installing the distribution and doing your own bug triage when a
release comes out. Linux implies community involvement, and if you do not want
to be part of the Linux community.. what then? What if you don't have time to
look for all these bugs and then file bugs on bug trackers and hope that someone
will hear your problem and fix it up? What if you don't have time to engineer
a solution to it?

Maybe they could BUY a Linux - Red Hat or SuSE Enterprise would be good choices.
Then, you can call Red Hat and they have to do it for you 'cos you paid for the
support contract. But, how is that free as in beer?

-- 
Matt Sealey <matt at genesi-usa.com>
Genesi, Manager, Developer Relations