Software licensing. As home users, it's already an incomprehensible mess of legalese that nobody cares one bit about. However - we home users have it easy. The situation for business users and people managing IT departments is even worse (proprietary software, mostly, of course). Microsoft is a major culprit in this regard, and while the company acknowledges that the situation is messy, they claim they can't really do anything about it.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Similarly, if I run a company that employes 500 people, how long is it going to take to get everybody up to speed with the new program(s)? Etc, etc.
Mate, I've seen people go out and purchase a copy of Exchange simply to use it as a mail server - I'm not joking. There are people who go out, purchase software that is unrequired but do so because it is a name they know - they don't want an 'email client', they want 'outlook'. They don't want a 'web browser', they want 'Internet Explorer'. Too many people in IT have that mentality - and it is shocking to see the number who are supposed to be educated and qualified who turn out to be no smarter than the people they're trying to serve.
If your company standardises on ODF with OpenOffice.org, for example, then if at a later date you wish to move to Lotus Symphony, it is just a matter of retraining the end users to use symphony. There is no long and laborious task of having to convert over large numbers of documents, correcting all the formatting errors that come as a result then converting all the templates across.
Again is a load of horsecrap. The example above - if one standardises on an open format, the only thing you have to do is retrain the staff and then deploy the software - there are no problems due to having to migrate large sways of data from one format to another and risk having large amounts of formatting being lost in the process.
Which has NOTHING to do with the discussion - stick to the topic.
And when you want to move in the case of Microsoft SQL - now what? you can just go and pick up all the stuff from SQL and start using it with some other package without major problems? where is this copy of Microsoft SQL for Linux or Solaris or FreeBSD? It isn't just choice for the sake of choice, it is the ability for you to have control over your data so that you aren't reliant on a single vendor anywhere in the stack.
You don't simply have multiple vendors for the sake of having multiple vendors but don't go out going 100% Microsoft, embracing every one of their proprietary formats under the sun - then turn around whining because when Microsoft puts the clamps on you, that you can't take your data with you without having to jump through several fiery hoops. It has nothing to do with open source or multiple vendors - it has to with your data being saved in an open and portable format.
What the hell Webkit, which you mentioned before, has to do with the discussion God only knows.
How about before you reply, you actually read the whole post and learn the difference between:
Open Source
Open Standards
Then once you learn it, then actually READ the posts instead of scanning for keyboards, drawing a conclusion based on the appearance of those key words then firing off a response without putting your brain into gear.
Edited 2009-10-06 01:07 UTC
Member since:2005-11-13
Obviously, you've missed my point. It's not usually the data that causes problems; it is the code behind that data. Unless we are to assume that you work for a company that doesn't actually do anything with the data it produces.
If my company wanted to switch from MS Office to Openoffice, for example, probably the biggest pain in the ass would be having to rewrite all those Excel macros and such. And even if you were using OpenOffice and ODF, when you wanted to switch from that to something else in 10-20 years, I don't see how you're going to be free from this hassle, unless you get lucky and whatever you switch to just happens to support Openoffice macros. Hell, I can hire interns to go through documents and make sure italics are in the right places, but what about that Excel spreadsheet that has a macro which hits an Oracle database and prints out graphs/charts based on the data that is returned?
If you've got a standards-compliant website and you use PHP on the back-end, if you wanted to change from PHP to another language, it's still going to suck, even if you don't have to change the formatting. Sure, it'll be cheaper if you don't have to reformat any of the data, but it's not like, "Oh, we're using open standards, so we can flip this switch and overnight we'll be on a new platform/office suite/whatever.'
I guess my point is that once you get settled on a particular infrastructure, it's difficult to move away from it, so there are risks involved no matter which way you go. When moving to something from something else, there's almost always going to be some pain involved, whether you're stuff is tied to a particular vendor or not. Rarely (if ever) will it be as cut and dry as you make it sound.
Edited 2009-10-06 03:20 UTC
Member since:
2005-11-13
That depends on a lot of things. For example, if it's just me involved, and there's a $30 proprietary app that's a ton easier to use than a free (as in speech one), I'll probably go for the former. But if the $30 app is $3,000, then I'd have to reconsider. Either way, the functionality of each app vs how much functionality I need will also factor into my decision. If paying $3,000 will help me get my job done in half the time as the alternative (even when I'm fully trained on the alternative), I might just decide that the cost is worth it.
Similarly, if I run a company that employes 500 people, how long is it going to take to get everybody up to speed with the new program(s)? Etc, etc.
I think that's kind of a strawman, because if you invest heavily in any technology, whether open or closed, it's probably going to be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to migrate away from. Just because you implement open standards/open solutions doesn't mean it's not going to cost you a sh*tload of time/money if you need to migrate to something else in the future. For example, I read somewhere on this site that the Konquerer developers wanted to migrate away from KHTML as the renderer and switch to Webkit, but the app is so dependent on KHTML, it wouldn't really be practical to try and switch to WebKit. Hence, even though the solution they're using is open, they're still sort of stuck, unless they decide that the migration is worth the cost in time/money.
Sure, going with one vendor for your infrastructure has it's drawbacks, but it also has its advantages. For example, if you have Linux servers with a LAMP stack (or perhaps, in the case of the company I work for, Oracle instead of MySQL), it's easy for different vendors to point fingers at each other when something breaks, as I have witnessed happening on numerous occasions. However, if you're using multiple solutions from the same vendor, you know who's responsible.
I'm not saying that's the way everybody should go, just that the discussion is not as cut and dry as you make it seem.
Edited 2009-10-05 23:51 UTC