Re: [MLUG] licenses and choices (moved from discussion)

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Jack Smith wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 14:44 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>
> > Lots of people do lots of things for what amount to altruistic reasons, 
> > or maybe to get credit for doing a good thing.  I wouldn't call "love 
> > of open source projects" a form of bigotry:  There is a lot to like.
>
> Another scenario I can think of is that somebody solved a specific 
> problem with a piece of software they wrote (for example, a tool to 
> automatically shrink movies on 9 GB DL-DVDs into 4.4 GB single-layer 
> DVDs for backup purposes). The problem they solved was enough of a PITA 
> and they wished there was a program to do it, but there wasn't and they 
> had to write it. The problem isn't all that complicated, so it's not 
> likely that a program would be a big seller, so it's open-sourced 
> because otherwise, it would more or less just sit unused.

Good point.  That is a common scenario.  So the initial development is for 
personal use, but it costs the developer practically nothing to give his 
code away.  That may be an altruistic act, but with so little personal 
cost that it barely qualifies.


> The biggest advantage in using OSS over proprietary is really in the 
> deployment of the software. You don't have to keep track of licenses. 
> You don't have to pay per-seat. Distribution is easy- just download a 
> copy and install. You are also not tied to legacy hardware or OSes, 
> which is an especially big factor today with the 32 -> 64-bit switch and 
> MS shaking up OS compatibility.

The other thing that becomes a huge hassle is the changing of file 
formats, e.g., Word file format keeps changing.  This is such an annoyance 
that a number of major scientific journals recently decided not to accept 
Word files in the most recent version -- users have to save to the earlier 
format to submit to those journals.


> It can depend on what bugs or requests you submit and what proprietary 
> vendor you submit them to. I'll bet that if you submitted a feature 
> request to the Lotus office suite folks, they'd be *far* more likely to 
> incorporate it than if you submitted a request to Microsoft for Office. 
> The Lotus guys would be quicker simply because of the incentive to gain 
> a competitive advantage, which MS really does not care about.

It may be part of the monopolistic power of some companies, but I can 
think of some examples of smaller companies that seemed uninterested. 
One lost a lot of University business lately.  I wouldn't be surprised if 
Microsoft keeps track of suggestions so they know what to add to the next 
pricey upgrade.


> > Depending on the type of software, they might do that very effectively. 
> > Example:  SAS statistical analysis software has an annual license. 
> > They change the price at will every year.  We used to pay $50 per PC 
> > per year with academic discount, but now it is $150.  When I got a 
> > Linux box they said they'd give me a discount at $3,800 for the first 
> > year which is much less than their usual $19,000/yr for that kind of 
> > Linux box (dual Xeon machine).  On the other hand, with R you pay $0 
> > per year, every year for a constantly improving system.  R is free 
> > software distributed under the GPL.
>
> That is simply ridiculous. Anybody that charges that much for software
> either is the only one making it or darn close to it, or else the CIOs
> are complete morons.

I know.  The thing is, they have a really good lock-in program...


> For that much money, I'd hire a dev to make R do what SAS did and R 
> doesn't yet do rather than pay for SAS.

That sounds like a good idea, but it is extremely tricky to deal with a 
lot of the little quirks of SAS.  Many companies have legacy SAS code that 
is used to extract data, manipulate it in some way, and generate a report. 
The code might be very messy and complicated.  It might take one worker 
several months to go through it all, figure out what it is doing, and come 
up with a way to do it in something else, something like R with a MySQL 
backend.  It could be a really huge effort.  For most of these things, 
there is no easy way to read in the SAS code and write out the R code.

Many SAS customers are large corporations, like banks, financial firms, 
automotive or oil industry, etc.

Mike

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