Comments on: Asking the wrong questions on open-source adoption

CIOs don't separate out open source in their budgets, so why should surveys?

[fazalmajid]

Most of the time CIOs are not even aware of all the open-source deployments going on. Since initial deployments use the free-as-in-beer versions, they do not require budgetary approval and all the control-freak bureaucracy that comes with it, and fly under the radar, so to speak. Of course, CIOs hate that.

[grussak]

There's a very good reason that CIOs hate open source - it's called business.

Open source only makes sense to people with lots of technical savvy and not so much business savvy. There are no free lunches in this world - something business people understand all too well and the technical types seldom do.

I'm not surprised that someone with your background, Mr. Asay, would feel as if open source should get equal standing in surveys or budgets alongside commercial software, but saying it doesn't make it so. There's a good reason that open source, after all these years, is still reduced to anecdotal stories and blatant assumptions about adoption rates hidden somewhere deep beneath real survey data.....it's not viable for true commercial operations. Business people know that; otherwise, RedHat would already be the new Microsoft and Sun would have set in favor of Apache years ago.

So here's a toast to all the entrepreneurs who start, build and grow software companies with the reasonable expectation that if the product solves problems and has value it's worth charging money for it. Here's to those same people who then take that money to create jobs that, among other things, feed and clothe and house the technical people and their families who think it's cool to go open source so they don't have to pay "the man" anything for software.

[pentest]

Grussak,

A lot of unfounded comments.

Don't you realize that OSS is a multi-billion dollar business and few corporations do not use it.

Even MS uses it.

What about OSS requres technical savvy? Some specific applications do, but guess so do the proprietary counterparts and the people who use it are going to be technical anyway.

Linux, openoffice, mediawiki, etc, etc, etc take no technical savviness at all to use.