Comments on: Industry can consolidate for billions, or go open-source for free

Open source may offer technology titans a more efficient way to reach new customers than industry consolidation promises.

[Aaron Kempf]

I'm tired of reading your pro-open-source banter. It's old.

It's like you're a free Political Action Committee on behalf of all the open source companies..
What does it feel like to give

why don't you stop being a reporter and start being a real developer.. if you believe in it so much?

otherwise, please stop with your banter / crap about how holy open source is.

It's full of bugs.. doesn't perform as well as a $2000 piece of software from MS... so the ROI is _NOT_ in mySqls favor.

thanks for **** and provide impartial reporting

-Aaron Kempf

[Police_States_of_America]

are you retarded? this blog is called "The Open Road" what were you expecting?

[Matt Asay]

First of all, it's not supposed to be "impartial reporting." I'd get paid for doing that. This is a blog, and it is clearly labeled as such. As for my bias, look over to the right. See that? It's a disclosure statement. Read that, then post comments.

Ironically, this post will get me in trouble with the open source zealots you proclaim me to be. Are you not following along? "Proprietary" is not "open source." So when I talk about adding the two together, well, that makes me something less than an open source bigot. Or more. You decide.

Just try to keep your comments actually relevant to what I write.

[t8]

@ Aaron Kempf

I have an idea for you. Don't read this blog.

Is that bloody genius or what?

[halfNakedPappy]

Full of bugs? Doesn't perform as well as software from MS?

I don't know what world you're living in, or what you're smoking, but please share with the rest of us.

[philipdc]

One mans meat is another mans poison. I simply donlt get ho you get thsi colument to be too Open Source. My problems with Matt is that he is not "Open Source Enough'. He is like a disguised Commercial Software PR agent.

All that said, you can't get a better commentary on the State of the Union in Open Source, if youa re able to stick around, you will see that he has cutting edge insight.

[FutureGuy]

Matt: Nothing ever is free, you are sounding like a snake oil salesman. At least make an attempt and not showing your hidden agenda.

[Matt Asay]

Um, what is my "hidden agenda"? It's hidden so well I can't find it. :-)

I think I very clearly point out that Oracle can sell its proprietary software on top of open-source complements, and thereby get added market reach for lower cost. What is there in that - my actual thesis - that you disagree with? Please don't make weird arguments about posts I didn't write....

[DrtyDogg]

His agenda is not hidden. Matt, how much would it cost to get an ad posted on here for my company?

[t8]

For someone called FutureGuy, you sure can't see the future and what Matt is saying is the future and is reality.

Open Source is a great on-ramp to other products. It is a no brainer and it works well.

Often companies give something away for free and can up-sell from there. AVG is a perfect example of this.

Snake oil salesman sell colored water. Open Source is very valuable and useful to the IT ecosystem. I think your analogy FutureGuy is very wrong.

[kojacked]

I would have totally given this one to Matt but the fact that he threw Windows and SharePoint under the bus (the latter being his product's chief competitor) he turned it into an advertisement for his product.

DrtyDogg figured it out. Too bad most of you didn't.

The title of this post should have been "Alfresco -- the onramp to Freedom" or "Whaaa! Oracle is going to screw up my free database lunch"

We were talking at work today about outsourcing and how people have this misconception that if they send a project overseas that it will be built by a crack team of experts (and for so much cheaper!). In reality it's always a mixed bag of good developers and bad ones no matter where the work is done unless you can find the right team. The same goes for software: open or closed doesn't really mean much in terms of ROI or meeting the business need. It all depends on finding the right product.

[rdupuy11]

You are right about the outsourcing myth. In my experience, overseas teams are actually not very good at all. They might be able to install OSCommerce, but they will struggle to create anything new.

I tried outsourcing, I tried many times in fact. I could not find someone 'cheap' that had any talent Oh they would claim they did, but they would struggle for days on a simple task, I would do it for them, they would struggle for days on the next task, I would do it for them. Finally I would have to say, look, I'm doing the work.

It's silly I'm a mid level programmer at best. In the states, I've met all kinds of programmers who could do much better.

In the end, I'd even go so far as to say its cheaper to higher a crack programmer in the states, than to bother with the costs of outsourcing: the project delays, the poor quality work, the never ending search for new talent to replace the people you have to fire.

Because I'm fairly good at Russian, I even went so far, as to look into the vaunted 'Russian hacking' scene. What a bunch of script kiddies...arrogant, requiring project control...but ultimately not very skilled either.

I've decided what it must be is that in the U.S. people grew up with computers, its second nature to some people. Plus its the culture of innovation that helps too. In other countries, they got limited access to computers at universities and they strongly believe in doing as they were instructed, rather than inventing, and it really limits them.

[rdupuy11]

Open Source is great, I've seen many people shy away from it, when Linux runs Oracle just fine. If you are implementing Oracle anyway, it makes sense to go ahead and not pay for an OS license.

But beyond that I don't see much point to it. The fact is, in many business circles, as ashame as this is, they judge quality on price. If it costs a lot, it must be good, if its free, it might be amateurish.

A lot of people making technology decisions aren't real developers, they don't understand technology at that level....what they know often comes from the sales people that advise them...those sales people almost always pushing an expensive product, and rarely pushing something that is free, for obvious reasons.

Red Hat has partially addressed the issue, by charging for the open source software, but they are relatively small compared to closed source interests.

[Jeff Putz]

Open source software is not free. I've said it a million times... the cost of paid software is still just a rounding error compared to the cost of the people to integrate and deploy software, open source or not.

[Renegade Knight]

SUN recently had the vote to allow the purchase by Oracle. I voted not. If I'm lucky (and I'm not expecting to be) the vote will be a resounding no and Sun will remain a viable independant company who will hopefully go on to make me a lot more money than the Oracle deal would ever do for me.