Business fears
We have answers to all your business fears with regard to open source technologies.
| (1) Is proprietary software fundamentally better supported than OSS? No! There are actually two kinds of support for OSS: traditional paid-for support and informal community support. Openworld provides this traditional paid-for-support based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for all our customers representing local support for users of Open Source Software. |
| (2) Does proprietary software give users more legal rights than OSS? No! Do you think that “with OSS you give up your right to sue if things go wrong?” The answer is that essentially all proprietary software licenses also forbid lawsuits - so this isn't different at all! You cannot sue Microsoft or other proprietary vendors when things go wrong, you simply take care of your problems. In any case, Openworld believes that our customers are not interested in suing vendors - they want working systems. This is what we assure our customers. On the other hand, proprietary software vendors can sue software users or organizations that cannot prove that software in use is legitimately acquired. |
| (3) Aren't OSS programs simply illegally acquired proprietary programs? No! A programmer who has access to the source code of one program could illegally take that code and submit it to another related program. OSS programs have all their source code open to the public and we have not had any case where a proprietary vendor has shown that their products have been violated. |
| (4) Does OSS expose you to greater risk of abandonment? No! Businesses go out of business, and individuals lose interest in products, in both the proprietary and OSS world. A major difference, however, is that all OSS programs are automatically in escrow - that is, if their original developer stops supporting the product, any person or group can step forward to support it instead. Since the source code is open. |
| (5) Are OSS licenses enforceable? In particular, is the GPL enforceable? Yes! Almost all OSS programs are released under some sort of license, and the most popular license is the GPL. This year, 2004, the GPL was tested in court and found valid. Source: http://news.com.com/ |
| (6) Is OSS economically viable? Yes! Fundamentally, software is economically different than physical goods; it is infinitely replicable, it costs essentially nothing to reproduce, and it can be developed by thousands of programmers working together with little investment (driving the per-person development costs down to very small amounts). It is also durable (in theory, it can be used forever) and non-rival (users can use the same software without interfering with each other, a situation not true of physical property). Thus, the marginal cost of deploying a copy of a software package quickly approaches zero. This explains how Microsoft and others got so rich so quickly (by selling a product that costs nearly nothing to replicate), and why many OSS developers can afford to give software away. |
| (7) Will OSS destroy the software industry? Won't programmers starve if many programs become OSS? No! It's certainly possible that many OSS products will eliminate their proprietary competition, but that's the nature of competition. If OSS approaches pose a significant threat to proprietary development approaches, then proprietary vendors must either find ways to compete or join the OSS movement. OSS doesn't require that software developers work for free; many OSS products are developed or improved by employees (whose job is to do so) and/or by contract work (who contract to make specific improvements in OSS products). If an organization must have a new capability added to an OSS program, they must find someone to add it... and generally, that will mean paying a developer to develop the addition. The difference is that, in this model, the cost is paid for development of those specific changes to the software, and not for making copies of the software. Since copying bits is essentially a zero-cost operation today, this means that this model of payment more accurately reflects the actual costs (since in software almost all costs are in development, not in copying). |
| (8) Is OSS compatible with Capitalism? Yes! Some years back some tried to label OSS as “communistic” or “socialistic” (i.e., anti-capitalist), but that rhetoric has failed. OSS is quite consistent with capitalism: it increases wealth without violating principles of property ownership or free will. If only OSS programs exist in a software category, will that completely eliminate competition? No!Oddly enough, OSS programs compete with each other in a given functional area. Competition in this case ensures quality in products. |
| (9) Is there really a lot of OSS software? Yes! These are the largest repositories of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet that give free services to Open source developers have the following statistics. Freshmeat.net counts over 33,779 OSS projects. Sourceforge.net hosts 79,604 OSS projects all by itself (all as of July 12, 2004). |
| (10) Is having the ability to view and change source code really valuable/important for many people? Surprisingly, Yes! It's certainly true that few people need direct access to source code; only developers or code reviewers need the ability to access and change code. But not having access to how your computer is controlled is still a significant problem. Open source gives the user the benefit of control over the technology the user is investing in. An analogy to put this across: Imagine the bonnet of your car was welded shut! What would you do if it developed a mechanical problem that required the engine removed? We demand the ability to open the bonnet of our cars because it gives us, the consumer, control over the product we've bought and takes that control away from the vendor. We can take the car back to the vendor's garage; if he does a good job, doesn't overcharge us and adds the features we need. But if he overcharges us, won't fix the problem we are having or refuses to install that musical horn we always wanted? Well, there are 10,000 other car-repair garages that would be happy to have our business. This is what open source is about, giving control to the consumer and options to choose from. In the proprietary software business, the customer has no control over the technology he is building his business around. If his vendor overcharges him, refuses to fix the bug that causes his system to crash or chooses not to introduce the feature that the customer needs, the customer has no choice. This lack of control results in high cost, low reliability and lots of frustration. |
| (11) Is OSS really just an anti-Microsoft campaign? No! Certainly there are people who support OSS who are also against Microsoft, but it would be a mistake to view OSS as simply anti-Microsoft. Microsoft already uses OSS software in its own applications; Windows' implementation of the basic Internet protocols (TCP/IP) was derived from OSS code. Indeed, OSS leaders often note that they are not against Microsoft per se, just some of its current business practices. |
| (12) I've always assumed there's no free lunch; isn't there some catch? If there is an OSS product that meets your needs, there really isn't a catch. Perhaps the only catch is misunderstanding the term “free.” The OSS GPL license includes this text: “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.” That is, OSS is not necessarily cost-free. In practice, it's still often a bargain. |
