centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
A Window into OpenSource Minds
Marcus Whitney made some interesting comments about OpenSource software and the mentality/motivation of those that criticize it. While I agree more with his notion of ‘OpenSource is a Gift’, his article inspired a flurry of comment activity with opinions on multiple sides.
When it comes to OpenSource, I think the safe approach is to ‘Try at your own risk’ – if you want SLA’s and Assurances, you gotta pay the piper :)
Things like support are often cited as reasons to buy commercially, but can you actually get useful SLAs and Assurances (for software or complete systems[*]) these days for affordable amounts of money? If all you can get is support that solves the simple or easy problems, is it really worth it?
If you lack technical expertise there’s definitely uses for buying technical support and the expertise to set things up. But my impression is that there’s consultants who will do this for both commercial products and open source ones. Are the commercial product consultants cheaper, better, or just more easily assessed for actual skills et al?
[*: if you are trying to get total system support, watch out; very few companies can actually provide it. It's much harder than it looks to truly do it in a way that can help you if you have non-trivial problems.]
I very much agree – most OpenSource users have to support themselves (us included). The catch is that a user must assume the risk of the entire application. For instance, if a bug appears that is very serious and very complicated – then each person ‘paying’ for support has a choice to make. Leave it, or pay for it. That can be a big burden :(
I don’t believe that open source software makes you worse off for support than closed-source software, depending on what you consider ’support’ to mean. Certainly I don’t believe you’re any worse off in the face of bugs, because I don’t believe very many companies provide real support to start with, at least to anyone who spends less a year than a Wall Street brokerage house.