CIOs Band Together Against Paying For Software Bugs 361
gmerideth writes: "This article over at cio.com interviews several CIO's who are sick and tired of spending billions every year on software upgrades simply because the creater tells them to upgrade as they wont support previous versions or they get stuck into lengthy, costly licenses. Quoted from the article "Other companies, such as Ameritrade Holding, are opting for open-source technologies such as the GNU and Linux operating systems, the Apache Web server and Sendmail e-mail.". It's glad to see the open source movement doing it's job."
Shouldn't they have thought of this earlier? (Score:2, Insightful)
M$ being one of the primary instigators of this...
i.e. the older (M$app) x.x does not work with new (M$app) y.y.
Perhaps this is a chance for open source to shine.. upgrades are... FREE.
Planned Obsolescence (Score:3, Insightful)
In the automotive industry, people are encouraged to dispose of their perfectly good cars due to new features on new models and increasing prices of replacement parts... although their car is perfectly fine.
I remember hearing something about GM phasing out model years on cars... but haven't heard anything since, they must have come to their senses.
Or how about when the knob breaks on your stereo and it costs as much to replace the knob as the stereo.
Consumer backlash? People still buy new cars and new stereos...
Weird. (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately, there are a host of alternative solutions on the horizon, and a growing number of CIOs are determined to make them a reality. They include renewable licensing agreements, in which CIOs purchase the right to use software for two to three years at about 85 percent of the cost of what they'd pay under a perpetual license. CIOs then have the option to renew the license at the end of the term if they're happy with the quality of the product and the support. Subscription licensing agreements are similar to renewable licenses, except the term is shorter, lasting about a year, and CIOs rent the software, as opposed to owning it.
Aren't they just playing into the hands of vendors who want to increase ongoing revenue for product they used to just sell once? I don't get it.
software sales model change? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft's changing of its licensing practices has clearly pointed to a flaw in the software sales model -- in small doses, companies will put up with it because it's easier to maintain status quo than to radically change. However, companies are now looking at a tripled technology budget -- and they're looking seriously at how things are working.
They've figured out that some of it sucks.
The problem with the current software sales model is that it is impossible to tell the companies that will support and stand behind their product from those that will rake you over the coals. When companies have the ability to change their licensing agreements overnight, the consumer has no ability to chose the good from the bad.
The good thing from this: people might REALLY take open source seriously.
The bad thing: I think a lot of well-run, fair and supportive software companies are going to suffer because of the greed of the others.
Corporate Acceptance (Score:3, Insightful)
What does corporate acceptance mean? It means we have become cheaper to set up and maintain than the other options for the corporate world, those being Windows and MacOS.
Linux still has its original stability and low price tag, and there are now several versions of all the software that corporate customers formerly had to develop for.
Macintosh lost out to Windows in the corporate marketplace for the same reason so many companies are switching over to Linux now. Installing Windows on a pre-existing IBM DOS box is a lot cheaper, and there were more applications. We now have the same applications, possibly fewer in number, but lower in price, so companies are turning their head toward the other option.
Companies are predictable buggers. If you give them a cheaper option with the features they're looking for, they will jump on it. Every time. Linux developers only need to ask what those features are and include them in the core OS or surrounding software, and we'll enjoy even greater corporate acceptance.
Re:Weird. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the subscription model is you have a drop dead date. If you do not switch to another software package by the time your subscription runs out, you cannot continue to legally use the software. Furthermore, if you don't upgrade when the software vendor tells you to, you cannot continue to legally continue to use your current systems.
Imagine what would have happened to that CIO if his company couldn't meet payroll because oracle had forced them to upgrade to Oracle 11i which didn't work yet.
Re:thank heavens (Score:4, Insightful)
Case in point: a user of ours was having difficulties saving extremely large PowerPoint presentations. We tried everything we could to get Office 2000 to corporate (including numerous MS Knowledge Base-suggested fixes). The end result: the only way we were going to fix it was to "upgrade" to Office XP.
Was there another solution? Sure. We could have kept the hacked registry keys and crossed our fingers. The user would have never known the difference. The problem here, though, is what is a "bug" and what's an honest-to-goodness limitation of the current version of the software.
Another point on that note: many of the limitations set aside by developers (in the number of pages a document can have in memory, the number of rows a spreadsheet can include) are forecasted not by them but the limitations of the current technology. Sure, if MS used a less pretty office assistant they can save a few megs for that spreadsheet. But the bottom line is, at the time, developers of older versions of software did not, or simply were not able to, think ahead.
Which leads once again to my question: what's a bug and what's a limitation? That will determine whether people will pay for an upgrade.
While I admire their resolve... (Score:3, Insightful)
I do believe that market rejection could place tremendous pressure on software vendors to put more effort into bug-testing their product thoroughly before it is used by the client. But bug-testing is a time and resource consuming affair. No software company, no matter how big and fat with cash can throw enough money at a product to make sure that every possible scenario is covered. It is only a matter of time before a bug (perhaps even a significant, critical one) is found.
But still, I appluad the efforts of anyone who is willing to tell their software vendor(s) to try harder to get it right. I sincerely hope this strategy will convince the software vendors that purposefully release broken products to stop assuming we'll upgrade when you release the "professional-special-app-of-the-year-gold-box" edition of the software just because this version fixes that nasty, data-ruining bug in the last version.
I think it's worth noting, though, that only one thing can truly lead to the elimination (or near-elimination) of software bugs: developing for a limited number of platforms/OSes. The more OS/hardware possibilities you bring into the picture, the more bugs you'll have. Guaranteed.
Of course, similar arguments could (and should) be a applied to the PC games industry, but that's another debate.
Re:Shouldn't they have thought of this earlier? (Score:3, Insightful)
You think we roll out MS Office 2K without investing a couple man-years of effort, testing installations on supported platforms, building SMS packages, preparing training programs, advertising, providing conversion from Office '95 files, etc.? No difference between MS and GNU there.
And you may think that these are the big costs. Multiply that by 7,000+ desktops in this corporation, and Office 2K license fees run into the millions. If the installation cost runs to $150,000 for various peoples' time, it's still peanuts to the licenses.
John
Re:While I admire their resolve... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think anyone (except PHBs) truly believe it will; I don't even think it can. Software is inherently buggy unless you pay orders of magnitude more than you can afford to (good, fast, cheap)
What CAN happen is that vendors be forced away from saying "This is a known issue. This is fixed in the next version of Product X." In other words, force vendors to provide free bug fixes. Perhaps EULAs should specify an end-of-life for the product; then purchasers KNOW exactly what they are getting.
Re:Planned Obsolescence (Score:5, Insightful)
Similarly, Microsoft is switching largely to this new leasing model.
And in both instances, it is for the same reasons: features are no longer improving. During the 50's, 60's, there were model year changes in autos each year. Look at the shoebox Chevy's (55-57) While having the same underpinnings, each year had different trim, a new look, etc. Flash forward to the 'new' shoebox Chevy, the '87-'93 Ford Mustang. Almost identical. Not even the cosmetic changes of the older models.
Now look at Microsoft: big difference between Win 3.1 and Win '95. Not so big to '98, not so big to ME...
There is no technological need to upgrade in either industry. So force a revenue stream by only renting the product.
(BTW, I hope and prey that Bob Lutz will help get GM in gear. I've never owned a GM, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with their product, there is no compelling reason to buy it. DCX really screwed up when they let him go.)
OSS for the wrong reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that a little like making a date for the prom with the ugly girl, knowing full well that once you've made the cheerleader jealous, she'll go with you after all? Nobody cares about the ugly girl, she's just being used. And she'll be dumped in the end.
Seems to me this is the wrong reason to be considering open source. The CIO's want a brand name (cheerleader) and if they have to date OSS to get her, they will. But where does that leave OSS in the end?
Re:Planned Obsolescence (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus, there's no such thing as a free car, as there is with free (as in beer) software. So MS is really shooting itself in the foot here. They push "lease or walk", and we fight back with "or Linux, or BSD, or HURD, etc..."
Sfotware Bugs (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been writing software for years, and I can't understand this kind of "oh well, all software has bugs" mentality that exists in most of the places I have worked. When I write software, it *doesn't* have bugs. Sure, even a cautious design phase and well-documented specs won't help when you accidentally type "crsh++" instead of "cash++", but other than typographical errors (which can be easily found and fixed), there should be no *logical* bugs.
Personally, I begin to wonder how much of the bug issues these days are either because of sheer human laziness ("I don't need to check the limits on this array, no one will *ever* type in a 257 character string here") or because of intentionally releasing a flawed product ("Quick, slap an installer on version 0.0001733Alpha so we can sell it to Dell!"). Either way, as a programmer, I think it is a terrible thing...
If you are a programmer, and are reading this right now, take a few minutes after every block of code, go grab a cup of coffee, look out the window, read slashdot, something to take your mind off what you just wrote, and then come back to it, go through it line by line, make sure your code is doing what you think it is. Make sure there are no buffers to be overflowed and no shorts where there should be longs. Take pride in your work! Don't be a dime-paperback hack romance novelist! Be a Hemmingway, a Gibson, an Orwell, or whoever you think is a brilliant writer, be Tolkien! Give your programming work the same respect that you would reserve for those people you respect.
If programmers as a whole stopped thinking along the "bugs are inevitable" line and started taking a fresh approach, one where they think perfect, bug-free code is possible, then the software industry as a whole would become a much cleaner place.
No More Code Monkies!
Proprietary Lock-in Not Addressed (Score:4, Insightful)
The flaw here is that products like Oracle 11i (cited in the article) usual require a large amount of custom development work and intergration. It is also tightly coupled to Oracle's database. Since these products don't follow any standards (either they don't exist, or they are deliberately ignored to lock the customer), all that investment is lost by switching to a competitor.
All the software vendors have to do is to ensure the cost of switching to another product is higher than the subscription + the cost of living with the shortcomings of the product.
It is called proprietary lock-in, and it can take many forms -- business information in MS Word Documents throughout the enterprise, Oracle ERP that requires Oracle DB and custom development, and many many more.
Let's not be too quick to pat ourself on the back (Score:3, Insightful)
The same sort of problem can easily happen with Windows and Linux. What if KDE 3.0 requires a 1GHz processor and 3D graphics card? What if the Star Office developers decide to change the file format and ignore backward compatibility, maybe because they are behind schedule and they can't find many programmers interested in helping out?
Re:Planned Obsolescence (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem they've come up against is that they've feature bloated their software to the max. It's common knowledge that people don't know how to use 95% of the features of their word processors. Ten years ago, that number used to be 50% ignorance. They sell "new" software with more "features" because their revenue stream model forces them to market "new and improved," not out of any consumer demand.
Thus the birth of .NET. A subscription model. Same product, but now with "fewer hassles." Make it attractive to developers by pushing the hell out of it in the magazines and with evangelical meetings. Make it attractive to consumers by offering them magical promises that it "keeps up automatically with the latest features." They don't even have to think up those features today. It's like buying cleverness on credit!
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Microsoft gets a monthly rent check from you, too.
John
The Problem is Software is Too Cheap! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are going to release bug free products, then you'll simply need to spend perhaps twice as much time, which means half us many new releases.
In other words, you've got to double the price.
Now, just how many CIO's aren't going to seriously consider switching vendors when a software house says they're doubling the price in order to get better quality control...
At least with subscription, the software house no longer has the desperate need to push a product out whether its ready or not.
but... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Software Bugs v. buggy software. (Score:3, Insightful)
Buggy software is not the same thing as software that has bugs. Buggy software is software that reaches such a level of poor quality or irrational design that you identify it more by what it screws up than what it does. You may be able to get a lot done, but only because you've memorized a catalog of work-arounds and "don't do thats."
Any ambitious software will have bugs because people are not perfect, but buggy software exists because people don't give a damn.
Sendmail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if they said qmail on the other hand...
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Subscriptions Won't change anything... (Score:3, Insightful)
A subscription model does not address one of the bigger problems that Microsoft (and many other companies) have.
These companies take orders from the Marketing department.
Instead of making stable products that work, you have programs that contain stacks and stacks of bullet items and features demanded by the Marketing department. (No matter how nasty it makes things for the programmers or the users.)
And these features rarely get removed.
The advantage with Open Source is that they are not stuck to "getting it out before Comdex or Christmas". The bugs get fixed. (For the most part. The reason Mozilla has so many problems is that it has a HUGE codebase. I am amazed that they can get a grasp on the project itself.) The drive for why a program gets written is different. Open Source programs are written to fill a use. (It may not be your use, but the programmer most likely needed it.) It is functionality driven, not buzzword driven.
Unfortunatly, most CIOs that I have met do not understand what it takes to implement their "solutions". They are not able to figure out that if you are locked in to a single vendor, with no options or abilities to "fix it yourself", if needs be, that the costs to productivity can be enormous.
It bothers me when a decision is made to go with a vendor and then you wind-up figuring out the true cost of what it will take to make it work. (Having to buy an extra license for this, and a license for that, and the extra BDC and PDC licenses, and the extra Exchange box so we can restore the mail spools that get corrupted every so often, and so on and so forth.) You start feeling like you have to keep forking out money just to keep your head above water.
And subscriptions will not make it any better. Instead, if you refuse to pay, then they can just shut you off. (Extortion-ware?) There is no incentive to fix anything. They have you locked in. The only advantage is for the company selling the software. They have a constant revenue stream. They no longer have to worry about "the next big version" to make their revenue for the year. They have a constant stream. There is no incentive to build a better product because you get the money whether or not there is anything new or useful.
And the beauty of the whole thing is that the customer does not own anything. With the current licenses, the company is absolved from any liablility whatsoever.
The customer is just there to pay and pay and pay.
This is the most lop-sided deal I have seen yet. (If UCITA ever gets enacted, you will have even less rights.) And there will be next to nothing you will be able to do about it. (Except for Open Source.)
"When you have them by the software, they're hearts and minds will follow." - B. Gates
ALL the advantages? (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm, no I don't.
I don't have the advantage of actually having the source.
With open source, I can fix any bugs, without having to wait for the official fix (an advantage).
With open source, I can learn from the source code.
With open source, I can adapt the source for my own needs - like adding a feature I want that the vendor doesn't feel is necessary/important.
Software subscription gives you ONE of the advantages of open source, but there's no way it gives you ALL of the advantages.
Re:Sfotware Bugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats, you are the most perfect software developer to have ever walked the face of the earth. Either that, or you simply aren't experienced enough to know that all software has bugs. And when you get to the enterprise scale of software, developing good software is very, very hard. You need *good* (good == top 5%ile, based on my experience) coders, *good* architects, *good* testing and *good* project management. Getting any ONE of those is rare!
Take the Linux kernel. I think there's a pretty good bunch of smart people working on that. I think they care about the quality of their code. I think they appreciate correctness and elegance. And *every single version* of the kernel has had bugs. Why is that?
If programmers as a whole stopped thinking along the "bugs are inevitable" line ...
The average programmer should care more about the quality of his work. Duh. That's a feel-good tautology. It's not that easy.
Re:Planned Obsolescence (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that in the Electronic and Automotive industries, you can always find a 3rd party verdor to support your equipment, in the MS world, you can't since the code is closed.
How would OSS/FS apply to "enterprise apps?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Successful Open Source solutions, I think, are general computing applications where the volunteer developers understand the standard requirements of the system in question. Namely, Open Source OS, databases, web servers, email servers, are successful because the developers can all agree on the critical features. They also would tend to agree on what "good solutions" to say, web server functionality, would constitute.
The examples of Lawson and Oracle 11i in question are so called "enterprise applications" or general business applications. Specifically, they discuss Financials & Accounting applications. Let's be clear here, this is not QuickBooks or MS Money level stuff. These are systems designed for "keeping the books" and billing and payments for multi-nationals, conforming to accounting regulations in the EU, Asia, US/North America, and the rest of the world.
My question is, how realistic is it to expect an Open Source solution for a global multinational financial app? Can I really expect the CPAs, international tax experts, the controllers and accountants (who normally make up part of the design team of these financial apps) to join in on the OSS design effort?
What about the other types of "enterprise apps," the manufacturing and resource planning software? The kind of software that, for example, Ford or GM might use to coordinate the sourcing and timing of components from Mexico/Thailand/Detroit? Vendors like SAP (and also Oracle 11i) include these components, designed by programmers, manufacturing shop floor professionals, and "industry expertise." It would be great if someone could prove me wrong, but I doubt Open Source is a viable option in these situations.
It's all a matter of design standards and requirements. Open Source developers know these backwards and forwards for operating systems, web servers, databases, and other general computing tools. When it comes to specialized business apps though, it gets real tricky. The OSS/FS options in these cases are simply not there.
Benbox
A bit misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, the majority of our tech calls are simply because the user is not able to, or refuses to follow the simple directions we make availabe with our software. Those people should pay and pay handsomly for support. Yes, the software industry is full of many rogue companies, but it's not like there is some giant conspiracy in place. And, the users should be held responsible too. If people would stop supporting companies who make crap software and overcharge for it, well then, the problem would take care of itself. Just my opinion of course.
Subscriptions and migrating won't work (Score:3, Insightful)
If they need bug free, no problem! Any decent team of software engineers can create rock solid, bug free code. We simply adopt the same design and manufacturing standards that a company like Boeing has. Sure, it may take years for a word processor to be developed and it'll cost about $250,000 dollars but it will only crash your system about as often as a 747 crashes too. Everyone's happy right?
Wrong! These CIO's say they want bug free but what they aren't saying is they don't want the price to go up at the same time. The extensive testing, debugging, improved up front design work, etc will cost a lot of money and increase the time it takes to get an application out the door as well as it's price tag. Who's going to pay $1000's of dollars for something that's rock solid when they can get it for $100 even though it crashes once a day or has some extra configuration issues that have to be resolved?
There'll be a few that will but if Microsoft has proven anything it that good enough IS good enough. That's how they got their monopoly, by getting the same CIO's to look only at the bottom line and pay modest fee for crappy software.
These guys know it's not good but try convincing the bean counters to spend $1000 for something they can get for $100. Business types can rarely accept the loss of productivity cost associated with the occasional reboot or restart of an application.
Requirements (Score:3, Insightful)
Demand Less (Score:2, Insightful)
CIOs want the latest features now and to spend as little as possible. If a CIO would apply the same philosophy to buying a car he would be driving a moped and complaining it doesn't have power steering.
If they want fewer bugs they must be willing to have patience while the software is created. It doesn't matter if it's Open Source, prioprietary or even Microsoft, you will receive what you're willing to wait for.
Re:Software Bugs v. buggy software. (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a friend who used to say that one problem for software developers is that, unlike hardware, the "white wires" where software has been patched don't show. Continuing his analogy, no company would ship a circuit board that had a dozen cut traces, two dozen white wires, ICs with half the pins cut off and three daughter cards soldered on in odd places. Software with the equivalent level of kruft ships all the time.
Cost of Retaining Programmers to Provide the Suppo (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not entirely true. One big consideration in all this is that to provide support for the older products, they must retain programmers who know those older products. They must pay these people to sit around and wait for a support request to come in. If the volume of incoming calls is low, how do you justify hanging on to these people?
You find them something else to do. Probably, since they are intimately familiar with the product, you assign them to working on the new version. When support requests start coming in for the new version, who are you going to turn to? The people who worked on it.
So, now you have these people supporting both the new and old versions. As call volume increases for the new version, which has priority, the old or the new?
At some point, these people are going to lose skills in the old version because of spending so much time with the new version. At some point, you are going to have to decide to drop support of the old version unless someone is willing to pay an exorbitant fee so you can justify retaining and/or training people to provide support for the old version.
This is true for both usage and bug/defect support.
This is where Open Source really makes a difference. How often does a company release the source code to their software, even after they have decided it's no longer commercially feasible to continue providing support for it? With Open Source software, if you can't find someone to support the software, you can hire and train someone to do it for your company. You have the source code available; you can fix it yourself.
One way or another, you're paying for the support. The difference is who has access to the source, and if they decide whether it is worth their time to support it.
Re:Sfotware Bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree in part, there is no principle reason that software should have bugs. In the process of writing software from scratch or in a team, skillful programmers should communicate their intent well so that there are no bugs. When I write software from scratch I usually have no logical bugs in my code either.
I get bugs in practical situations however. For example in one of my OpenGL demos a certain video card produced a mirrored effect instead of a translucent effect using a certain alpha blending function. I had no logical errors in my code, the same compile runs fine on other boxen, but on certain configs I'll crash the X server.
In another example I can give from work, I maintain a large set of Perl data processing scripts. The previous author left no notes. The code is rife with examples of bad programming... for instance a while loop several thousand lines long starts with a label above it... the while loop is filled with if statements, nearly all of the if statements break to the label above the start of the while loop (but not all mind you). Some of the subroutines called inside the loop return, some call exit, some call modules and libraries.
Amazingly this seeming kermudgen of code has no logical errors in it. The program functions perfectly. I personally think that I am a better programmer now than the person who created the program was at the time they wrote the program and it's dozen or so libraries... however, my boss only knows that I take longer to work on the script and that I create bugs in the software whenever I do. He wonders why he can't get me to work as fast and efficiently as the man I replaced.
There should be no bugs. It's a good idea, so is leaving notes in your code, and not using globals for everything. It is also a good idea for software to have a set of functional goals that are clearly defined so a programmer knows when something is working properly and when it isn't. It is also a good idea to have a definition of what is a bug and what isn't.
The interaction between software components, operating system inconsistencies, and poor communication introduce bugs to software. There should be no bugs, but there should be clear direction for what code does. There should be clear functional decompositions or object oriented designs. In the real world there isn't.
It would be nice if the bossman would stop and let the programmers be free. Instead the bossman keeps us down beating his drum chanting, "faster, faster, cheaper, cheaper!" I can take pride in my work right out the door while one of my coworkers says, "sure I can take over his job, he left such clear notes and perfectly logical code!" And, who do you suppose keeps his job because he is irreplacable? Right, the guy who leaves a kludge and no perldocs.
Re:The better licensing plan (Score:2, Insightful)
Who said the mainframe died? I'll agree that they aren't as popular as they once were, but most fortune 500 companies still rely heavily on their IBM and Unisys mainframes. I don't think old Honeywell is in the game anymore, but I could be wrong. The problem was't really price. PCs were originally used to suplement mainframes or to create networks for SOHOs where mainframes would be an overkill (not to mention costly). As time went on tho, there developed money in the PC support business. As a result, anyone coming into the computer field learned PCs instead of mainframes. The end result was that these PC "gurus" tried to move all the mainframe functionality (which they didn't know) to PCs (which they did know) and failed miserably. Guess that high availability thing was important, huh? Now there are a large number of businesses stuck supporting something as stupid as DBase (AARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!).
Re:Sfotware Bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sfotware Bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Planned Obsolescence (Score:3, Insightful)
Please take no offense, but this is a highly uneducated observation. Win95 to 98 was not a dramatic rewrite of the OS, true, but the change was huge. It is so much easier to support 98 then 95, for a whole slew of reasons. ME is an even bigger step forward. Sure, on the front they all look very similar, but they are definatly reasonble upgrades. Then, take 2000 and XP into account, and you have yet another "leaps and bounds" improvement.
Re:This article is GARBAGE (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh yeah? When I was the IT department for a small business, we had a problem with Windows NT... seems that there was a memory leak in a Microsoft driver... one that, when heavily used, would cause slowdown and eventual freeze of the server in question.
This machine did a lot of things for us... providing local web services, e-mail, and caller-id for our multiline phone system. The other thing it did was maintain our large (20,000+ record) customer/contact database. When this machine was down, our business couldn't function.
When I located the module that was causing the problem, I called Microsoft. Now, after finally describing the problem to the person at the other end they said "this is referenced in knowledge base article number..." whaterver it was. At any rate, I looked at the article and sure enough, it described the problem, and said "this is a known issue with Windows NT 4.0 and all service packs" and as far as I know, they have NEVER fixed the problem. Another service pack came out, and it was STILL there.
As near as I can tell, they don't plan on fixing it because it's not an issue for 95+% of their customers, and besides, NT is obsoleted by Win2K. But, it pisses me off. They knew about the problem, and did nothing to fix it.
Oh, and we were billed for the service call. So, it seems I can nullify one of your arguments.
Furthermore, open source has a huge advantage if a company employs a coder or two. (but not a humble one, I seem to have developed a distaste for those just now.) If a bug is discovered, there is a chance that it can be fixed in-house, because you have the source. When was the last time you heard of a customer patching a bug deep in the bowels of a giant piece of software like Windows NT or Oracle?
Open source may not be a magic bullet, but it's a bullet nonetheless.
Who's that? (Score:2, Insightful)
It looks like the closed source community is doing the job.
The open source movement just has to sit back and watch!