I take issue with your points a little bit, although they are mostly
valid.
>
> Great points ,Nuno, about 'open source' ...A lot of non-IT managers see the cost ( free) and figure that it has to be more
> economical to use free stuff than to pay big bucks for something that they don't see as much different...
>
> Those are the people who , to paraphrase someone, 'know the price of everything but the value of nothing'.
>
> The 'true' cost of something includes the purchase price, the support costs( contract or salaries to IT support staff), the
> ongoing update/maintenance changes and their cost in down time, person-hours, etc.
>
Open source advocates like to call this "Free Beer" versus "Free
Speech". PostgreSQL is free in that 1) it costs nothing to acquire and
2) you are free to change and fix the code. I've used PostgreSQL as a
low traffic web site backend, and it never even hickuped. It cost me
maybe a week's worth of learning the system, but that would be the
case with any database system. If you wanted to use it on a large
scale, it will cost time, benchmarking, etc. (It took us a week to
install and reinstall and reinstall...Oracle server last month before
it decided to run fast, and not in slow motion, though--I
digress--some of that was network card problems.)
But lets be honest, Oracle is not for the feint of heart. If it
weren't for ORAFAQ, these newsgroups, and a bunch of other stuff, we'd
be screwed. How much does Oracle charge for support, anyway?
> Also, and most importantly, IMHO, the lack of technical support from the manufacturer of the product, whose knowledge of the
> product will (or should be) greater then any end user can develop is a major drawback to open source software..
>
I completely disagree, also IMHO. In the Open Source software that I
have used for business, I find help is easier to find than closed
source software. Typically, there are consultants for any Open Source
software that you can find. Also there is much support from the
Internet. I have not had experience with Oracle support, but Oracle
database has a very good support group on the Internet (except on my
HostName question, but I digress) with these newsgroups and orafaq and
other things. When you compare the Microsoft products to Open Source
for support, that is where the constrasts start to come in. Then
companies go out of business--Open Source defeats this by letting the
community handle this.
> Add to this the need to be compatible with various OSs, existing systems, legacy data, etc. and no corporation is going to
> jump into software that is still mainly a techie project...
>
Also on this one, I find that Open Source works across many more
platforms than proprietary software. As far as interoperability, I was
feeding PostgreSQL from SQLServer using SQL Server's DTS without any
problems. (You could feed it from Oracle with DTS also.) I can open
Word documents in AbiWord. If that doesn't work, I can use OpenOffice.
It depends on the app (just like proprietary). No doubt, Open Source
has a long way to go before it is accepted by corporations, but I
think that it's on its way. There are bunches of early corporate
adopters already out there (Burlington, IBM, Apple, etc.). Oracle even
bundles Apache with Oracle Database.
