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Provocative tagline. It's worth noting that most open source users do so not to avoid paying, but for more idealistic and teleological reasons.
by proemeth 17y ago
Provocative tagline. It's worth noting that most open source users do so not to avoid paying, but for more idealistic and teleological reasons.
- mseebach 17y agoMaybe not paying as such, but freeing your organisation from the annoyance of dealing with licenses has been a major factor in some migrations I've seen. I wouldn't call that ideology, more more of an economic factor, as there is both a direct cost and an opportunity cost to dealing with licenses.
- pingswept 17y agoTotally agreed. In a professional setting, especially when working on a project basis, using open source stuff is huge. I work on embedded systems in renewable energy manufacturing. I can't imagine what it would be like trying to deploy some of our stuff if we had to worry about database licenses, subscriptions, or any of that stuff. Negotiating licenses with several vendors for each project would be horrendous.
- robin_reala 17y agoOpen source products still require you to deal with licences. It’s just that the software’s usually licensed under a clear and free-as-in-beer licence.
- mseebach 17y agoI think you're misunderstanding, we're talking about free software, as in OSI-approved licenses, not random proprietary software that happens to ship with source code. OSI-licensed software isn't "usually" anything, it's always completely free, both beer and speech.
- notauser 17y agoGPL/BSD licensed software doesn't have to be free as in beer - you are perfectly welcome to charge for it. (The challenge is how to keep charging for it since anyone you give it to can also sell it or give it away.)
- notauser 17y agoCompared to the average vendor library license even the GPL is clear, concise, unambiguous and friendly. The biggest advantage is that once your lawyers approve the (L/)GPL, Apache and BSD licenses for use you get access to a vast range of stuff with no more legal work to do. Vendors aren't organized enough to pool a small set of standard licenses.
- timwiseman 17y agoTechnically true, GPL, LGPL, etc are all licenses. But they are licenses that require fairly limited thought to use the software (modifying the software or borrowing its code is a slightly different story, but those aren't even options in most cases in the closed source world). Compare that to major enterprise software where everytime you need to install it on a different machine, move it from one machine to another, etc can require careful licensing management. At one corporation I worked for, licensing tracking and management was a major portion of the work of one fairly senior person.
- timwiseman 17y agoI think a lot of people use many open source packages because they are better with little thought spared for idealism. Python is, in my own personal opinion, the best language for much of what I do. I prefer it to say C# with Visual Studio, for most projects, and I have a fully licensed and paid for version of Visual Studio (I do use C# for a few things where it works well, especially in conjunction with SQL Server). I prefer FireFox to every other browser on the market. I do not do heavy image manipulation, but for the little I do I think GIMP works better than Photoshop. Of course, I also use proprietary software. I do use C# for some projects. I prefer SQL Server to all other RDBMS, including MySQL. And I have yet to see top rate video games from the Open Source community.
- seldo 17y agoMost open-source users are doing it for reasons of idealism? I would be interested to see actual numbers. I personally think open-source is nice and everything, but the reason I started using it was when I lived in the developing world and any commercial software was prohibitively expensive.