5 ms·

It sounds like you're not so much in "the" industry but a subset of the industry that doesn't consider free open source software to be an option. If you're fig

by gdulli 10y ago

It sounds like you're not so much in "the" industry but a subset of the industry that doesn't consider free open source software to be an option. If you're fighting the attitude that the only viable option is one that costs a ton of money instead of a decision based on technical merit, additional facts about Postgres won't help. Sometimes the decision gets made on a golf course and not after reading very long texts.

forgotpw1123 10y ago
>Sometimes the decision gets made on a golf course and not after reading very long texts. This is why I swore to only write software at software companies some years ago. For other industries software is just another expense like buildings or supplies. The people buying it have no idea what they're looking at so they buy the shiny thing that everyone else is buying. When I worked in other sectors I regularly saw executives attempt to assemble software as if it was a large building. Materials were gathered, agreements were made to purchase or rent heavy equipment, and the whole project was planned out with exacting detail. When all the permits and contracts were in place construction would begin. This was to be done in a measured amount of code using the chosen architecture, and delivered complete on a certain date. Any deviations were seen as workarounds for not following the original plans, and overruns the result of incompetence. The whole thing was just a shitshow of incompetence at the higher levels.
- devonkim 10y ago
  You're correct that non-software companies will simply outsource but not quite correct that it must be closed source - software is simply something they don't have much expertise in and never will. The problems only show up when software becomes such an integral part of business operations that you really do need to actually do well at software or risk a lot of business. The reason that it tends to be closed source companies is that most of the relationships that the non-software companies have is when open source was really not very viable of a foundation for one's software. Demanding and exercising the use of a throat to choke is a massive, massive part of how at least American business works due to prevailing leadership styles as well. It also shows how they tend to view their workers as well. "Blameless culture" is something that is a tiny, tiny minority that only seems to have worked out well among socialist-ish boutique software companies and until we start seeing companies that practice traditional Taylorist and authoritarian leader worship cultures fail very disproportionately, nothing will fundamentally change.
  - bigtex 10y ago
    I think that is another reason why some companies outsource all aspects of IT, so they can blame someone. Who cares if it takes 10x the time compared to having the skillset in house when you can just point at the 3rd party and blame them. Doesn't matter if it is the same person selecting all the 3rd party providers who continually are horrible at their jobs, we are saving money!
    - badosu 10y ago
      Nobody ever got fired by hiring IBM mindset I guess...
      - pekk 10y ago
        It's worse than that. You're not just choosing a reliable solution, or even a solution with a conservative reputation so that your butt is covered. You're choosing a solution which may actually be worse because when you fail to deliver for someone else, you have someone to scapegoat. If there is nobody else to blame, you might take the blame for having chosen open source with no specific party to blame (the hot potato stopped with you).
    - devonkim 10y ago
      I guess I already covered that in the culture of desiring parties to choke. Whether it's a vendor or your own employees, leaders that rule by fear like to find scapegoats to shift blame away from themselves and take credit for others' efforts. The people that know better are effectively kept away from any form of power or under-resourced, so they'll always be too small to succeed. I'm familiar with a number of very large deals done basically between C-level to C-level where the scope of IT projects has nothing to do with technologies but entire about cost savings - literally "I will save you $n MM / yr in opex so you can get your bonuses" and other vendors get shut out. Sometimes these deals work out, other times they don't and the executive is basically ousted. Companies with bad politics and enormous cronyism may have worked fine for decades, but they just may not be doing as well anymore unless you're on Wall Street and you make so much money it doesn't matter how it's done.
- circular_logic 10y ago
  Is that not just plan driven development? (I.e. waterfall)
seanot 10y ago
I spent several years in securities and derivatives trading and the most frequently cited reason for avoiding open-source software I heard was that, in the event of a major foul up, there was no one to sue if you got sued yourself. It's not that difficult for an attorney to paint you as reckless for using "free" software.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  and how often do securities firms sue oracle, microsoft, ibm, sybase and other current and previous database giants?
- nihonde 10y ago
  Show me an enterprise DB license that offers you better indemnity/liability options than open source. (I negotiated them on behalf of huge clients for many years.)
  - rjzzleep 10y ago
    It's not so much the license per se. It's that the setup is done by a third party that can be blamed when something goes wrong. I saw one one contract that was specifically saying that they are insured for 1 mio. in damages. The company for the longest time wouldn't even touch basic firewall rules without having the firewall contractor implement it.
    - nihonde 10y ago
      This is so true, it hurts. I call it The Triangle Of CIO Turnover.
- ballenf 10y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I think is the better point or rewording of your point.
  - vacri 10y ago
    The state government of Queensland (Australia) has forbidden any further contracts going to IBM. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...
kwillets 10y ago
Some of the money gets funneled back into salespeople; that's how enterprise software gets bought. The salespeople target the CTO or another single point of contact.
brandall10 10y ago
It's not about technical merit or cost - it's about service contracts. I was a Sybase point person for years at a fortune 50 medical devices enterprise company (we had revenues of well over $1B annually on devices running Sybase dbs). There were dozens of bugs/issues I found that I pushed up the chain to an engineer and had special patches turned around within 48 hours, sometimes even hours. Before I left that job I started playing around with Rails and mentioned MySQL and Postgres for a potential greenfield project. I was told it would be fine for internal use but no way, no how were they going to deploy any software without that kind of parachute based on economic leverage.
- davidgould 10y ago
  Some years ago - never mind how long precisely -I was one of the engineers at Sybase who would have produced that EBF patch for you. More recently I do the same sort of thing for clients running Postgresql. I have worked on the code of both db servers, been involved in bug hunting and fixing as well as support escalation for both, and interacted directly with users and developers of both. If my life depended on a medical device, with a choice of one running Sybase and one running Postgresql, I would choose Postgresql, in a heartbeat (so to speak).
- gdulli 10y ago
  > no way, no how were they going to deploy any software without that kind of parachute based on economic leverage. Making software work at scale without that economic leverage could never work in theory. It only works in practice.
  - watwut 10y ago
    Those in practice fixed bugs in mysql themselves and had to make it more performance themselves. Which basically means larger development team and more time. The parachute is meant to avoid that expense. Oh, and those who did it were above oracle in terms of data size making it rational decision too. The calculation is still different for majority of companies.
- anarazel 10y ago
unixhero 10y ago
Regarding "The industry". Okay. Let me rather call it, The Real World. I work in a Fortune 500 company, a consultancy of 400.000 people, on projects for other Fortune 500 companies. My experience is from the real world.

by gdulli 10y ago

forgotpw1123 10y ago

>Sometimes the decision gets made on a golf course and not after reading very long texts. This is why I swore to only write software at software companies some years ago. For other industries software is just another expense like buildings or supplies. The people buying it have no idea what they're looking at so they buy the shiny thing that everyone else is buying. When I worked in other sectors I regularly saw executives attempt to assemble software as if it was a large building. Materials were gathered, agreements were made to purchase or rent heavy equipment, and the whole project was planned out with exacting detail. When all the permits and contracts were in place construction would begin. This was to be done in a measured amount of code using the chosen architecture, and delivered complete on a certain date. Any deviations were seen as workarounds for not following the original plans, and overruns the result of incompetence. The whole thing was just a shitshow of incompetence at the higher levels.

devonkim 10y ago
You're correct that non-software companies will simply outsource but not quite correct that it must be closed source - software is simply something they don't have much expertise in and never will. The problems only show up when software becomes such an integral part of business operations that you really do need to actually do well at software or risk a lot of business. The reason that it tends to be closed source companies is that most of the relationships that the non-software companies have is when open source was really not very viable of a foundation for one's software. Demanding and exercising the use of a throat to choke is a massive, massive part of how at least American business works due to prevailing leadership styles as well. It also shows how they tend to view their workers as well. "Blameless culture" is something that is a tiny, tiny minority that only seems to have worked out well among socialist-ish boutique software companies and until we start seeing companies that practice traditional Taylorist and authoritarian leader worship cultures fail very disproportionately, nothing will fundamentally change.
- bigtex 10y ago
  I think that is another reason why some companies outsource all aspects of IT, so they can blame someone. Who cares if it takes 10x the time compared to having the skillset in house when you can just point at the 3rd party and blame them. Doesn't matter if it is the same person selecting all the 3rd party providers who continually are horrible at their jobs, we are saving money!
  - badosu 10y ago
    Nobody ever got fired by hiring IBM mindset I guess...
    - pekk 10y ago
      It's worse than that. You're not just choosing a reliable solution, or even a solution with a conservative reputation so that your butt is covered. You're choosing a solution which may actually be worse because when you fail to deliver for someone else, you have someone to scapegoat. If there is nobody else to blame, you might take the blame for having chosen open source with no specific party to blame (the hot potato stopped with you).
  - devonkim 10y ago
    I guess I already covered that in the culture of desiring parties to choke. Whether it's a vendor or your own employees, leaders that rule by fear like to find scapegoats to shift blame away from themselves and take credit for others' efforts. The people that know better are effectively kept away from any form of power or under-resourced, so they'll always be too small to succeed. I'm familiar with a number of very large deals done basically between C-level to C-level where the scope of IT projects has nothing to do with technologies but entire about cost savings - literally "I will save you $n MM / yr in opex so you can get your bonuses" and other vendors get shut out. Sometimes these deals work out, other times they don't and the executive is basically ousted. Companies with bad politics and enormous cronyism may have worked fine for decades, but they just may not be doing as well anymore unless you're on Wall Street and you make so much money it doesn't matter how it's done.
circular_logic 10y ago
Is that not just plan driven development? (I.e. waterfall)

seanot 10y ago

I spent several years in securities and derivatives trading and the most frequently cited reason for avoiding open-source software I heard was that, in the event of a major foul up, there was no one to sue if you got sued yourself. It's not that difficult for an attorney to paint you as reckless for using "free" software.

mgkimsal 10y ago
and how often do securities firms sue oracle, microsoft, ibm, sybase and other current and previous database giants?
nihonde 10y ago
Show me an enterprise DB license that offers you better indemnity/liability options than open source. (I negotiated them on behalf of huge clients for many years.)
- rjzzleep 10y ago
  It's not so much the license per se. It's that the setup is done by a third party that can be blamed when something goes wrong. I saw one one contract that was specifically saying that they are insured for 1 mio. in damages. The company for the longest time wouldn't even touch basic firewall rules without having the firewall contractor implement it.
  - nihonde 10y ago
    This is so true, it hurts. I call it The Triangle Of CIO Turnover.
ballenf 10y ago
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I think is the better point or rewording of your point.
- vacri 10y ago
  The state government of Queensland (Australia) has forbidden any further contracts going to IBM. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-420969 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

kwillets 10y ago

Some of the money gets funneled back into salespeople; that's how enterprise software gets bought. The salespeople target the CTO or another single point of contact.

brandall10 10y ago

It's not about technical merit or cost - it's about service contracts. I was a Sybase point person for years at a fortune 50 medical devices enterprise company (we had revenues of well over $1B annually on devices running Sybase dbs). There were dozens of bugs/issues I found that I pushed up the chain to an engineer and had special patches turned around within 48 hours, sometimes even hours. Before I left that job I started playing around with Rails and mentioned MySQL and Postgres for a potential greenfield project. I was told it would be fine for internal use but no way, no how were they going to deploy any software without that kind of parachute based on economic leverage.

davidgould 10y ago
Some years ago - never mind how long precisely -I was one of the engineers at Sybase who would have produced that EBF patch for you. More recently I do the same sort of thing for clients running Postgresql. I have worked on the code of both db servers, been involved in bug hunting and fixing as well as support escalation for both, and interacted directly with users and developers of both. If my life depended on a medical device, with a choice of one running Sybase and one running Postgresql, I would choose Postgresql, in a heartbeat (so to speak).
gdulli 10y ago
> no way, no how were they going to deploy any software without that kind of parachute based on economic leverage. Making software work at scale without that economic leverage could never work in theory. It only works in practice.
- watwut 10y ago
  Those in practice fixed bugs in mysql themselves and had to make it more performance themselves. Which basically means larger development team and more time. The parachute is meant to avoid that expense. Oh, and those who did it were above oracle in terms of data size making it rational decision too. The calculation is still different for majority of companies.
anarazel 10y ago

unixhero 10y ago

Regarding "The industry". Okay. Let me rather call it, The Real World. I work in a Fortune 500 company, a consultancy of 400.000 people, on projects for other Fortune 500 companies. My experience is from the real world.