4 ms·

There's tons of highly specialized vertical market software that will basically never have open-source alternatives. Every industry has a few examples. I at lea

by ufmace 7y ago

There's tons of highly specialized vertical market software that will basically never have open-source alternatives. Every industry has a few examples. I at least know of the high-end CAD, FEA, and CFD software used in certain branches of engineering. See Ansys, Autodesk, etc. The reason why is that building this type of software correctly requires an immense amount of domain knowledge. That type of knowledge doesn't come together in a useful way without a lot of money. Such software also doesn't get used enough to be trustworthy as far as results without some other big companies using it to do things with and testing the results. What company is going to trust their product designs to the results of a bunch of open-source code with no company standing behind it?

afarrell 7y ago
> with no company standing behind it One misinterpretation of this mindset I have heard: "They just want someone who they can sue if things go wrong." If my business depends on something, I want to know that attention is being paid to it.
- ufmace 7y ago
  "They just want someone who they can sue if things go wrong." is true, but phrased in a rather hostile/negative way. The more positive way to say the same thing is, that because the company building the software knows they can be sued, and is not some fly-by-night operation that will vanish at the first sign of trouble, they have a strong incentive to make sure their software is high-quality and free of critical bugs. That incentive has proved to work well in the commercial world. Much better than, well this open source software has a critical bug, I sure hope somebody feels like opening a PR to fix it before our deadline. Or we could spend a few million bucks to spin up an in-house software development department to fix it ourselves, when that isn't our primary line of business. Or we could just spend a few thousand a seat to buy something proven, that somebody we can trust, and who is liable to be sued and has something to lose, is standing behind. Dirt cheap compared to the other options.
jbay808 7y ago
I don't understand why there isn't an industrial consortium supporting an open source CAD standard. Enough companies depend on proprietary software that they already pay a fortune for that they could front the cost of software development to save money in the long run.
- scholia 7y ago
  (1) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of employing the people who use it. (2) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of retraining staff and changing business workflows and processes to cope with different software. (3) Changing to new software is relatively simple compared with the problems of making all your staff, your contractors and your suppliers change to new software. (4) Even if changing to new software was relatively simple and cheap, there would be massive risks in doing it. If you are designing nuclear power stations, nuclear submarines, skyscrapers, bridges or whatever, the cost of mistakes can run into the billions, or be fatal for a significant number of people. (5) Bonus point: making this kind of switch could take a decade and could end up not saving you any money (cf Munich trying to switch to open source). Not many CEOs will attempt it because they are more focused on the next quarter's results. Anyway, in many if not most companies, the benefits -- if any -- would accrue to whoever the-next-CEO-after-the-next-CEO happens to be. And who really cares about that? It's hard enough to get most people to change their email client or their text editor or whatever when the alternatives are free and the real-world risks are negligible. Getting them to change the software on which their whole business survival is based is another matter. Moral: changing business software is not as simple as it seems if you only look at the software and don't look at the whole business plus the whole industry infrastructure of related businesses. It's never as simple as people think.
  - labawi 7y ago
    (5) Munich might not be a valid example. Parent talked about a consortium, for which a single city administration might be a bit small, and AFAIK the failure was not necessarily technical.
    - 7y ago

by ufmace 7y ago

afarrell 7y ago

> with no company standing behind it One misinterpretation of this mindset I have heard: "They just want someone who they can sue if things go wrong." If my business depends on something, I want to know that attention is being paid to it.

ufmace 7y ago
"They just want someone who they can sue if things go wrong." is true, but phrased in a rather hostile/negative way. The more positive way to say the same thing is, that because the company building the software knows they can be sued, and is not some fly-by-night operation that will vanish at the first sign of trouble, they have a strong incentive to make sure their software is high-quality and free of critical bugs. That incentive has proved to work well in the commercial world. Much better than, well this open source software has a critical bug, I sure hope somebody feels like opening a PR to fix it before our deadline. Or we could spend a few million bucks to spin up an in-house software development department to fix it ourselves, when that isn't our primary line of business. Or we could just spend a few thousand a seat to buy something proven, that somebody we can trust, and who is liable to be sued and has something to lose, is standing behind. Dirt cheap compared to the other options.

jbay808 7y ago

I don't understand why there isn't an industrial consortium supporting an open source CAD standard. Enough companies depend on proprietary software that they already pay a fortune for that they could front the cost of software development to save money in the long run.

scholia 7y ago
(1) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of employing the people who use it. (2) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of retraining staff and changing business workflows and processes to cope with different software. (3) Changing to new software is relatively simple compared with the problems of making all your staff, your contractors and your suppliers change to new software. (4) Even if changing to new software was relatively simple and cheap, there would be massive risks in doing it. If you are designing nuclear power stations, nuclear submarines, skyscrapers, bridges or whatever, the cost of mistakes can run into the billions, or be fatal for a significant number of people. (5) Bonus point: making this kind of switch could take a decade and could end up not saving you any money (cf Munich trying to switch to open source). Not many CEOs will attempt it because they are more focused on the next quarter's results. Anyway, in many if not most companies, the benefits -- if any -- would accrue to whoever the-next-CEO-after-the-next-CEO happens to be. And who really cares about that? It's hard enough to get most people to change their email client or their text editor or whatever when the alternatives are free and the real-world risks are negligible. Getting them to change the software on which their whole business survival is based is another matter. Moral: changing business software is not as simple as it seems if you only look at the software and don't look at the whole business plus the whole industry infrastructure of related businesses. It's never as simple as people think.
- labawi 7y ago
  (5) Munich might not be a valid example. Parent talked about a consortium, for which a single city administration might be a bit small, and AFAIK the failure was not necessarily technical.
  - 7y ago