4 ms·
I think you're downplaying the risks of non-free (or at least non-transparent) software in an enterprise setting, and overplaying the "value" of the vendor bein
by yellowapple 6y ago
I think you're downplaying the risks of non-free (or at least non-transparent) software in an enterprise setting, and overplaying the "value" of the vendor being able to provide meaningful assistance.
Speaking from experience: even if a software product is not freely licensed, there is immense value in source code being available and - better yet - modifiable (whether directly or through plugins) when trying to troubleshoot issues with that software or integrate it with other software or adapt it for your business' needs. Further, if your company's finance department is worth its salt, any such customizations and integrations are assets with real value, so even if your company's engineers are "wasting time" tinkering, the company can - and should - still capture this value on the books.
And further speaking from experience: with relatively few exceptions, I've found enterprise software vendors to be pretty much useless in terms of support, and to be more often than not an obstacle to business operations than a value to it when things go wrong. All for a pricetag that doesn't even come close to justifying their meager SLAs (that they'll inevitably weasel their way out of anyway).
The decision to use transparent software is more often than not a decision in the best interests of a company. Transparency is a dependency of trust; without that transparency, you have no real way of knowing whether you can trust your business on it.
- hertzrat 6y agoAnother huge benefit is that the foss software won’t just disappear if the company has a bad quarter. If the maintainers or developers leave the project, in a pinch you can make a bug fix yourself or at least legally preserve a copy of it. It’s a major risk that an offering you depend on might change or disappear if it isn’t foss
- aidenn0 6y agoMany companies will agree to escrow their code (at the customer's expense) against the risk of them going out of business. I've never actually seen it happen, but it definitely has been offered when that concern was raised, and once the customer has to pay for it, they immediately say not to bother.
- hertzrat 6y agoImagine it’s a web or iOS or Android app. Imagine that you put 10,000 cards into supermemo.com and they took it down because of some legal dispute with another company. I have about 15k cards in anki for this reason: I’m not at a large risk of losing a significant investment if something randomly happens to the creator of the software
- aidenn0 6y agoIf it's not self hosted, it doesn't matter if you have the source or not
- hertzrat 6y agoGood point. You could still import your backups into a replacement after somebody else resumes the project. Many apps don’t even offer backups or export. Supermemo.com incidentally did not at the time I moved away from it years ago