6 ms·

The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions. License costs are a factor, yes, but the

The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions. License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one. In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same. On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more. It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end. Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account. (Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer The structure of the phrase is [[no brain]er], not [no [brainer]]. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er , sense 7/8.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  It's word play.
- spit2wind 2y ago
  Exactly, that's the whole point of the article. The second sentence says that, > While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Did you mean to reply to someone else?
looofooo0 2y ago
"Third, there are often large costs to users from switching technologies, which leads to lock-in. Such markets may remain very profitable, even where (incompatible) competitors are very cheap to produce. In fact, one of the main results of network economic theory is that the net present value of the customer base should equal the total costs of their switching their business to a com- petitor [19]."
- rvba 2y ago
  All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused. And why? Because the designers need to prove that they so something?
  - motorest 2y ago
    > All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused. I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the problem. Windows 11 slremains very much recognizable since the Windows 7 days, and the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was seamless. Moreso with walled gardens like macOS. In the meantime you can't sneeze in the direction of a mainstream windows manager for Linux without it introducing radical changes, not to mention how all distros are heavily fragmented and sometimes even customized.
    - rvba 2y ago
      Windows "streamlined" the taskbar so much that it allows for exactly 11 icons. In my experience tons of office jobz require you to have 20-30 windows open. And you switch through them constantly. So this streamlining murders productivity. You can try to change it withan external program, ut good luck doing that on a corporate computer.
orthoxerox 2y ago
And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA. Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options: - hire Postgres experts into every ministry. Not very efficient. - create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy - create a commercial support provider that has to earn money by selling Postgres support to private enterprises. Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
- szszrk 2y ago
  > you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA. Have you received reasonable help in reasonable time that way? How big was the investment on your company's side to make that happen? It was a meme on every DBA team I worked with.
  - orthoxerox 2y ago
    Yes, we have received reasonable and timely help when a wild ORA-600 appeared (with an Oracle engineer arriving on site to diagnose and apply the fix), but you are right, we had an 80-core POWER machine running this database.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    The reality matters far less than the vaguely worded promises CEOs think they hear when they're sold on switching to Oracle.
  - ripe 2y ago
    "Oracle has to provide a fix" also means that you can tell your boss that you're doing your best and it's up to Oracle now. It's not just about fixing the problem, but about protecting your own career. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
croes 2y ago
And then MS makes changed like the ribbons for MA Office and you start training again. Most people don’t know much about the OS or Office, so you have to train them anyway for the companies use cases and non standard programs. MS just seems convenient, but isn’t. In large companies every update brings problems. Things like Teams change the UI quite often which leads to support questions. So for me the training costs don’t differ that much.
- nyclounge 2y ago
  It is much more economical to invest in local open source people to take care of the tech need than big corp. Big corp are notorious unreliable over long period of time, their incentives are NOT aligned with the customers, only with profit and/or 3 letter agencies.
- sanex 2y ago
  I still hate the new ribbon.
cjfd 2y ago
"corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license." Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the advantage of those that make the most money from the least quality offering.
- bruce511 2y ago
  Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue flow from that sale. In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you". n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with. If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.
Lutger 2y ago
Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem together. And the maze of certifications that expire every other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open source (or another vendor). If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either. The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.
- hyperman1 2y ago
  For a lot of software in megacorps, it makes more sense if you look at 'trained in X' as a kind of magic spell that has no real relation with the ability to do a job. If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X. The company then provides training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so the company officially did something, and the excuse about not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user. So training being expensive has better optics. Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money. Actual training for the whole company is more like a networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.
Ericson2314 2y ago
Look up balance-of-payments-constrained growth. In a developing country, you really want to be careful with your dollars/imports. Local labor is almost certainly cheaper and more abundant. The question is, can they do it all. If they can you save dollars and you build local skills that transfer, a double benefit. If they can't, yes you might be forced to buy and import the tech.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer The structure of the phrase is [[no brain]er], not [no [brainer]]. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er , sense 7/8.

hiddencost 2y ago
It's word play.
spit2wind 2y ago
Exactly, that's the whole point of the article. The second sentence says that, > While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Did you mean to reply to someone else?

looofooo0 2y ago

"Third, there are often large costs to users from switching technologies, which leads to lock-in. Such markets may remain very profitable, even where (incompatible) competitors are very cheap to produce. In fact, one of the main results of network economic theory is that the net present value of the customer base should equal the total costs of their switching their business to a com- petitor [19]."

rvba 2y ago
All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused. And why? Because the designers need to prove that they so something?
- motorest 2y ago
  > All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused. I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the problem. Windows 11 slremains very much recognizable since the Windows 7 days, and the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was seamless. Moreso with walled gardens like macOS. In the meantime you can't sneeze in the direction of a mainstream windows manager for Linux without it introducing radical changes, not to mention how all distros are heavily fragmented and sometimes even customized.
  - rvba 2y ago
    Windows "streamlined" the taskbar so much that it allows for exactly 11 icons. In my experience tons of office jobz require you to have 20-30 windows open. And you switch through them constantly. So this streamlining murders productivity. You can try to change it withan external program, ut good luck doing that on a corporate computer.

orthoxerox 2y ago

And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA. Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options: - hire Postgres experts into every ministry. Not very efficient. - create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy - create a commercial support provider that has to earn money by selling Postgres support to private enterprises. Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.

szszrk 2y ago
> you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA. Have you received reasonable help in reasonable time that way? How big was the investment on your company's side to make that happen? It was a meme on every DBA team I worked with.
- orthoxerox 2y ago
  Yes, we have received reasonable and timely help when a wild ORA-600 appeared (with an Oracle engineer arriving on site to diagnose and apply the fix), but you are right, we had an 80-core POWER machine running this database.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  The reality matters far less than the vaguely worded promises CEOs think they hear when they're sold on switching to Oracle.
- ripe 2y ago
  "Oracle has to provide a fix" also means that you can tell your boss that you're doing your best and it's up to Oracle now. It's not just about fixing the problem, but about protecting your own career. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".

croes 2y ago

And then MS makes changed like the ribbons for MA Office and you start training again. Most people don’t know much about the OS or Office, so you have to train them anyway for the companies use cases and non standard programs. MS just seems convenient, but isn’t. In large companies every update brings problems. Things like Teams change the UI quite often which leads to support questions. So for me the training costs don’t differ that much.

nyclounge 2y ago
It is much more economical to invest in local open source people to take care of the tech need than big corp. Big corp are notorious unreliable over long period of time, their incentives are NOT aligned with the customers, only with profit and/or 3 letter agencies.
sanex 2y ago
I still hate the new ribbon.

cjfd 2y ago

"corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license." Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the advantage of those that make the most money from the least quality offering.

bruce511 2y ago
Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue flow from that sale. In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you". n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with. If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.

Lutger 2y ago

Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem together. And the maze of certifications that expire every other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open source (or another vendor). If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either. The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.

hyperman1 2y ago
For a lot of software in megacorps, it makes more sense if you look at 'trained in X' as a kind of magic spell that has no real relation with the ability to do a job. If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X. The company then provides training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so the company officially did something, and the excuse about not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user. So training being expensive has better optics. Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money. Actual training for the whole company is more like a networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.

Ericson2314 2y ago

Look up balance-of-payments-constrained growth. In a developing country, you really want to be careful with your dollars/imports. Local labor is almost certainly cheaper and more abundant. The question is, can they do it all. If they can you save dollars and you build local skills that transfer, a double benefit. If they can't, yes you might be forced to buy and import the tech.