4 ms·

...and that, dear readers, is why commercial software can compete against free, open source alternatives.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
mapleoin 17y ago
um... no, not really. There is proprietary (you mean proprietary, not commercial) software without any kind of support provided to the user and there is open source software with _commercial_ support.
- tom_rath 17y ago
  No, I'm speaking to those who are worried about their commercial software not being able to compete with 'free' alternatives. That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn, so it's easy to out-compete those folks as a business and provide a superior product.
  - christonog 17y ago
    "That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn" Please elaborate on this comment. Redhat has basically been the poster child for the free software/commercial support business model for over a decade now. I believe support for an open source software product can be scaled as a business.
    - bad_user 17y ago
      RedHat doesn't really sell support. They sell licenses, enforced by their trademark. They provide support for each license sold, that's true. People buy RedHat licenses because it's a defacto standard in the industry. Some people or companies use CentOS, which is a re-branded RedHat. But if you want the original, you have to buy the product.
      - mapleoin 17y ago
        So why do they buy the license? CentOS is 100% compatible with RedHat. There is no reason to buy a license other than if you want the support they offer. RHN is part of that support.
        blasdel 17y ago
        Because managers need a line item in the budget to do anything, and it's a lot easier organizationally to pay a yearly subscription (no matter how expensive) than it is to make it an employee's job. The support basically amounts to access to their RPM repository. You'd have to pay a lot of money to get access to Alan Cox -- normal tickets just get you access to people who've been through the same training that your manager paid you to go to.
        lnguyen 17y ago
        You're forgetting a second perk of paying for an item with support: You get to yell at someone when something goes wrong without having an HR report filed against you. Passing blame and responsibility for "opportunities" is standard enterprise behavior.
    - tom_rath 17y ago
      Joel Spolsky summed it up pretty well in his last Inc. article: "...The Web consulting business was great, but it had one problem: limited margins. You could charge only so much for an hour of some consultant's time -- in those days, maybe $200. Some of that went to overhead (say $20) and some to pay the consultant's salary (maybe $70). That leaves you with a mere $110 per hour in gross profit. That's a lot of money, but it paled in comparison with margins in the software industry, in which you can produce additional copies of an application at virtually no cost." So, if a body-shopping service company is competing against another body-shopping service company, they're facing the same per-employee costs and will have no problems in their market. However, if a body-shopping service company is competing against commercial software for the exact same product and market, commercial software will face lower costs and receive higher revenue for the same work and so will have more resources to bury that competing body-shop every time. Also, if our company receives a service call, we regard it as a failure of our product to address our customer's needs. If a 'commercial' open source company receives that same call, they regard it as money earned from a support ticket. Given that difference, which software product would you prefer to run in your business?
      - christonog 17y ago
        Not sure why you downvoted, I thought you made some great points. However, your example helps illustrate what I've been saying. Say you want a car. You may want to go to the dealership and just buy one (Toyota's automated process, thus lowering marginal cost). However, maybe you're the hotrod type and would rather build it and customize it yourself. You pay for someone to help you build it and troubleshoot any mistakes you make along the way. Sure, it took longer to build, and was probably more expensive, but it's exactly want you wanted. I think that's where the value of opensource/support lies. Commercial open source companies (at least Redhat) use subscription models for their support (in addition to consulting, professional QA, etc) so I don't think they would consider troubleshooting software money earned. In fact, I think this gives them a greater incentive to maintain the quality of their software so they get less support tickets and scale to have more subscription fees per support person. I guess you can say that RedHat, through their support, sells the peace of mind of having that support person if you want to go the open source route.
  - omouse 17y ago
    That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn Yeah it does. Instead of having a single official company to go to for support, you can go to multiple ones and choose the one that fits you. Competition is a good thing, right?
    - bad_user 17y ago
      > Competition is a good thing, right? The parent was referring to "scaling" for businesses, not consumers. Competition is good as long as it's driven by quality, not price. A competition on price can be good for products, but then again, it's only good when your lowering the price by improving the quality of the manufacturing process ... I don't think anyone will be happy if Apple goes bankrupt or stops producing IPhones because of cheap knockoffs made in China. In the case of support, people only want to pay the minimum amount they can for their needs to be met. If you want to provide quality services, you'll have a hard time doing that when your customers will discover that they don't need it and outsource their operations to India. This happens because few pieces of software really need paid support. For an open-source project, in many cases you'll get better support from its mailing list than from a commercial entity. Only companies with enough money will pay for high-quality support ... and they'll only do it for peace of mind and for passing the blame. Not to mention that B2B products are quite boring and support can also be provided by cheap labor.
  - lsc 17y ago
    I agree that it is quite difficult to scale support; but that is even more true for closed source software. Open-source software, at least, has plenty of 'free help' in the form of searchable web forms and mailing lists.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  Tom didn't say anything about the availability of support options. It's very simple. If I buy something, I know that the vendor is interested in making me happy to some (sometimes minor) degree. If I pick up code that someone dropped on github I cannot make that assumption. So the two models default to different basic assumptions and that has nothing to do with support contracts being available or not.
crcoffey 17y ago
No, not at all? Just because commercial software can and will be catered to the users specific needs, doesn't imply the user always wants to make any form of financial contribution to the desired result. Nine out of ten times, if you want something, Users tend to google it to look for a share/free/OS version, before they fork out the cash, and if they are lucky enough to find one and get it running, It's always the coders fault that they can't quite make it work for their needs.
iman 17y ago
The user referenced in the article who complains and thinks that he deserves everything for free is not the kind of customer you want.
- whughes 17y ago
  If you're getting paid to support that user, then it doesn't matter much what you want. That is the case with a commercial setup.
  - lsc 17y ago
    not necessarily. businesses can (and do) target customers who work best with the business model they use. I know I have something of a barrier to entry for customers; if you can't figure out how to use an OpenSSH public key to authenticate your access to a serial console, I refer you to linode or slicehost. I freely admit I am unprepared to support those users, and probably could not do so at my current prices. And my competitors are good; I haven't heard anything bad about either one. Sure, I could have more customers if I had an easier way to control your VPS than a ssh-based console, but at what cost? People who know Linux are pretty easy to support, once you give them (standard linux) tools. There are enough people who understand (sometimes even prefer) the standard linux tools to a web interface to support my business, so I say, why not offer them a service at a price that reflects the lower cost of supporting those users? (right now my big problem is provisioning; that is, if you want to add services, you need to wait for an employee of prgmr.com to help. But most everything else, the user can do without my help.) I think forcing your support people to stay on the line with rude or difficult customers is a good way to burn out your support people. I think having a liberal but well-defined money back guarantee makes doing support quite a bit easier. Keeping good customer support people is hard - I think losing the most difficult 2% of customers is a small price to pay to keep good support people for the rest of your customers. And really, I'm not in the business of tricking people into giving me money. If we aren't what you expected, then yeah, I'm happy to give you a refund.
psadauskas 17y ago
Ha! Ever try to get Microsoft to provide /real/ support for a problem in an OS you paid them for?

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

um... no, not really. There is proprietary (you mean proprietary, not commercial) software without any kind of support provided to the user and there is open source software with _commercial_ support.

tom_rath 17y ago
No, I'm speaking to those who are worried about their commercial software not being able to compete with 'free' alternatives. That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn, so it's easy to out-compete those folks as a business and provide a superior product.
- christonog 17y ago
  "That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn" Please elaborate on this comment. Redhat has basically been the poster child for the free software/commercial support business model for over a decade now. I believe support for an open source software product can be scaled as a business.
  - bad_user 17y ago
    RedHat doesn't really sell support. They sell licenses, enforced by their trademark. They provide support for each license sold, that's true. People buy RedHat licenses because it's a defacto standard in the industry. Some people or companies use CentOS, which is a re-branded RedHat. But if you want the original, you have to buy the product.
    - mapleoin 17y ago
      So why do they buy the license? CentOS is 100% compatible with RedHat. There is no reason to buy a license other than if you want the support they offer. RHN is part of that support.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        Because managers need a line item in the budget to do anything, and it's a lot easier organizationally to pay a yearly subscription (no matter how expensive) than it is to make it an employee's job. The support basically amounts to access to their RPM repository. You'd have to pay a lot of money to get access to Alan Cox -- normal tickets just get you access to people who've been through the same training that your manager paid you to go to.
        lnguyen 17y ago
        You're forgetting a second perk of paying for an item with support: You get to yell at someone when something goes wrong without having an HR report filed against you. Passing blame and responsibility for "opportunities" is standard enterprise behavior.
  - tom_rath 17y ago
    Joel Spolsky summed it up pretty well in his last Inc. article: "...The Web consulting business was great, but it had one problem: limited margins. You could charge only so much for an hour of some consultant's time -- in those days, maybe $200. Some of that went to overhead (say $20) and some to pay the consultant's salary (maybe $70). That leaves you with a mere $110 per hour in gross profit. That's a lot of money, but it paled in comparison with margins in the software industry, in which you can produce additional copies of an application at virtually no cost." So, if a body-shopping service company is competing against another body-shopping service company, they're facing the same per-employee costs and will have no problems in their market. However, if a body-shopping service company is competing against commercial software for the exact same product and market, commercial software will face lower costs and receive higher revenue for the same work and so will have more resources to bury that competing body-shop every time. Also, if our company receives a service call, we regard it as a failure of our product to address our customer's needs. If a 'commercial' open source company receives that same call, they regard it as money earned from a support ticket. Given that difference, which software product would you prefer to run in your business?
    - christonog 17y ago
      Not sure why you downvoted, I thought you made some great points. However, your example helps illustrate what I've been saying. Say you want a car. You may want to go to the dealership and just buy one (Toyota's automated process, thus lowering marginal cost). However, maybe you're the hotrod type and would rather build it and customize it yourself. You pay for someone to help you build it and troubleshoot any mistakes you make along the way. Sure, it took longer to build, and was probably more expensive, but it's exactly want you wanted. I think that's where the value of opensource/support lies. Commercial open source companies (at least Redhat) use subscription models for their support (in addition to consulting, professional QA, etc) so I don't think they would consider troubleshooting software money earned. In fact, I think this gives them a greater incentive to maintain the quality of their software so they get less support tickets and scale to have more subscription fees per support person. I guess you can say that RedHat, through their support, sells the peace of mind of having that support person if you want to go the open source route.
- omouse 17y ago
  That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn Yeah it does. Instead of having a single official company to go to for support, you can go to multiple ones and choose the one that fits you. Competition is a good thing, right?
  - bad_user 17y ago
    > Competition is a good thing, right? The parent was referring to "scaling" for businesses, not consumers. Competition is good as long as it's driven by quality, not price. A competition on price can be good for products, but then again, it's only good when your lowering the price by improving the quality of the manufacturing process ... I don't think anyone will be happy if Apple goes bankrupt or stops producing IPhones because of cheap knockoffs made in China. In the case of support, people only want to pay the minimum amount they can for their needs to be met. If you want to provide quality services, you'll have a hard time doing that when your customers will discover that they don't need it and outsource their operations to India. This happens because few pieces of software really need paid support. For an open-source project, in many cases you'll get better support from its mailing list than from a commercial entity. Only companies with enough money will pay for high-quality support ... and they'll only do it for peace of mind and for passing the blame. Not to mention that B2B products are quite boring and support can also be provided by cheap labor.
- lsc 17y ago
  I agree that it is quite difficult to scale support; but that is even more true for closed source software. Open-source software, at least, has plenty of 'free help' in the form of searchable web forms and mailing lists.
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
Tom didn't say anything about the availability of support options. It's very simple. If I buy something, I know that the vendor is interested in making me happy to some (sometimes minor) degree. If I pick up code that someone dropped on github I cannot make that assumption. So the two models default to different basic assumptions and that has nothing to do with support contracts being available or not.

crcoffey 17y ago

No, not at all? Just because commercial software can and will be catered to the users specific needs, doesn't imply the user always wants to make any form of financial contribution to the desired result. Nine out of ten times, if you want something, Users tend to google it to look for a share/free/OS version, before they fork out the cash, and if they are lucky enough to find one and get it running, It's always the coders fault that they can't quite make it work for their needs.

iman 17y ago

The user referenced in the article who complains and thinks that he deserves everything for free is not the kind of customer you want.

whughes 17y ago
If you're getting paid to support that user, then it doesn't matter much what you want. That is the case with a commercial setup.
- lsc 17y ago
  not necessarily. businesses can (and do) target customers who work best with the business model they use. I know I have something of a barrier to entry for customers; if you can't figure out how to use an OpenSSH public key to authenticate your access to a serial console, I refer you to linode or slicehost. I freely admit I am unprepared to support those users, and probably could not do so at my current prices. And my competitors are good; I haven't heard anything bad about either one. Sure, I could have more customers if I had an easier way to control your VPS than a ssh-based console, but at what cost? People who know Linux are pretty easy to support, once you give them (standard linux) tools. There are enough people who understand (sometimes even prefer) the standard linux tools to a web interface to support my business, so I say, why not offer them a service at a price that reflects the lower cost of supporting those users? (right now my big problem is provisioning; that is, if you want to add services, you need to wait for an employee of prgmr.com to help. But most everything else, the user can do without my help.) I think forcing your support people to stay on the line with rude or difficult customers is a good way to burn out your support people. I think having a liberal but well-defined money back guarantee makes doing support quite a bit easier. Keeping good customer support people is hard - I think losing the most difficult 2% of customers is a small price to pay to keep good support people for the rest of your customers. And really, I'm not in the business of tricking people into giving me money. If we aren't what you expected, then yeah, I'm happy to give you a refund.

psadauskas 17y ago

Ha! Ever try to get Microsoft to provide /real/ support for a problem in an OS you paid them for?