That said, I am against OSS. This is partially because I’ve learned some hard lessons on saving time. Money grows back, but time doesn’t. Commercial alternatives offer better service and reliability and the scope of vision is larger than a mere “shiny toy” of a product with a “witty” name (e.g. Drupal, GIMP, Ruby, Mambo, Ubuntu, Eclipse, FireFox, FireBug).

Additionally, I have my own algorithms that I intend to patent, get rich off of, and retire because I’m not afraid to be frank and admit that I want to retire comfortably. I am simply not going to give my power away along with my IPR. I expect and deserve to be compensated for my expenditures.

There’s also the annoying habit OSS developers have of giving unsolicited software advice and knowledge. I get the sense the motives have less to do with my needs and more to do with their own ideologies.

Time is a limited resource for each of us. How much of yours are you willing to give away for free? 40 hours? 1000 hours? Call me. I’ve got code you can write for me for free if you’re interested in being a slave. You can fool yourself into thinking you’re doing something noble and wonderful if you want. You can even convince a few others to believe you, too. Maybe you can convince some of those others to contribute to some of those oh-so-wonderful open source projects I need to use without having to pay for their development as well. Maybe I can convince you suckers to fix some problems I’m having with my roof while you’re at it. Got any open source architects out there, or open source surgeons? Any open source lawyers or open source grocers? How about open source power? Open source water? Why are you nutcases attacking just one industry?

Mr. Cohen (reply #31) hits the nail right on the head, especially with point (b). BTW, Jason is the only vendor i’ve ever heard (p4 conference) recommend using a ‘competing’ open source product ‘if that’s what you need’.

Day to day, I’m in charge of running a mission critical system and I would not trust it to open source software in it’s current, not-too-supported state. Subversion is an awesome tool but I’d hate do be ‘that guy’ that finds a critical bug in it. Good luck getting that fixed in a timely manner. Forget calling someone on the phone and getting a timely workaround.

It’s not just *my* time, but everyone else’s time that will be affected by the outage. The entire QA department in the games division can’t test the latest game, all of RnD is down so our internal artists can’t get that bugfix, the render farm stops working. An hour of downtime of any one of these groups where I work can literally mean losses of millions of dollars.

The *right* software is the one that is of higher quality and has a better support system around it. If your company wants to pay you to maintain someone else’s software and you’re an expert, then fine. Perhaps you should be working for the software vendor, then. The bottom line where I work is that even if I could fix critical problems (that frankly almost never come up), it will take me longer that the expert support at the vendor for this ‘competing’ product to Subversion (free plug for Perforce!) The ‘savings’ of not spending a few hundred dollars and using open source instead is far outweighed by the direct monetary loss.

Other places I have worked, no problem. Use open source. A whole day of downtime might not be a big deal. But in the vertical market of source control software, the commercial options are far better and far less buggy than any open source version control software I’ve seen.

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Sorry to ramble on, but I think you ‘Linux’ guys are funny. I’ve been using Linux for 12 years or so, and have used many distros. I like how you all interchangeably use ‘Linux’ and ‘Ubuntu’ and ‘Debian’. They’re all different things, of course. Linux is the kernel, that’s it.

I can ask 10 Linux nerds, including myself, whether or not Linux is ‘easy’ and they all say ‘Yes, download nnn distro …’. It took me three distros to find decent 64-bit support on my laptop here. Try asking your mom or little sister to do that. Here’s how the conversation in Best Buy would go:

My Mom: “My son told me I should get a laptop with Linux on it.”

Best Buy Guy: “Do you prefer Ubuntu or RedHat?”

My Mom: “Mmmm. The first one sounds funner.”

Best Buy Guy: “Do you prefer KDE or Gnome?”

My Mom: “Where do you keep the Macs?”

A particular distro is easy *for you* because you have the experience. It’s easy for *me* because I don’t mind trying three distros until I find one that works with all my hardware. It’s *not* easy for everyone else because they’re not hackers. And this is part of the point.

I’m not saying that Windows, or Solaris or BSD is any better or worse, or any easier or harder than Gentoo IN GENERAL, but in the context of a novice, a Mac is certainly the easiest to use and most compatible with everything out of the box. And this aspect of software is a consideration when trying to sell to people over open source. Know what your audience wants and solve *their* problem(s).

My assertion is that the percentage of applications that install quickly, have good documentation and support, and are easy to use, is much higher in the commercial software world than in the open source world.

(No money to buy, but time, money, and attention for life.)

At Smart Bear the biggest reason people used our software is (a) active development, (b) we answered the phone and fixed their bugs, (c) we always had more features because of (a) and (b).

Of course there’s always exceptions — no one would argue Apache Tomcat or Linux isn’t a marvel. But most people want Mac X instead of BSD, that’s the point.

P.S. (d) Open source software’s UI is usually an afterthought, whereas commercial software can be the other way around.