Price myths persist long after their time. A decade after the popularisation of open source for business use, I’m still hearing the idea espoused that it’s safer to buy proprietary software from a big supplier than use open source and buy subscriptions. I consider that argument in today’s article on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK |
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Simon, you are bang on the money with this article!
I have direct recent experience where the proprietary vendor decided to unilaterally discontinue support for a system which was (and still is) mission critical for the client company. As I want to keep my job, the victim and the perpetrator of this behaviour will remain nameless, but they are a large long established blue-chip multi-nationals etc. The client company (my employer!) had no alternative than to engage a former member of the vendor’s support staff (who happens to be excellent, but that is not the point), purely to keep the system going while an alternative is being sought. If the system had been open source then the considerable expense and disruption of an externally forced migration could be avoided!
As a curious possible halfway stage, I am aware of at least one legal agreement which obliges the vendor to disclose all the source code to the client should the support discontinue. This might or might not actually work when the time comes. Should the vendor fail, then even legally binding agreements can be ignored by insolvency practitioners if there is a cost involved, and company failures are not noted for being typically orderly affairs!