Kuo, Jimmy wrote:
>>It's not free, but you can buy service for open source products. Many
>>companies will sell you service for mundane tasks for open source
>>systems. The above is just false.
>>
>>
>You're right. What I was referring to is the concept that Open Source
>is cheaper because it's Open Source. And you're making the point I
>intended. That being, service is a separate issue that you would still
>need to pay for.
>
Basically agreed. But then lets look at the TCO picture:
* Open source solution:
o capital: zero
o support contract: competing providers
* Proprietary solution:
o capital: $foo thousand dollars per seat
o support contract: whatever that one vendor wants to charge
you, bounded above by your cost of switching to a competing
product
Of course, circumstances vary, and proprietary solutions may well turn
out to be the most cost effectve. But the above factors tend to favor
open source.
Which is why IMHO it was quite sensible for the (now dead) Oregon bill
to specify that the State had to *consider* open source, and *justify*
choosing proprietary solutions. It did not require that any particular
choice be made.
Even so, I suspect had the bill passed that there would quickly appear
some boilerplate rationalization that would let a civil servant justify
a proprietary solution in just about any circumstance. The main impact
of the bill would be to make said civil servants aware of what they are
doing.
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/
Chief Scientist, Immunix http://immunix.com
http://www.immunix.com/shop/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jul 15 2003 - 21:36:26 PDT