Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, July 21, 2006:
Open Source Reality Check
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot."If you think open source is the end-all of software development, show me the open source equivalents of Photoshop, ProTools, DreamWeaver, MS Office, PageMaker, BBEdit, World of Warcraft, QuickBooks, FinalCutPro, Performer, and thousands of other successful applications. For every product I listed there are many viable commercial alternatives, but only a few open source ones. The few that exists can not match the capability or raw development speed of their commercial counterparts."
http://www.ellislab.com/index.php/open_source_reality_check/
Great post by Rick. Says what I always try to say but does it much more eloquently. Please leave your flaming replies on his blog
Update: I recommend reading the comments, some good stuff in there. Matt Mullenweg (guy who started Wordpress) chimes in and Rick does a most excellent job of responding.
Discussion
I've actually never been more convinced of this until this week when I tried out the latest Opera. It's mind blowing how much faster, better, and innovating a small company can produce software compared to a large company or open source.
Most of the great open source products out there were great on the first version, and then once popular, the new features slowed to a crawl. Compare the differences between Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0, IE6 to IE7 and Opera 8 to Opera 9. You can barely notice any differences between the Firefox versions, and if you keep up with their development discussion boards, you can see why. Getting innovation into that crowd is way harder then at Microsoft, and certainly harder then at Opera. Less developers is always better!
Created by Phil on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
Yep. Anyone can participate is great until you have to actual make some decisions at which point it's a big PITA. That's another reason why I think open source software that focuses on low level applications (think PHP, Apache, Linux) are so much more popular in their spaces then end user open source apps. In the low level apps things are much more straightforward. There's usually some type of actual or de-facto standards that are being implemented plus some goodies. Whereas in an end user app there's a lot more that has to be done on the decision front since you're not following a spec you're innovating.
Created by Ian on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
The biggest strength of open-source is not in making better, faster etc applications, especially not the kind of applications (almost) everyone would gladly pay for. And its biggest strength is certainly not that it's free (as in beer); it is in the fact that it's open, and that you can take an OS application, change what you need and apply it to your own projects.
Consider PHP, which is used for HelpSpot. If you're making a large-scale custom Web application it's simple to extend PHP with additional functionalities, either as an extension or directly in the engine core (as a former team of mine did for a telco application), or if wou're making something more distributable there are numerous open-source tools such as frameworks, ADOdb and others.
Created by Berislav Lopac on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
While I agree with the point saying that open-source won't kill commercial development I wouldn't be so quick with saying that there's no good alternative for software Rick mentions.
Both "classic" development and open-source have its pros and cons. Very often price is the most important one (I don't agree with Berislav here), especially when you don't need hi-tec space technology, but you just want to improve your simple processes. OpenOffice probably won't catch MS Office, but for vast majority of users nothing more is needed. There is enough place for both.
One more thing I'd add to the subject. A mixed model, where you have open-source solution, but developed in a controlled way (by someone investing money into the project) and available in two ways:
- for free under standard open-source licence (e.g. GPL)
- for "business price" under commercial licence where you don't need to give your software under GPL, you get well-tested version, you have support and so on.
MySQL went that way, and they're quite successful with that. Another example can be Asterisk I wrote about.
Created by Pawel Brodzinski on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
I think that OSS shall remain a niche.
There's no way to ground an enterprise IT ecosystem on OSS only. The equivalents of commercial software are too developer oriented, to hard to configure and maintain, to be viable replacements. They may be solid and superbely coded, but what makes the difference in the enterprise environment is ease of setup and minimum maintenance, along with the least technical skills required for the people. A Company IT, normally, is pleased to stop thinking to technicalities to start thinking on how to use technology to help the business (Microsoft is superb in this aspect).
OSS is really fascinating to a geek but the business environment is something really different and should not be confused with a tech. environment.
Created by Sevenoaks on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
Open Source definately has its place, if you understand the good and bad sides to it. Here is my take:
http://onenerd.blogspot.com/2006/06/open-source-software-take-good-with.html
Created by Anthony on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
I know "you're free to modify the source code" has always been central to the free software / open source creed, but people who actually do that, like Berislav and his colleagues, probably make up maybe a hundredth of a percent of the total users of PHP, Linux, or other "mainstream" OSS applications. For the vast majority of users, the primary appeal to "free software" is that it's "free as in beer".
It strikes me that most successful open source software is not particularly innovative. Linux had 30 years of Unix to choose the best techniques from, The GIMP is a Photoshop clone, OpenOffice.org is cloning MS Office, etc. I don't know whether Apache was imitating a commercial server; maybe it's an exception. In my view, open source tends to simply do the easy part (implementing the product) after the hard part (market research, product design, years of resolved design bug fixes and corrected missteps, etc.) has been done by commercial companies.
All that said, I think Firefox has certainly improved on IE (but for how long?), and I do appreciate some of the open source tools like nUnit that have come out of the developer community.
Created by Jesse Smith on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm
@Jesse Smith
The part that is commonly addressed by OSS is the very very easy. For each OS applicaton that targets end-users, there are hundredths that are made for developers only. Developers only, not even trained IT technician. Those which are decent to set-up and administer are chewed by commercial companyes.
Software development is way too important to be left in the hand of developers. They're like masons; they do can build a robust house, but for a nice and comfortable one, an architect is required.
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Created by Sevenoaks on 07.21.2006 2:07 pm