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At one of Microsoft’s recent Get the Facts campaigns, some interesting tid-bits came out, in a report by Izwan Ismail, titled a Different view on open source (google cache).
Dr. Ewe Hong Tat, a dean of IT at the Multimedia University mentions folks get confused with open source software as being freeware/shareware, citing that the “distribution, support and services for users are not free”. Excuse me, with freeware/shareware, was this the case? No. Software like RHEL and SuSE Enterprise Linux are paid-for because you’re going to get support thats on par, if it doesn’t exceed Microsoft’s support options. With RHEL3, you’re going to be guaranteed a product life cycle of five years, and thats a long time to support software. Who says you can’t get support with the other “free” Linux’es out there, like Debian, Fedora, and so on? There are local support joints that will always do this for you.
“Soon, they will realise there’s nothing free in this world.” Yes, Red Hat Linux and SuSE have always realised that there’s nothing free in this world, and always had paid support options for their packages. They’d give it away free to some varying degree, but support was always charged for (I remember this back to the Red Hat 4.x days). Look at Progeny, they support a version of Debian, and have never been shy to say so.
Then we have the venerable Butt Wai Choon. He says “commercial software is basically more reliable than that of the open source” – funny, that Netcraft’s web server survey lists Apache as having just above 67% market share right? Or that around 55% of mail servers out there are using three of the largest open source packages out there (Sendmail/Postfix/Exim)? The numbers speak for themselves, Butt.
Open source companies are constantly driven to innovate too. Just look at where we stand today? The GNOME Desktop enviornment wouldn’t be what it is without big players like Red Hat, Novell and Sun in the picture. And yes, occasionally they do patent new things too – only so that a commercial giant doesn’t patent the technology against them; but look at Red Hat’s promise on software patents. Can Microsoft ever attest to something like that?
“Commercial software are stable, tested and get regular updates on bugs or security holes.” Sure, they are (Blue screen of death jokes aside). Open source software is generally stable too, if not rock solid (the above server numbers speak for themselves), it is very well tested, have open QA policies, and always have regular updates for new features. If security holes come out, they don’t wait for “service pack releases”, but generally release a fix in under-48-hours.
So a different view on open source, or just a plain lack of understanding from Mr. Butt & Mr. Ewe? If you’re ever at one of these events, ZDNet has a good list of pointers on How to talk to Microsoft about Linux; I’d definitely suggest that as a read if you’re going in to fight the good fight. Don’t forget all the recent virus issues – us Linux users just have to delete the e-mail from our inbox (or get it cleverly filtered).
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