Why I love open source
A couple of people have remarked to me that one reason that they are not prepared to make the open source jump is the lack of support.
Well, last week I wrote about a mastermap importer that I had found. I said I would like to be able to merge the huge numbers of shapefiles produced into more manageable chunks. I got a lot of good advice as to ways I might be able to do that using gdal, which is really handy, BUT I also emailed the developer about the same problem. Two days later he released a new version of the software with that functionality built in.
To me, this highlights one of the big advantages of open source. People want to make their software better, and are willing to listen to suggestions. Small firms or one-man bands don’t have the inertia of the major firms and can respond to requests quickly and easily. To the user, that means flexibility and control. In other industries, that would be seen as an advantage, not a disadvantage, so why not in software?
Jo
I get the support question all the time too. Here is how I am beginning to answer it:
How is your support for SuperCalc? QuatroPro? WordStar?….. All these programs had commercial support and the companies are now dead. How is your support for Visual Basic 6? Microsoft went in another direction (.NET) and you are out of luck. How about Avenue? Unix version of ArcGIS? Sorry - you were mislead.
You need to pick your software solutions based on what they can do, what help is available, and how large a user community is available. COTS software is always a killer in #1, about even in #2 (varies) and usually far behind in #3. All three must be factored in the total cost of ownership.
I get asked the support question all the time too, when I am advocating open source options along with COTS products. Having had to ask a combination of business and technical questions recently to both camps, my conclusion is that paying for support only really gives you a license to shout at somebody. There is no guarantee of better service or results when you pay for the license - but the person on the receiving end will sit and take it if you have paid them money. For example, I’ve had a defect logged against one of the big players for over two years now, and its still ‘under consideration for development’, despite being a de facto feature of every open source equivalent. My organisation paying £xxxK a year to them means nothing, as thats small beer to them, and fixing their defect doesn’t fit in with a corporate strategy or the other users of their software. But its a deal breaker for me. Hello open source!