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Posted on 07/20/2004 12:26:53 PM PDT by ShadowAce
You might not think that Citizens Against Government Waste would be playing up the cost benefits of proprietary software for use by government, but the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization did just that with a recent press release.
Praising
the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for its memorandum urging agencies to consider the total cost of ownership including lifecycle maintenance, risk, and ensuring security when acquiring software, CAGW indicated that open source can cost more. CAGW President Tom Schatz said people mistakenly refer to open source as free software because it can be freely altered and distributed, yet while the software itself might be free or cheaper than licensed software to purchase, the cost to maintain and upgrade open source can make it more expensive.
"Like all procurement decisions, the best policy on the use of software is to place all products on equal footing so that taxpayers receive the best quality programs at the least cost," said Schatz's statement in the press release. However, Schatz went on to claim that "most studies conclude that acquisition costs represent 5 to 10 percent of total cost of ownership. Maintenance, training, and support are far more expensive with open source than proprietary software."
When asked about the apparent endorsement of supposedly less expensive proprietary software, Schatz said the press release and OMB memo were issued to counter a sort of "open source fever" that seems to have swept over budget-crunched G men and women working as federal public servants.
"The point is that OMB would not have had to issue this if agencies weren't prioritizing or tending toward open source," Schatz told NewsForge.
The watchdog group head explained that some who tout the cost advantages of open source are not looking beyond the current year and considering lifetime and liability costs.
"A lot of other countries say open source is less expensive, but it isn't always less expensive," Schatz said. "The GPL in particular raises more issues than a traditional, proprietary license."
Schatz echoed a July 1 OMB memo, which noted that open source software has more complex licensing requirements, forcing review by agency general counsel and adding to expense.
"There should be some cautions and explanation to individuals to be careful when putting an entire system together," Schatz said. "The government has just been technologically challenged over the years. They need these reminders about the formation of systems, the protection of information and the cost. We're trying to keep things simple and make sure they don't waste billions as they have in the past by looking for a single answer in open source."
Schatz said government had actually become more cautious about not picking open source or proprietary over one another and finding what actually works best, regardless of its license or lack of license.
Yankee Group analyst Andy Efstathiou said open source software is unlikely to need any more review than proprietary software, pointing instead to the particular use and environment in question.
"It entirely depends on what it's being used for and what the legacy environment is," Efstathiou said. "For a well-developed solution that is not open source, such as complex processing in a complex environment, proprietary may be less expensive," Efstathiou said. "[For] software requiring low levels of services, open source is likely to be less expensive. In relatively simple environments, many enterprises are going toward open source and Linux."
The analyst added that with indemnification of some kind from most major vendors, checking out the legal concerns and actual liability may not be any more for of a concern with open source.
Efstathiou also said with movement towards interoperability and standardization, the question of whether software is open source or proprietary may not be relevant 10 years from now.
The subject has been kinda dry for a few days, so I thought I'd toss some wood on the fire. I don't have access to my entire ping list at the moment, so if you see that I've missed anyone, feel free to ping 'em.
Well, it makes sense that an open source system for something like air traffic control or ambulance dispatching might never come along. But for word processors and database report writers, open source is just fine.
Tech Ping
Why?
The watchdog group head explained that some who tout the cost advantages of open source are not looking beyond the current year and considering lifetime and liability costs.
Definitely a concern.
Next time you might want to cut out the advertisement HTML.
Oops. One of the (few) disadvantages of the AdBlock extension to Mozilla. I never saw it. I still don't see it.
Ha!
$710.96... The price of freedom.
The software is free, it's the support costs that will get you. The model for this used to be illustrated with the example of razor blade manufacturers that gave razors away free. All their profits came from a lifetime of buying razor blades.
The same principle applies here plus there are no deep-pocket liability is attached if the product ever proves to be defective. After all, all of the code was donated, debugged and evaluated by everyone.
(Although IBM claims to be spending on the order of $1Billion per year to make sure Linux is supportable - where do think the money to do that comes from?) OpenSource is NOT free.
And the support costs for closed source software are still higher. Once you figure in upgrade costs, manpower for patching, virus cleaning, license compliance and downtime due to rolling back broken patches, closed source software support costs are dramatically higher.
What were the estimated costs for Slammer? For Nimda? Welchi? Nachia? How about the recent IE/IIS exploit that even cause the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to recommend that people not use IE? Make sure you figure that into your TCO estimates.
The same principle applies here plus there are no deep-pocket liability is attached if the product ever proves to be defective.
You've never read a EULA, have you? Guess what? No software company has liability for the actions of it's code. If a software company could be sucessfully sued for selling broken code, Microsoft would currently be bankrupt.
OpenSource is NOT free.
And closed source software is even more not free. Much more not free.
And that costs money.
| Government watchdog group the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization
Some years ago, Microsoft was in need of some support from the citizenry to convince state government officials to go easy on Microsoft during the anti-trust trial. And hundreds of citizens responded. They wrote nearly-identical letters to dozens of officials. So eager were these citizens to speak up for Microsoft that some of them actually rose from the grave to do so. It was not really grass-roots support, it was "Astoturfing," managed by a lobbying firm that actually wrote the letters and told people what names to sign to them. The name of that lobbying firm? Citizens Against Government Waste.
There is certainly nothing wrong with hiring a lobbying firm to advocate on your behalf. And there is nothing wrong with a lobbying firm dressing itself up as People For Goodness and Truth while churning out press releases for its clients. All of that is everyday fare in Washington. Let's just be clear that that is what is going on here. This is a lobbying firm, and Microsoft is one of its clients. |
There ya go.
I suspected that something like that was going on.
It was all too ADTI-esque to be believable. No facts, no comparisons with real figures, just some honcho spouting old FUD (which is easily refutable).. but without the nasty "edge" to it.
AdBlock does rock. I stopped using it because it made Firefox .9 unstable for me. I see it's stable again. Another great one for boards like this is Make Link. Select text in a link, right click, and it'll put the HTML to recreate that link in the clipboard. I don't type "a href" anymore.
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It's a lobbying firm. It is the business of lobbying firms to do political advocacy for money.