Free software is a protection against doing stupid things over and over again.
Open Source does not win by being cheaper
11–20 of 287 posts
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#12We are also open Source community at Apache https://github.com/apache/age
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
What liability are you referring to?
in the event of an incident, the exec or departments reputational liability
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#14For me, OSS is all about being able to edit to get some long-tail functionality in. For both Kong and Airbyte, I didn't have to wait for some internal prioritization pipeline to finish.
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#15I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…
Same reason it’s easier to get contractors or backfill instead of giving raises… HR makes it a pita for managers to do it.
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#16I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…
It can sometimes be way easier to fire a vendor than an engineer.
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
I understand the full time engineer thing. But it was never explained to me at any of the places I have been at that it was a liability thing. At every place they thought we would leak trade secrets. Was always frustrating that technically we could never even contribute the most minor of bug fixes.
maybe it's a "blame" thing, but it's not a liability thing. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM*, but nobody ever got a nickel back either.
*IBM is a consulting firm now
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#18I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…
If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
Good luck trying to get any actual liability out of them...
Like, go try to make Oracle write you a contract where their base going down compensates your lost profits. You just won't get it, unless you throw some hideous amount of money their way (and they will just pay insurance company and pocket the rest).
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
What liability are you referring to?
Component breaks due to bug, deployment misconfiguration, scaling failure, etc., and your company loses $1M during the outage. If it's a vendor with an SLA, you can (sometimes) get them to cover the $1M. If it's in-house, you're eating it. It's often cheaper to build/run stuff yourself (unless it's so commodified that you're benefiting from amortization across the vendor's many clients), but then you have to be self-insured for problems.
Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
Good luck trying to get any actual liability out of them... Like, go try to make Oracle write you a contract where their base going down compensates your lost profits. You just won't get it, unless you throw some hideous amount of money their way (and they will just pay insurance company and pocket the rest).
It's not about compensation, it's about finger-pointing.
"WE didn't bill your card 40 times draining your bank account -- STRIPE did! Go sue them, not us!"