Why is Open Source Software so expensive for the enterprise? There is a very interesting discussion on this topic at Slashdot, of which we select 3 contributions

1.

“Possibly because it’s not a good business model for enterprise consumers–and therefore must up its charges.

I mean, you want to sell a product that a community developed. Which means its quality could be variable. On top of that, you want to support it. The depends on excellent documentation which isn’t enforced in the open source community. There’s probably a lot of dead OSS projects for every one successful OSS project. You’ll notice that the software itself is very very free … what the summary is complaining about is ‘seats’ (training or support).

This particular user seems to be looking for portable technologies. The commercial versions of these technologies are still in their infancy which does not bode well for the OSS alternatives. I would suggest that you’re paying the early adopter fees on a few of these things. Afterall, Google uses a stripped down version of Red Hat. My company of tens of thousands employees uses Red Hat company wide. They find the free cost to be quite lucrative–just buying support whenever it’s needed.

The OSS business model works well for the individual user who isn’t looking for support because the free end product is out there for them and they use it if it works. The enterprise consumers looking for support year after year must pay quite a bit.

The software itself is not expensive, nor is it necessarily harder to support–it’s just very difficult to create this support out of nothing.

In my opinion, you’re going about OSS all wrong. You should stick with what is working and slowly move to a new OSS tool one at a time. You will encounter learning curves. But there is a lot of information online and, worse comes to worse, you can look at the source/documentation yourself .â€?

2.

“What I find surprising is that, in the few responses I’ve skimmed (including yours), I haven’t seen anyone mention that these companies need to pay programmers. There’s this tremendous myth that OSS is all written by good Samaritans in their spare time, and companies that sell it commercially simply rebrand it, box it, and ship it.

It’s like people think that Linux is free, so why can’t Redhat distribute it for almost nothing? Redhat and Novel employ programmers, too. In fact, the paid programmers make a tremendous contribution to all of this FOSS we benefit from. That’s right, sometimes it’s the big companies’ work that makes the FOSS version so good, so the commercial companies aren’t getting all that work for free.

I don’t mean to insult anyone here, and I don’t want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions. Still, you can’t discount that there are Redhat-employed programmers working on Redhat, and sometimes Redhat’s work ends up in the free stuff.

So what I’m saying is, businesses selling commercial OSS have the same costs as a closed shop, even though they receive some free help. And for all the free help they get, these savings are offset by the fact that people don’t have to buy their software. So let’s say they cut their programming costs in 50% (just a number I’m plucking out of the air), their revenue is also cut by 75% (another made up number) by people who would buy it, but decided instead to download for free.

And this doesn’t even take into account the whole dynamic of competition in commercial OSS. In short, for whatever Redhat spends in development, Novel also gets that work for free, and vice versa. Now maybe Novel doesn’t want to use that work, and maybe Redhat is benefitting from Novel in just the same ways, but it sure does complicate the business model.â€?

3.
“Another reason it makes sense [[to go open source]] is that you can strip a box down for one task, like a web server or mail server, and reduce the amount of maintenance on that box much easier with FOSS, due to the reasons you state. This is difficult with MS, but very easy with Linux or BSD. Adding other features is pretty easy later on if you want. It is the flexibility that makes FOSS so popular on the server side.

Need a domain server? I can take a spare box, install a base Fedora and bind in about 20 minutes. Or add bind to an underutilized server in about 2 minutes. MS just can’t compare when it comes to small to mid size business servers. FOSS installs faster, has fewer issues when hardening, and in general is easier to secure, particularly when we are talking about using only one or two services. (block every damn port but 53 and move ssh to an unused high port and open that one up.)

On the desktop, however, it has been another issue. I can’t even get my USB wireless ethernet cards to work in Linux, and there are virtually no apps for small to midsized businesses. Most of the solutions that I have looked at on Linux cost about 20 to 50 times more than similar products on Windows (yes, really 20 to 50 times more) so we can’t AFFORD to move to “free” software on the desktop yet. I know this will change, but I was convinced 10 years ago that it would have changed within 10 years ….”