John, that was good.. I laughed out loud here. But you're right on track: government is dang skittish when it comes to open source products. There seems to be this mindset that, so long as they buy their products from a 'company' per se, that the world will turn, classical music will play and daisies will sprout from the backsides of their users.
After all of these years, the only thing that I can track that mindset to is that they want a security blanket. They want their warm fuzzies and their favorite, nibbled-on-the-corner and been-through-the-washer-a-bazillion-times blanket. They want to be able to have someone to call at 4am and cry to when their application dies. The same is true of hiring time. They want to be able to hire someone who already has managed a particular application, or suite of applications. We've all heard the 'total cost of ownership' and 'supportability' lectures, right? This is the way that the industry wants it. Independent thought, and God forbid, action, is almost heresy. Is this the right approach? Well, I suppose it depends on your perspective. To that end, any software application, be it vastly superior in terms of design, will always face an up hill battle. Just look at NetBSD, it's a perfect example. The OS is THE most ported platform on the planet, is rock solid, and has a lineage that stems from long before Winchunks was a glimmer in Gate's eye, yet - for all practical purposes - remains unknown, except to those of us that have worked with it. The same is true of FreeBSD, or OpenBSD. How about OTRS (http://otrs.org) for a simple help desk? What about RT (http://bestpractical.com/rt)? Both are stable, highly configurable (written in Perl) applications yet unknown. What about Zarafa (http://www.zarafa.com)? It's a drop in Exchange replacement that has been around for a bit, albeit not as long as some others. The product sits on top of a MySQL database, and can have something like postfix or sendmail for an mta in front of it so all of the milters or spam filtering can remain. The best part - it costs less than HALF of what Exchange does to operate - and it's FREE in a community edition. It's even got it's own webmail interface that looks like an Outlook client. Yet, in spite of it all, the user community remains small. Alternatives has never really been very useful in the software industry, when point and click, buy-off-the-shelf will do. Call me jaded, if you wish, but when I am talking to someone that is considering adding some sort of help desk, mail server, or whatnot, my first recommendation is almost NEVER anything that is licensed, packaged, or shrink-wrapped, unless there is some sort of ill-conceived standard which mandates it, and even then, I usually ask about exceptions. To that end, I had an interesting conversation last week with a CIO who wanted to know more about help desk software that he could use to streamline his request process and clean-up his department. By the time it was all over and done, he was staring at RT with an evil grin, considering a number of customizations, and almost overjoyed at the fact that he could put it on top of a free database to save on licensing. Just because something is free does not mean that it is inferior. The fundamental question surrounding sofrtware should be whether or not it will do the job. The number of options that it has don't mean jack if you can't make something work. Fri Jan 16 2009 05:08:29 PM CST from John <john.sundb...@kineticdata.com> to arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ARS 7.5? 7 uses Java -- Java is open source -- you are screwed. The logic of (if opensource - do not use it) -- does not make logical sense. For _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor: RMI Solutions ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
