Greg Woodhouse wrote: [KSB] <...snip...> > > Certainly, there must be some formal studies into cost of ownership. My > own "back of the envelope" estimates indicate that maintaining a VistA > system is by no means cheap. On the other hand, with a proprietary > solution, you'll end up paying for the same thing in the form of > licensing fees, support and upgrades. There doesn't seem to be any > obvious way to estimate the difference in cost of ownership of > comparable (whatever that means) open source and proprietary systems. > [KSB] The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to do an unbiased apples to apples comparison of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of FLOSS (Free/Libré and Open Source Software) vs. non-FLOSS for a variety of reasons, and not just because the concept of TCO is itself flawed.
"Studies" are always biased. For example, Microsoft studies about Windows having a lower TCO than Linux, or Microsoft Office having a lower TCO than Openoffice.org frequently burden the estimate of Linux TCO with a large "retraining cost". [Whether this is right or wrong, I will not opine on.] We who communicate in English are handicapped by the fact that "free" has two different meanings, whereas in Spanish, "gratis" and "libré" are distinct words. FLOSS is not free as in gratis. FLOSS is free as in libré. Internet Explorer is gratis. Mozilla Firefox is libré. The freedom of libré includes the freedom to use the software in any way you choose to use it, the freedom to learn from it, the freedom to modify it to your needs, and the freedom to make your changes available to others. The freedom of gratis may allow you to run the software without paying a license fee, but will generally restrict your use of the software, restrict your ability to reverse engineer it and learn from it, restrict your ability to modify it, etc. For example, have you ever wondered why there are so few apples to apples benchmarks of popular non-FLOSS databases? The fine print of most license agreements prevents you from publishing benchmark results without the written approval of the database vendor, who will not give permission to publish if their product is not the winner. So, even when software doesn't have a license fee, and even if TCO can be well defined, you can never make an apples to apples comparison between FLOSS and non-FLOSS software. The choice between FLOSS and non-FLOSS has to be made on qualitative grounds, not on cost grounds. By way of analogy, many people choose to pay off their mortgages if they can afford to, even though it is more tax efficient (at least in the US) to borrow money (i.e., a mortgage has a lower TCO than paying off the house). This seemingly irrational behavior is because owning a house free and clear gives people greater freedom in the libré sense. So don't waste time & energy trying to compare the TCO of a FLOSS solution with a non-FLOSS solution. -- Bhaskar _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
