I think these days, the line between open source and "closed" source
is somewhat blurred - and this is a good thing.
You now have "premium open source" - with the likes of RHEL, SugarCRM,
MySQL and Magento. Microsoft technologies are no longer exclusively
closed - I'm currently working with a team of 9 .net/wpf/silverlight
developers that are all using open source technology, along with big
ticket items such as BizTalk. Pragmatism at it's best - using the
correct tool for the job.
MySQL may be free, but my database on this project is going to have
half a billion rows - I can't see relying on community support for
solving scalability issues to be clever - intact, it's a massive risk
on the project risk register. Luckily, as I mentioned already - there
are MySQL professional services.
The whole IIS/windows server licensing issue is also beginning to
disappear - if you want a well supported, enterprise grade, stable and
scalable PHP environment, you'll likely want Zend Server - which costs
around the same as a Windows Server license. Apache, lighttp, nginx
etc are all free, but who actually supports them? If your server goes
bump in the night, who you gonna call?
As always, you get what you pay for. This is true regardless of open
source vs "closed". If you do open source on the cheap you'll get bad
coders that will produce crap, then disappear. Spend more and you'll
get a better application, that requires less maintenance and because
it's built well, easier to maintain and the developers won't disappear
because they're terrified of supporting their own bad code.
Open source vs closed? IMHO, makes no difference unless you hire bad
developers or are unable to maintain a good relationship with your
developers.
Sent from my iWheel
On 8 Jan 2010, at 08:46, Parijat Kalia <kaliapari...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey guys,
Just lighting up everyone's day, would like to get as many as
possible arguments on this. Me and a friend of mine, had a debate
last evening, about open source(PHP) vs closed source technologies
(DOT NET).He raised the following points:
1. He feels that open source is not reliable whereas closed source
is. The logic being that, once the application is developed and
sold, if it runs into some kind of a bug or an error, there is
support team for closed source technologies who are going to come
and help you fix it, whereas this is not a guarantee in open source
technologies.
2. Development for a successful open source technology is community
dependent, implying the choice is still on a faithful group of
users, whereas in closed source technologies it is more reliable
because it is being backed by a company (microsoft for .NET and SAP
for SAP). f
3. The third point that was raised is, closed source technologies
enforce quality control as opposed to open source technologies,
where the onus on quality control in case of the latter, is more on
the developer himself.
The reasoning I could offer was that big companies such as Yahoo
( symfony), facebook (php), and Twitter (rails) rely on open source
technologies, surely they are aware of the above points but still
choose to go with open source rather than closed source
technologies. Money is not the most important criteria for these
companies, and there definitely is a better reason why they choose
open rather than closed source technologies.
However, it is still not convincing me for I found myself agreeing
to the points my friend raised in favor of closed source
technologies. Can anyone shed a light on this?
Thanks!!!
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