Why do companies use closed source applications that are tremendously more expensive, when they could probably get away with using open source solutions that are noticeably cheaper? That’s a question that’s been heavy on my mind lately.
You see, in my line of work, I see companies that use closed source software for pretty much everything. I don’t always consider that a bad thing, because each business is different and has different needs. Some businesses are required to run proprietary applications by their suppliers, others are not. For those that are not required to run closed source applications, I personally don’t see the point in choosing to go that route if you don’t have to. In the case of the companies I have worked with, they really don’t need to run so many proprietary applications, and they are wasting a ton of money each year.
That got me thinking, if it were up to me, what would I do different? What would I recommend to others that run a business and want to save cash? Let’s take a look at some typical money traps businesses fall into, and some really good open source solutions that should be considered.
File Sharing
A great example of a “closed source money trap” is simple file sharing within a network. If you have a server which its only goal in life is to serve files to others, installing Windows Server on that box is one of the biggest money wasters in the industry. To have Windows power such a thing, you’d need a Windows Server Standard license ($999) plus CALs (Client Access Licenses) starting at $199 for a mere five users. (Source) It’s very easy to spend a few thousand dollars on this alone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that using Windows Server doesn’t have any value, my point is to think it through, do you really need such an expensive operating system? For simple file sharing, absolutely not!
Operating System
For some employees, there may be software that requires Windows. Great strides have been made in getting typical programs to work under Linux, and many have alternatives that are just as good. If you have employees that only use their computer to check email and fill in a quick spreadsheet or two, you’d be wasting money by buying Windows licenses for that user level. An Ubuntu LTS release is a great choice for the corporate desktop, and includes all of the general stuff like email, word processing, web browsing, spreadsheets (and more) out of the box. That right there saves you from purchasing a Windows license (around $299.95) AND an Office standard license (around $399.95), per seat! (The prices vary depending on the license type and particular version of course, but that is the general idea).
Virtualization
Ask any experienced IT guy (or gal) and they’ll likely tell you the same thing: virtualization saves money. After all, why have ten physical servers in your rack if you can get away with having two servers that can each run five virtualized servers with room for growth? The hardware costs you’d save would be phenomenal. Best of all, if you ran the virtualized servers with Linux and a Hypervisor, you’d only have to pay hardware costs, as software costs would be thrown out the window. Linux is absolutely wonderful when it comes to virtualization, with services to choose from like Xen, Qemu, and Virtualbox to name a few. Some have costs attached and others don’t, but all would be cheaper than buying a whole server for each task, and even more money is saved by not buying a Windows license for each server unless you absolutely have to. If you did purchase a Windows Server license for each virtual server, you could easily offset the savings that come with virtualization in the first place.
Imaging
When you are setting up a new PC for an associate, would you really want to spend a couple of hours installing the OS, and then all of the required programs? That’s why we IT people create images, it saves a TON of time. Restore the image onto the machine, and you’re done. With Windows, setting up computer images is a chore since you have to create one for each model of machine you’re going to deploy (unless you use config manager or a similar solution, which isn’t cheap). All of your typical Linux desktops could be created from a single image regardless of how many types of machines you have. Unless proprietary drivers are involved, Linux is scalable across machines and will swap around drivers during boot if it needs to. This saves a great deal of time from your IT staff, allowing them to work on other projects. Imagine, one PC image to rule them all. You could offset any departmental differences with simple shell scripts, rather than having more base images.
For the actual imaging task, Clonezilla is a really good choice. You can use it as a simple Live CD that pulls images from a network share, or you can install it on a centralized server and maximize its use even further. Even better, it can image Windows machines too, so if you can’t get away from giving Microsoft your money, at least you don’t have to shell out a ton of money for imaging as well. Using Clonezilla instead of solutions like Symantec Ghost or Config Manager would save your business money.
E-Mail
Yes, I have seen businesses buy Microsoft Outlook licenses just for the sole purpose of checking email, even those that are only required to check it a few times per day. Why use Outlook for the most general of email use, when Thunderbird works just fine? Another benefit of Thunderbird is that it is very platform-independent, meaning that an associate can have Thunderbird on their work PC, and once they got the hang of it, they could put it on their home PC too, and it will work pretty much the same way regardless of the OS. This is in contrast to Novell’s “Evolution” suite which is pretty much Linux only. Using a free, powerful, and scalable solution such as Thunderbird instead of Outlook will also save your company even more money.
Web Filtering
Keeping associates from visiting web sites that aren’t work related or are against the usage policy can be a very expensive thing to do. Employees that visit sites that aren’t work related waste productivity and company dollars, but what companies may not realize is that the services they purchase to block such things is ALSO wasting company dollars! Most companies I have worked with have purchased an expensive box that they have to put in their server room and maintain, that comes with not only an expensive subscription to some sort of service, it also has an annual maintenance contract fee involved too. (Some of them over ten thousand dollars!) A better solution is to either user OpenDNS (it’s free for businesses, as far as I know) or to throw a Linux firewall on an old server or virtualized device. That would put several thousand dollars back in your available budget at least, and would be one less box to maintain.
Conclusion
Why throw your money away? In the almost decade I’ve been working in the IT field, I’ve seen companies make some really stupid financial decisions when it comes to technology. Everything I’ve wrote above are things I noticed real companies doing. Buying Windows licenses for associates that don’t do anything Windows-specific, spending money on the Windows Server operating system just to share a measly 5-12GB of files, and buying Outlook licenses for people that probably could do well with Thunderbird or web-mail are just some of the things I’ve seen companies do to flush their money away.
The moral of the story is to think before you act, and buy the things you absolutely need, and to save money where you can. If you can save money within your organization, you can put it in another area, such as purchasing more servers or increasing your allowable bandwidth. If you require Windows servers and applications, that’s absolutely fine as not all businesses can control what the suppliers require. However, use free software wherever it may fit in your organization. You’ll put some money back into your IT budget. So why do IT departments use closed source software when they don’t need it? I have no idea.
What are your thoughts on this subject? What would you do differently in your organization if it was up to you? If it already is in your jurisdiction, how are you running your server room? Feel free to leave a comment.
Jeremy is a Certified IT Technician that blogs at ITNewsToday.com in his spare time. He has over ten years of industry experience, and studies the IT industry every single day. Jeremy has become an open source enthusiast over time and is studying for his Linux+ certification. He lives in Waterford MI with his wife Krystal and son Alan.
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It’s even cheaper to go with Red Hat or Novell or Canonical subscriptions than it is to run Windows.
Some of the hesitation, though, is the “Bus Rule”…
If your System Administrator was hit by a bus, how easy is to for the business to keep on running?
With Windows, it’s pretty easy… hire one of the thousands of admins out in the marketplace.
With Linux, BSD and Unix it isn’t so easy all of the time.
You didn’t actually answer the question posed in your first paragraph. The sad answer is that the decisions are often made by people with no insight into the matter, so none of the factors you mention are ever considered. Moreover, when there’s no insight, the notion of “it costs more so it must be better” comes into play. I’m getting riled up just thinking about it, so I’ll stop now.
@Ron:
Thanks for pointing that out.
Users are conditioned to Microsoft, it’s that simple. Everyone is afraid of change, especially when they’re afraid of technology to begin with. Take the average person out of their comfort zone and they refuse to accept that, from a users perspective, there’s essentially no difference between Windows, Linux or anything else.
I’ve run a few experiments:
Supplying a Linux box, running Ubuntu but modified to look like XP. It was accepted, and used without issue, for a few hours before the user noticed.
I also supplied 5 Ubuntu machines, for internet access, to be used by brain injury survivors. They just use them without question, no additional support required.
Marketing is king, everyone is conditioned to use Windows.
A great deal of companies go w/ closed source software because they’re comfortable w/ the level and type of support they get when there’s a problem, and “good” support comes from the names they already know and implicitly trust.
The major reason for this is their fear of the unknown, and the legitimate concern that recovery from a tech crisis may take longer if you’re using a niche software (w/ a far smaller pool of knowledge to tap into). When you stack up the risk of lost revenue during an extended downtime to the cost of closed software licenses, the decision becomes less obvious.
I totally agree with your article and I have been in the IT world for over 13 years, running both Windows and Linux. I choose Linux because it can do everything Windows can and more, at no cost other than the hardware which you need either way. In fact I believe Linux has so many more advantages than what is stated here, for instance far LESS headaches on maintaining the systems (i.e. spyware, viruses, rebooting for updates, etc). Personally, I use Linux for my own personal business server room, and have decommissioned all of my Windows servers. I also (in the past year), moved to using Linux solely at home, and I couldn’t be happier. I can do my daily tasks in Linux. Once in a great while I need to use an old Windows app, which can be done in either Wine or I also use VirtualBox with an XP virtual machine. But, even many 3D games work in Wine, so I have no reason to use Windows anymore.
Hopefully more experience Linux and move to it. It’s issue is marketing as others stated. It’s not readily available in stores, and users are uncomfortable with something new. However, there couldn’t be more changes between XP and Vista, so it’s the same thing.
I became so frustrated using Windows, I’ve even published my own article on the subject, covering some of the same thoughts:
http://members.apex-internet.com/sa/windowslinux
I’d like to expand on what kev said a couple of posts back. We all tend to prefer that technology with which we are familiar. At work, I reach for Python, R and bash scripts instinctively when I need to crunch some numbers. Why? Because it’s what I am familiar with. I could get the same answer with SPSS, but I don’t necessarily know how and that annoys the #$@(=* out of me. Thus I avoid using SPSS like the plague. I have a copy of it installed on a computer. The license has been with the company longer than I have been, so the cost of me using SPSS today is essentially the same as R, but I am more productive with R.
The same happens when you take someone who has spend years developing tools and expertise on the Windows platform. One of my co-workers has a great tool that he has developed that can take SPSS output and make nice tables, charts and what not via VBA. I’ve looked at some of the code and it is nice. But, it’s all based on the MS platform. And guess what? He doesn’t want to convert to R or OpenOffice.org, even though these tools can do everything that MS Office can do, simply because he doesn’t want to lose access to all of his cool tricks, hacks, and experience.
This is a conundrum that is sometimes over-looked in this debate.
But I also agree with the position that often the decision makers aren’t actual IT people and they just go with what they know, which is MS.
I converted a SMB to GNU/Linux a few years ago. They had an incredibly small amount allocated for IT but they needed a new system. I converted them from XP on thick clients to GNU/Linux on thin clients and had change to spare for printers, scanners, and cameras. Training was a one-hour session with managers who passed on usernames and passwords to users. We had 600 users on 153 seats changed over in 10 days. Apart from some failed memory and hard drive, the change was smooth for all but three users. One needed hand-holding with anything. One wanted MORE and we gave it to her. Another rebelled until we configured his room the way he was used to working with a local printer and USB devices to move stuff from his personal notebook to our system. His wife was his secretary. The main-office secretary was the only one who did not move with the wholesale change. She had the combined knowledge base of the whole organization in proprietary files. They would have had a very crippled system if we had to move everyone to Vista, half the number of computers and very few printers. Cost was clearly the deciding factor and we made it work. The system was turned over to the original IT guy with a 50 page manual and a few hours of hand-holding. Their system is causing envy amongst similar organizations who see it. Uptime, speed, reliability are amazing. Maintenance was cut by a large factor while seats were increased from 30 to 153.
I teach Computer Science at a university and, ironically, am both the Linux/Open Source “source” for the department and also the keeper of the software library for THAT company. (We get it free, so the students get it free.) I teach five courses regularly (multiple sections per semester of some) and two of their catalog descriptions are written in general terms–like “word processing,” spreadsheets,” “BASIC programming”–but guess what we teach? I have pointed out the disconnect implied, but so far all I’ve been able to do in these courses is slip in one or two OpenOffice.org assignment. However, the boss likes me–or maybe tolerates me–enough that we have OpenOffice, KompoZer, and a few others in the disk image for all the computers in the department.
But I didn’t come here to whine. I agree with the thrust of this article, that more people and more businesses could function with open source software than do. My concern is that the people who write this software have to eat, too. When I teach a graduate web design class for teachers, I use KompoZer, Notepad++, MySQL, PHP, PortableApps, and some online tutorials. I appreciate that they’ve given me very nice tools to work with.
So I contribute to these people–and send them a thank-you note. Their bandwidth for me to download their software costs them out of their pockets. I haven’t figured out a way to get the university to pay them–yet–and the authors aren’t going to eat well on what can I send them, but it’s something and it lets them know somebody appreciate them.
If your business decides to switch and you replace five office packages ($200 each, in quantity?) with one copy ofOpenOffice you download, how about sending them 20% of what you didn’t spend? If you have a batch of PIII or early P4 computers and switch them over to MEPIS (my favorite–gets the hardware right almost every time) and get a few more years out of them, send Warren a few bucks and a thank-you letter.
We talk about “community.” Some of us in the community are largely consumers. Let’s support the people who make it possible to do what we do.
That’s a good article Jeremy, thanks. And, amazingly, the comments have been well thought out and articulated too. Not one fan-boy from either side ranting about something or other.
Very refreshing.
I do believe there is a sea change occuring. We run a FOSS consulting and services business in the UK and are seeing an increase in unsolicited enquiries and generally more demand for our services.
The general public, businesses and public sector organisations are definitely becoming less ignorant or naive of Open Source in general. I am constantly amazed when talking to non-technical people – like in a pub or at a party – who use OpenOffice.org for example.
Thanks again.
Alan
I tend to favour SSuite Office’s free office suites. Their software also don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their software very small and efficient.
http://www.ssuitesoft.com