Guess what: “nobody” cares. Consulting companies will still sell Microsoft and all their legal and security compliance as a solution that makes companies and govs secure :)
Here is the thing, open-source could fix this, it has been ready for most things but… business is business.
- Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there’s isn’t someone to sue then;
- Buying proprietary stuff means you’re outsourcing the risks of such product;
- Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
- Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
- Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don’t require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the “sharp angles” between multiple solutions that aren’t related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
- Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don’t have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
- If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they’re easier to replace and you’ll pay less taxes;
- Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
- The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they’ll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you’re starting to sell software or networking services there’s little incentive for you to go pure “open-source”. With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.
Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.
You’ve listed a lot of good reasons why open-source for business isn’t used more frequently, and they’re all consistent with my experience as well. Are you familiar with any consulting companies / vendors who DO advocate open-source solutions?
I’ve been considering starting a FOSS MSP / FOSS B2B consulting firm, but I’ve consistently come to the same conclusion that the tech industry and business culture here are almost innoculated against open-source. If you know any firms that DO recommend open-source solutions I’d love to check them out.
Doesn’t Red Hat and the whole enterprise Linux space advocate FOSS B2B? I might be misunderstanding though
Are you familiar with any consulting companies / vendors who DO advocate open-source solutions?
Yes, I’ve seen a few of those and usually their customers are smaller companies that want to cheap out on IT and/or don’t consider it a priority and a cost. The irony here is that smaller companies cant fund the integration costs and development required to have useful open-source and bigger companies can but they’ll simply move on to MS/other proprietary stuff because of time-to-market, corruption or because some manager thinks its safer to go with proprietary.
Now think if you after that type of costumer they’ll never respect you nor pay you decently, they’ll always bitch for discounts, free support and put you through all kinds of hell as everything they’ll ever need is urgent and everything you propose is way too expensive or unreasonable in their little heads. <– trust me, been there :P
If you know any firms that DO recommend open-source solutions
Kolab for email/collaboration is a good example at that https://kolabnow.com/, they’re one of the major contributors of RoundCube and sell it with a bunch of other in-house developed solutions.
Anyways a few years ago I worked for a health insurance company (~200 employees, ~1 million customers) and they contracted services from a 3 guy company that had a business model similar to what you’re looking for. They managed the workstations and laptops, networking and the infrastructure where the in-house software dev team deployed (OpenLDAP, Samba, Linphone/Other VOIP, Self hosted email, Jira, tons of VMs for developers, local datacenter and 3rd party datacenter).
At some point the health insurance company bought them out because they were going bankrupt and became employees as well. At the time they said it was really hard because they were unable to get more big customers like that one and the smaller ones weren’t profitable (time to setup something wasn’t worth it).
Nowadays the company (with those same guys and few others) runs everything on Azure + Office 365 + Jira Cloud + AWS for internally developed stuff.
It’s amazing how everything they touch turns to crap. I’m surprised Github has made it this long.
Edit: After reading the posts, I am overwhelmed by irony.
Crap can still be profitable. Pretty much their business model.
You have to assume that any data online at this point has been compromised or will be compromised, up to and including encrypted information. You just have to hope we’re not on track to have publicly available quantum computing that can break said encryption or there’d be no point doing any kind of secure internet communication anymore.
