"There's no support available"
Sep 16, 22:29 by Kevin
Time and again, we hear people complain about open source software, and their biggest complaint is that “there’s no support available”. It’s the old adage that “you never get fired for buying Windows and Intel”, or whatever its current guise is; “but we get support from Microsoft”. Well, surprise surprise, the same level of support is available for many of the open source products which are used as core software by many many businesses, big and small.
Take the humble operating system; many businesses use Microsoft Windows as a desktop OS. Why? Because they can get support for it; because people are used to it; because it’s the simplest thing to do. But often it’s not the simplest thing to do; it wasn’t Microsoft who pioneered technologies like networks, like remote management of desktop machines, like client-server setups. Many of these things came from the Unix world, of which Linux and Mac OSX are derivatives. Linux-wise, there’s currently 3 major players and a host of up-and-coming companies who all offer support for there particular flavour of Linux – Redhat, Ubuntu, Novell, Linspire and others all offer support for their operating systems, and they all base their products on many relevant open standards which allow (for example) user-logins to authenticate against a common backend, documents to be shared in an easy-to-setup way, and many other things. Too many companies get sold the One True Way by Microsoft, only to later find that they’ve gotten themselves into an integration nightmare, and the only way out is by paying Microsoft thousands more in order to unpick it all.
Databases are another good example – traditionally, Oracle or IBM DB/2 or Microsoft SQL Server (formerly Sybase) have been the favourite choices of the enterprise. Each of these costs a lot of money; Oracle, for example, currently licenses at around $8,000 per CPU (depending on which option you take). Wowzer. For 99% of applications, however, MySQL is a perfectly good alternative. It’s been laden with a bad reputation for not having any “real world” features, but those stories are mostly now out-of-date. Recent versions of MySQL have provided many features that people used to complain were missing, and it really is a top-notch product. But more than that, you can buy support for it. That’s right; just because it’s Open Source doesn’t mean that you can’t get enterprise-class support from MySQL AB themselves (the company who produce MySQL). It’s not the kind of product which some spotty teenager has written in his spare time, it’s a world-class product used by the likes of Google, Yahoo, Flickr, and many other high-traffic high-availability applications.
So go ahead, take a risk; don’t just be old fashioned because otherwise “there’s no support available”.
