Trusting Open Source for Production...
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@scottalanmiller said:
I might have missed things already said as I'm starting from the top so ignore if redundant...
But you are connecting "open source" to "community." Don't make that leap. Microsoft makes open source software too. When you have open source you get Microsoft AND the community AND yourself to fix it. You never get less, you get more. We are talking about open source versus closed source, not about business versus community. You are connecting concepts that do not have a direct connection.
You could just as easily say that you trust Red Hat to fix Linux but don't trust the Spiceworks community to fix Windows. Why do you associate one with a business providing support and one without? Your mental connection there is arbitrary.
While the OP might have been talking about the concept of Open Source, I am comparing equal products items in my head.
Windows to Linux
Office to LibreOffice -
@BRRABill Compare Open Source vs Open Source Paid Support
RedHat vs CentOS or Xen vs Citrix Support for Xen
That was / is my intention.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I might have missed things already said as I'm starting from the top so ignore if redundant...
But you are connecting "open source" to "community." Don't make that leap. Microsoft makes open source software too. When you have open source you get Microsoft AND the community AND yourself to fix it. You never get less, you get more. We are talking about open source versus closed source, not about business versus community. You are connecting concepts that do not have a direct connection.
You could just as easily say that you trust Red Hat to fix Linux but don't trust the Spiceworks community to fix Windows. Why do you associate one with a business providing support and one without? Your mental connection there is arbitrary.
While the OP might have been talking about the concept of Open Source, I am comparing equal products items in my head.
Windows to Linux
Office to LibreOfficeThose are not equal products. Windows is an OS, Linux is just the kernel. A commercial OS to Windows would be RHEL.
So let's compare Windows to RHEL.
RHEL has more support options including famously better vendor support than Windows does. Everything that I pointed out applies when you compare apples to apples. The open source equivalents have more support options and almost universally better support from the overlapping options because their companies live and die by support dollars, not licensing dollars.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@BRRABill Compare Open Source vs Open Source Paid Support
RedHat vs CentOS or Xen vs Citrix Support for Xen
That was / is my intention.
Ah! I did not understand either. Well, basically it comes down to a non-IT evaluation of "what are the risks" and "how much does support cost?" Support might come with added features like "we'll install it for you" that have to be considered. It's purely a purchase value question and not one for IT at all. It's all finance.
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@BRRABill said:
Office to LibreOffice
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
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@BRRABill said:
Office to LibreOffice
Buying Office vs LibreOffice would never be about support for me, at least not Vendor (MS in this case) support. If Office isn't working I'll try a repair/reinstall of Office. If that doesn't work, I'll reimage. If that doesn't work, I figure it's a bug that we discovered and would post about it on the MS forums, but would never consider calling MS.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
Who decommissioned what?
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
I don't follow. As we had discussed offline, open source cannot go away. It's literally impossible. The fear of going away is purely a closed source concern. You were confused about which was which when we were discussing this. Open source is the only means of protecting against the fear that you have. Commercial products that people are still using actually go away all of the time. Open source cannot. It is as simple as that.
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@BRRABill said:
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
How can any open source product "go away"? Even if it's completely dropped from development, IE TrueCrypt, if it's a useful tool someone will pickup it up and continue on, IE VeraCrypt. Whereas if Microsoft decides to drop MS Office, you are up a creek and nobody will be working with the code anymore.
I know how it feels, but it's just feelings. Open source is much more likely to stick around long after the original developers are no longer around.
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@Dashrender said:
@BRRABill said:
Office to LibreOffice
Buying Office vs LibreOffice would never be about support for me, at least not Vendor (MS in this case) support. If Office isn't working I'll try a repair/reinstall of Office. If that doesn't work, I'll reimage. If that doesn't work, I figure it's a bug that we discovered and would post about it on the MS forums, but would never consider calling MS.
It's amazing how differently people approach things in IT. I'm with you here. It would never occur to me that MS Office came with support and that I should call someone outside of reporting a bug somewhere - normally through an automatic bug report system. Calling MS would never enter my mind.
But for a lot of companies, support is a live or die thing and they would never run MS Office without an active support contract.
LO has all the options that MSO does, so it works out for everyone here. But the approach differences are amazing.
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No, I understand.
@scottalanmiller has been bringing me over to the dark side. Which is apparently is actually the light side.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
I don't follow. As we had discussed offline, open source cannot go away. It's literally impossible. The fear of going away is purely a closed source concern. You were confused about which was which when we were discussing this. Open source is the only means of protecting against the fear that you have. Commercial products that people are still using actually go away all of the time. Open source cannot. It is as simple as that.
A great example would be Office 2003. That software isn't supported or available for sale anymore. And while OpenOffice in it's old form isn't really there any more, it's been replaced by LibreOffice.
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I've never called MS for support once in my entire IT career.
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@travisdh1 said:
@BRRABill said:
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
How can any open source product "go away"? Even if it's completely dropped from development, IE TrueCrypt, if it's a useful tool someone will pickup it up and continue on, IE VeraCrypt. Whereas if Microsoft decides to drop MS Office, you are up a creek and nobody will be working with the code anymore.
I know how it feels, but it's just feelings. Open source is much more likely to stick around long after the original developers are no longer around.
It's funny, TC was actually the product that he had brought up. I want to write a paper on the TC story because it is one of the best possible examples of why open source matters. TC was closed source, not open, and they vendor (we think) tried to make it go away. But accidentally let the code slip into the public domain and become de facto open source and the product was protected from the evils of closed source because the code owner attempted to hide which effectively gave up his code ownership.
TC shows how dangerous closed source can be and how open source is the only protection against those fears. No example could be better, really. You never know when a closed source company is going to have an agenda that you don't understand and take their product away because it suits some other purpose.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
I don't follow. As we had discussed offline, open source cannot go away. It's literally impossible. The fear of going away is purely a closed source concern. You were confused about which was which when we were discussing this. Open source is the only means of protecting against the fear that you have. Commercial products that people are still using actually go away all of the time. Open source cannot. It is as simple as that.
A great example would be Office 2003. That software isn't supported or available for sale anymore. And while OpenOffice in it's old form isn't really there any more, it's been replaced by LibreOffice.
Not replaced. OO is still very modern and up to date and competes with LO. OO is developed by the Apache Group.
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For those wondering where TrueCrypt went, it is now VeraCrypt as was mentioned above. Because the owners accidentally let TC fall into the PD it became de facto open source and got picked up and maintained instantly and audits continued making it still one of the most secure, most audited encryption suites out there. The open source project is hosted by none other than Microsoft themselves on CodePlex.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
I don't follow. As we had discussed offline, open source cannot go away. It's literally impossible. The fear of going away is purely a closed source concern. You were confused about which was which when we were discussing this. Open source is the only means of protecting against the fear that you have. Commercial products that people are still using actually go away all of the time. Open source cannot. It is as simple as that.
A great example would be Office 2003. That software isn't supported or available for sale anymore. And while OpenOffice in it's old form isn't really there any more, it's been replaced by LibreOffice.
Not replaced. OO is still very modern and up to date and competes with LO. OO is developed by the Apache Group.
oh, did they catch back up? I know when someone else took over the project for a while it went south, which is why LibreOffice even exists. I was unaware they had returned to parity, or near parity.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Let's also compare MS Office to LibreOffice. I get every type of support for LibreOffice that you can get for MS Office plus more. Again, the real world examples hold up that open source encourages better and broader support options. Closed source just gives you... less.
I still have the "fear" that an open source product will just go away, where MS Office just won't.
Though since they decommission it, it might as well, right?
I don't follow. As we had discussed offline, open source cannot go away. It's literally impossible. The fear of going away is purely a closed source concern. You were confused about which was which when we were discussing this. Open source is the only means of protecting against the fear that you have. Commercial products that people are still using actually go away all of the time. Open source cannot. It is as simple as that.
A great example would be Office 2003. That software isn't supported or available for sale anymore. And while OpenOffice in it's old form isn't really there any more, it's been replaced by LibreOffice.
Not replaced. OO is still very modern and up to date and competes with LO. OO is developed by the Apache Group.
oh, did they catch back up? I know when someone else took over the project for a while it went south, which is why LibreOffice even exists. I was unaware they had returned to parity, or near parity.
LO split off many years ago when Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice with the purchase. Oracle was not maintaining it well and so a group split off to form LibreOffice to protect OO from Oracle. The two were and have been developed in parallel ever since. Oracle immediately realized what they had done and donated the OpenOffice project to the Apache group who have run it for a very long time now. OO and LO now compete but there is talk of merging them as they are ideologically aligned.
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One of the examples that I had used about why closed source was risky... Microsoft used to have a couple different operating systems including DOS and Xenix. Both were closed source and both did not fit into the Microsoft "world view". Neither is available today, in any form. Just gone.
IBM, likewise, did the same thing with OS/2 which was an extremely popular operating system.
Also BeOS, an independent operating system was closed source and when the company failed the OS and the entire ecosystem collapsed as there was no way to update, patch or maintain the system.
Closed source encourages "dead ends" in code. And even the vendors you feel like you can trust, Microsoft, IBM, Google, etc. shut down projects and products all of the time. It's a very false sense of security to feel that MS will not stop making or supporting products that no longer make sense to their bottom line. MS is a business and supporting old software is extremely expensive. And often old software isn't just expensive to maintain but might actively compete with newer products (which is why Xenix was killed off.)
