CIOs Jumping On The Free Software Bandwagon
from the good-for-them dept
For years, we've heard claims that, for all the wonders of "free software," the "real" CIO would never use free software, as they would need to have a clear monetary relationship with the provider to ensure things wouldn't go bad. Of course, that's pretty silly. Lots of IT departments have made use of all sorts of free software such as Linux and Apache, but a new study suggests that CIOs are quite comfortable with using free software, finding that "76% of CIOs surveyed say they use free software at the enterprise level and 88% said they have free software deployed at the department level."Now some of this may be driven by standard free utilities like Adobe Reader, but many CIOs reports using things like OpenOffice, Google Docs, Skype and others. In fact, the study found that 54% of the CIOs for large organizations admitted to using more than 10 free software products (if you drop it to six or more, the number goes up to 84%). CIOs seemed split down the middle in preferring open source software to proprietary but still free products, which isn't really a huge surprise.
Not surprisingly, the CIOs who use so much free software say it's not just the "free" part that makes this happen. They still put the software through the same testing they put fee-based software, but 81% also admit that not having to pay license fees is one of the "key benefits" to going free.
While this might not be all that surprising overall, it is a pretty good view of the general impression of "free software" in the enterprise, suggesting that it's hardly a taboo or something to be avoided.
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Filed Under: cios, free, free software, software
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Free Software vs Freeware
If you want to understand the difference, compare Mozilla Firefox with Microsoft Internet Explorer; the first one is Free Software which earns a tidy income for its developers, while the latter is freeware being offered with no coherent business model from the company which owns it. Which one is going from strength to strength, steadily gaining market share, and which one struggles just to stay in the game?
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Re: Free Software vs Freeware
Gratis does not mean Libre!
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Re: Free Software vs Freeware
As stated elsewhere, open source software adds the benefit of being highly adaptable for any given implementation. The corporation benefits from the efforts of developers that worked on the project before they adopted the software, and the open source community benefits from continued evolution of the project as it is adapted from one environment to the next.
"Freeware" is locked-down. It works for one's environment, or it does not. "Beer for free" is not at all a bad thing, but if you can't tweak the recipe you might be left with a bitter aftertaste, if you are able to choke it down at all.
Free(dom) is such an abused term these days.
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There's a great article too about how free/open source software has helped Governments that otherwise can't afford licensing costs, along side the advantage of being at less risk to vendor lock-in.
http://linuxologist.com/advocacy/how-linux-helped-5-poverty-stricken-governments/
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Having spent many years working with open source...
It's worthwhile to remember that no middle manager will risk their career on a piece of unsupported software (or at least, not supported by a commercial contract), something which is a key dynamic in enabling commercial open source businesses.
And, in the end, I don't see a lot of IT budgets being substantially reduced, it's just a lot of cost displacement. CIO have a schizophrenic task of both reducing costs and increasing their budgets, open source and 'free' software accomplishes both admirably well...
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I assume that unsupported means no license, no contract.
So, there is no middle management in charge of websites? A majority of website servers are apache.
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Re:
On top of that, Apache comes as part of RHEL, so if you have RHEL support, Apache is supported.
Yes, I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but no middle manager is just downloading and installing Apache in a vacuum....
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Re:
In case you are interested...
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It's the blame game
Whereas one would assume the smart questions are:
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Re: It's the blame game
As a company's data grows, use of that data hopefully matures and the capabilities of the platform(s) within your IT organization allows the company to leverage that data effectively.
So paying for "support" or investing resources into a free software product should also be done looking for the ability to influence the roadmap of those softwares, both in terms of application functionality and system interoperability.
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Re: CIOs Jumping On The Free Software Bandwagon
What are your computing capabilities while on the road (desktop, notepad, netbook, pda/smartphone)?
What is your current infrastructure?
What functionality do you need (view, edit and/or download attachments)?
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Small vs Big Businesses
Most of my work has been for small businesses, where the boss owns the company. Such outfits have less vested interests in large deployments of proprietary software, and they find it easier to understand the benefits of Free Software, including lower compliance costs in having to keep track of licences. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission before making a radical change to your system configuration, you just do it.
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