Bonum Certa Men Certa

FOSS: The Low Cost of Exit

Another interesting statement from the recent CITI forum, was UWC custodian of IT, Professor Derek Keats' observation regarding an often overlooked aspect worth considering when implementing a technology, the cost of replacing the technology with a competitor, or as he put it - the cost of exit.

...So, my question... to everybody out there, what should the business model then be? If we are not going to start taking Linux out of the... out of the little developer sitting at home doing some work, how do we get it into the corporate environment? The corporates are not going Linux because they dont have a single throat to choke, and that is the expereince that we have.in the market today.

Well, I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer this, I think Stafford would do a much better job seeing as how he's using... seeing as how, basically, Novell is trying to be the single throat to choke, and that is one of the ways in which Linux... GNU/Linux is penetrating the corporate environment.

I think that, unless we have big players like Novell in this space, you're always going to find that is the situation. It's...It's... Even in my own institution, as I've said - we are an enterprise customer as well as an R&D organization - and on the enterprise side, even my own techies, I have difficulty convincing them that they should be using Linux and one fo the reasons we have actually... we are in fact still a customer of Novell is because we do have that... capability - we know that if we go back to them and something is broken, there is going to be considerable pressure for it to be fixed, and if it isn't fixed that we've got someone we can hold accountable, so y'know I think that is what Novell is trying to do, they're not the only player in that space by any stretch of the imagination, and one of the beauties about Free and Open Source Software in the enterprise, and one that we seldom hear the proprietary vendors talk about, is the relatively low cost of exit.

So if, for example, tomorrow I wanted to pull out... say SUSE and replace it with another distribution of Linux, I could do that on 100 servers over a few days at no cost, that is the beauty of it and I think one of the things... one of the selling points that companies like yours need to get across to your customers as well, is that the total cost of exit is also a major factor when it comes to implementing technology.

Professor Keats also spoke about how UWC has moved their datacenter from almost 100% proprietary platforms to nearly 90% non-proprietary, and how heterogeneity allows UWC to choose the best solution for the task, including taking into account when "assurances" are necessary, and when "risk" is acceptable.

I think that one has to recognize that there is heterogeneity in the Free and Open Source Software space. and there's times when you'll want to take one approach, and there're times when you'll want to take another approach.

So, if I look at UWC, for example, we were, in our datacenter almost 100% proprietary platforms, I would say that we are now pretty close to 90% not proprietary, and we've been able to make that change because those people that hold us financially accountable, we've been able to give them assurances and so we need a partner like Microsoft, like... Microsoft?(a misstatement)... like Novell(intended to say), like MP, like Red Hat, someone who we can say to our funders, the... the government of South Africa and the students, and those who have fiduciary responsibilities to the... for the continued existence of the university, that we've got some assurances, that we're not putting the institution at risk.

I think its important to understand that in that respect, we are a typical enterprise customer, but there are spaces where we can live with more risk.

So, for example in our student labs; so, in our student labs we don't need the assurances that we can get from an enterprise partner; so we can deploy things like OpenSolaris, which we have deployed, another... another Free and Open SOurce Software platform that we haven't actually spoken about.

and, on the desktop, we also deploy Ubuntu, so our choices are based on practical realities of the situation in which we live, so I think within the provincial government I think the same thing can apply, there are places, there are spaces where you have some fiduciary responsibility where you have to be... you have to have another level of accountability... but there are other spaces where you can deploy other technologies, and I think its important for us to understand that we are dealing with a heterogeneous environment, we don't have to be just one size fits all.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
 
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch
Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world
First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site
We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis
Links 25/09/2023: Patent News and Coding
some remaining links for today
Steam Deck is Mostly Good in the Sense That It Weakens Microsoft's Dominance (Windows)
The Steam Deck is mostly a DRM appliance
SUSE is Just Another Black Cat Working for Proprietary Giants/Monopolies
SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
IBM is Selling Complexity, Not GNU/Linux
It's not about the clients, it's about money
Birthday of Techrights in 6 Weeks (Tux Machines and Techrights Reach Combined Age of 40 in 2025)
We've already begun the migration to static
Linux Foundation: We Came, We Saw, We Plundered
Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
Security Isn't the Goal of Today's Software and Hardware Products
Any newly-added layer represents more attack surface
Linux Too Big to Be Properly Maintained When There's an Incentive to Sell More and More Things (Complexity and Narrow Support Window)
They want your money, not your peace of mind. That's a problem.
Modern Web Means Proprietary Trash
Mozilla is financially beholden to Google and thus we cannot expect any pushback or for Firefox to "reclaims the Web" a second time around
Godot 4.2 is Approaching, But After What Happened to Unity All Game Developers Should be Careful
We hope Unity will burn in a massive fire and, as for Godot, we hope it'll get rid of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Has Conquered the World, But Users' Freedom Has Not (Impediments Remain in Hardware)
Installing one's system of choice on a device is very hard, sometimes impossible
Another Copyright Lawsuit Against Microsoft (or its Proxy) for Misuse of Large Works by Chatbot
Some people mocked us for saying this day would come; chatbots are a huge disappointment and they're on very shaky legal ground
Privacy is Not a Crime, Reporting Hidden Facts Is Not a Crime Either
the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
United Workforce Always Better for the Workers
In the case of technology, it is possible that a lack of collective action is because of relatively high salaries and less physically-demanding jobs
Purge of Software Freedom and Its Voices
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer