[Opensource] OT: Total cost of ownership

[jsadove at beltion.net]

Geeta,

Here are just 7 places you can look. I'm baffled that you can't find material.

Regardless, it sounds like you're up against the usual nonsense in corporate
Umerica. The belief that quality, security, TCO or any of these other issues are
what decides almost any issue in corporate Umerica is (nothing personal) naive.
As we have learned in the last few years, as well, even profitablity is not at
the top of the list of corporate objectives or bases for decision-making. 

Umerica is #13 on the list of Transparency International's business corruption
register, behind all of Europe except for Italy and tied with Japan. I still
think that position is a little generous. This is not a good indication,
particularly when you consider the fact that, as we all know, things are a lot
worse than they appear in this regard rather than a lot better.

Umerica and its companies have almost ceased to "improve" themselves. There is
no longer even any respectability attached to such an effort; it's all about
self-enrichment and looking after your own and the management class has adopted
this outlook almost universally.

Therefore, if you succeed in your quest to prove that Open Source/J2EE, etc. are
better for all the empirically better reasons, you have just lucked out...
either in the management you are convincing or because the personal
aggrandizement/enrichment to attention span quotient is not attractive enough.

Eric Raymond is a good source of material on Open Source vs. Proprietary issues:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/

Opensource.org has a fair amount of advocacy stuff. You can look around and find
stuff on the other sites as well. 
http://www.opensource.org/

http://www.osafoundation.org/index.htm
http://www.osdl.org/
http://www.osdn.com/

http://egovos.org/ (eg.Testimony before NYC council)


> 
> Hi everyone:
> 
> First, I'd like apologize for posting this off-topic question, and if people
> would prefer to respond to me off-list, that would be fine with me - thanks
> in
> advance for any and all answers!
> 
> The company I work with has recently merged into a larger company.  One
> result
> of this merger (of five smaller companies) is that many of my original
> company's technological decisions are now being questioned, or at least
> being
> looked into.  One such decision is a debate over whether to stay the course
> with Java/J2EE or to go over to .NET.  I have been put in a committee (with
> the
> grandiose title of "Web technology assesssment committee") to look into
> this.  I have been actively trying to argue the case for Java and in fact in
> the interim report that we submitted, five of the seven people in the
> committee
> have voted for going with J2EE (while only one said we should go .NET and
> the
> other suggested the use of both).  I had assumed that this would therefore
> persuade management to what I consider is the sane point of view, but
> apparantly there are people in the managerial circles who I believe are
> behind
> the scenes trying to put forth the idea that .net is the better way to go. 
> One
> argument that i hear is favoured is that "Total cost of ownership" is lower
> in
> the .net case..  I have tried many many times to show the advantages (both
> monetary and otherwise) of open source, (as well as the disadvantages of
> clamping ourselves to one vendor) but rather than see the advantages of OS,
> management seems to want to look into the "maybe costs" and the "hidden
> costs"
> (which don't seem to be articulated enough, in my opinion) and I believe
> they
> (maybe honestly) think that open source and free products "cannot" be
> true..(the old "nothing in life is free" argument -yaaawwn..)
> 
> So my question is this: does anybody here have any kind of "Total cost of
> ownership" figures (for .net vs. a j2ee solution like linux/apache/expresso
> or
> linux/apache/jboss) that I can bring to management's attention?  I have
> searched the web with not much success - most of the searches yield results
> in
> particular categories (like operating system Linux vs. Windows etc.)  Also,
> it
> has been suggested that training costs for J2EE are prohibitive (another
> factor
> in the TCO argument)..  Of course not really knowing much about the M$ world
> doesn't help me here - for example, is it really easier/cheaper to learn
> .net
> than it is j2ee?  Also, we hear a lot about Microsoft "clamping down" on
> security with their new MS2003 server - basing their approach apparantly on
> Apache's model of "allow nothing except what you absolutely have to". Is
> this
> credible?
> 
> If anybody has links or stories, which are not inherantly biased (so nothing
> from microsoft.com or sun.com may be appropriate!!), please share them with
> me:  I would really appreciate it..:)
> 
> Thank you very much for your time,
> Geeta
> 
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