Two Camps. Open Source vs M$
I had an interesting debate in the office this morning about different database types and the pros and cons of both, a subject i knew little about so i listened in for some information. MySQL came into the debate which turned the conversation towards the title of this post: Open Source vs M$.
I was very shocked to hear that several developers in the office are AGAINST open source, they say that allowing all to update a piece of software provides it with instability, little support and errors that are annoying to fix.
Some people in the office actually prefer M$ dominating software development technologies as everything would be ‘the same’ and ‘easy to use and find answers to questions’.
Some other developers argued for open source saying that support is plentiful, updates are quicker and bugs are easily fixed or avoided due to a massive community of developers updating the software continually.
So it seems from my limited time in the IT industry you are either FOR or AGAINST open source, there seems to be none without an opinion in IT.
I tend to play devil’s advocate so with so many open source fanboys in SoC, I regular rant about it’s problems.
The fact is that open source causes security problems, is usually inferior software (just look at your example, nobody realisticly things MySQL can complete with Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server), offers no real business model, provides little money for R&D and by it’s very nature is open to exploitation because one person does all the work and someone else just comes along and steals it. Meanwhile Bill Gates is funding his foundation to end poverty and improve healthcare and education to the tune of several billion dollars.
Question is, do I really believe that? :p.
Just read your blog post related to this subject and you make a very strong argument indeed, i can now see the pros and cons of open source more clearly hummmm maybe both need to exist for IT to progress? R&D for new featues and OpsenSource for refining some featurs for specific needs?
I know this is nearlly a direct contradiction to my final statement of the blog post where I said you could be wither FOR or AGAINST open source as I am now saying both!
Actually, I agree with you Raby. I think that folk in IT make a decision very early on in life which side of the fence they are going to sit on and vigorously defend their corner. That has certainly been my experience in both industry and academia so I’m not surprised to hear it is yours at work too.
Well I’ve got to disagree with you there Kieran. I spend a lot of my time with architects and developers from a range of companies and in my experience, even within my own company, this simply isn’t the case.
An intelligent and sensible systems architect will pick the ‘best’ platform, product and technology for a given project regardless of any emotional attachment to a particular camp. Often it’s a lack of skills which causes fear, and reactions against Technology X. Why develop in .NET when you already know J2EE? Why run SQL Server 2005 for a tiny website when MySQL will do the job?
Oh and, my company by the way – that’ll be MS
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