Reglas de la competencia relativa en los asuntos contenciosos civiles

is cheaper than using GNU/Linux with J2EE. This Giga Research study sponsored by Microsoft compared the costs incurred by five large and medium-size companies that used J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) with the costs incurred by seven large and medium-size companies that used .Net applications to develop Web portal

applications. For large corporations, the cost of using Microsoft products (for

development and deployment plus three years of maintenance) was 28% less than for J2EE/Linux. For medium-size companies, the Microsoft products were 25% cheaper. However, once again, the TCO values all hinge on the assumptions made. As

CIO.com points out, the Microsoft-based solution was cheaper primarily because the GNU/Linux systems were configured using extremely expensive proprietary products

such as those from Oracle (for the database system) and BEA (for the development system).

A company can certainly choose to use these particular products when developing with GNU/Linux, but not all organizations will choose to do so. Indeed, the acronym “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl) was coined because that combination is extremely popular when creating web portal applications. MySQL and PostgreSQL are popular OSS/FS database programs; PHP, Python, and Perl are popular OSS/FS development languages (and tie easily into the rest of the

development suite provided by OSS/FS operating systems). An obvious question to ask is, “Why were extremely common configurations (such as LAMP) omitted in this Microsoft-funded study?” CIO.com reports Giga’s answer: “Microsoft didn’t ask them [to] look at any such companies.”

Again, I give credit to Giga for clearly reporting who funded the study. Indeed, if your situation closely matches Giga’s study, your costs might be very similar. But it would be a mistake to conclude that different situations would necessarily have the same results.

You may also want to see MITRE Corporation’s business case study of OSS, which considered military systems.

Most of these items assume that users will use the software unmodified, but even if the OSS/FS software doesn’t do everything required, that is not necessarily the end of the story. One of the main hallmarks of OSS/FS software is that it can be modified by users. Thus, any true TCO comparison should consider not just the products that fully meet the requirements, but the existing options that with some modifications could meet the requirements. It may be cheaper to start with an existing OSS/FS program, and improve it, than to start with a proprietary program that has all of the necessary functionality. Obviously, the total TCO including such costs varies considerably depending on the circumstances.

Brendan Scott (a lawyer specializing in IT and telecommunications law) argues that the long run TCO of OSS/FS must be lower than proprietary software. Scott’s paper makes some interesting points, for example, “TCO is often referred to as the total cost of ‘ownership’... [but] ‘ownership’ of software as a concept is anathema to proprietary software, the

fundamental assumptions of which revolve around ownership of the software by the vendor. ... The user [of proprietary software] will, at best, have some form of (often extremely restrictive) license. Indeed, some might argue that a significant (and often uncosted)

component of the cost of ‘ownership’ of proprietary software is that users don’t own it at all.” The paper also presents arguments as to why GPL-like free software gives better TCO results than other OSS/FS licenses. Scott concludes that “Customers attempting to evaluate a free software v. proprietary solution can confine their investigation to an evaluation of the ability of the packages to meet the customer’s needs, and may presume that the long run TCO will favor the free software package. Further, because the licensing costs are additional dead weight costs, a customer ought to also prefer a free software solution with functionality shortfalls where those shortfalls can be overcome for less than the licensing cost for the proprietary solution.”

Microsoft’s first TCO study comparing Windows to Solaris (mentioned earlier) is not a useful starting point for estimating your own TCO. Their study reported the average TCO at sites using Microsoft products compared to the average TCO at sites using Sun systems, but although the Microsoft systems cost 37% less to own, the Solaris systems handled larger databases, more demanding applications, 63% more concurrent connections, and 243% more hits per day. In other words, the Microsoft systems that did less work cost less than systems

that did more work. This is not a useful starting point if you’re using TCO to help determine which system to buy - to make a valid comparison by TCO, you must compare the TCOs of systems that meet your requirements. A two-part analysis by Thomas Pfau (see part 1 and part 2) identifies this and many other flaws in the study.

There are some studies that emphasize Unix-like systems, not OSS/FS, which claim that that there are at least some circumstances where Unix-like systems are less costly than Windows. A Strategic Comparison of Windows vs. Unix by Paul Murphy is one such paper. It appears that many of these arguments would also apply to OSS/FS systems, since many of them are Unix-like.

Be sure that you actually compute your own TCO; don’t just accept a vendor’s word for it, and in particular, don’t just accept a vendor’s claims for the TCO of its competitors. In 2004 Newham council chose Microsoft products over a mixed solution, reporting that their selected solution had a lower TCO according to an independent study. Yet when the reports were made public in September 2004, it was discovered that it was Microsoft who created the cost figures of switching to their competitor - not an independent source at all. Any vendor (open or closed) can tell you why their competitor costs more money, if you naïvely let them. Again, it’s TCO that matters, not just certain cost categories. However, given these large differences in certain categories, in many situations OSS/FS has a smaller TCO than

proprietary systems. At one time it was claimed that OSS/FS installation took more time, but nowadays OSS/FS systems can be purchased pre-installed and automatic installers result in equivalent installation labor. Some claim that system administration costs are higher, but studies like Sun’s suggest than in many cases the system administration costs are lower, not higher, for Unix-like systems (at least Sun’s). For example, on Unix-like systems it tends to be easier to automate tasks (because you can, but do not need, to use a GUI) - thus over time many manual tasks can be automated (reducing TCO). Retraining costs can be significant - but now that GNU/Linux has modern GUI desktop environments, there’s anecdotal evidence that this cost is actually quite small. I’ve yet to see serious studies quantitatively evaluating this issue, but anecdotally, I’ve observed that people familiar with other systems are generally able to sit down and use modern GNU/Linux GUIs without any training at all. In short, it’s often hard to show that a proprietary solution’s purported advantages really help offset their demonstrably larger costs in other categories when there’s a competing mature OSS/FS product for the given function.

Factors that need to be included in a TCO analysis is switching costs; most people remember to include the costs of switching to something, but forget to include the extremely important costs of switching away from it later. As noted in ???, Linux Adoption in the Public Sector: An Economic Analysis by Hal R. Varian and Carl Shapiro (University of California, Berkeley; 1 December 2003), “a system that will be difficult to switch away from in the future, in part because the lock-in associated with using such a system[,] will reduce their future bargaining power with their vendor. Vendors always have some incentive to make it difficult for users to switch to alternatives, while the users will generally want to preserve their flexibility. From the user’s viewpoint, it is particularly important to make sure that file formats, data, system calls, APIs, interfaces, communication standards, and the like are well enough documented that it is easy to move data and programs from one vendor to another.” Obviously, someone who elects to use a proprietary program that locks them into that specific program will almost certainly pay much higher prices in future updates, because the vendor can exploit the user’s difficulty in changing.

Clearly, if one product is significantly more productive than another where it’s used, it’s worth paying more for it. However, it’s clear that at least for major office tasks, GNU/Linux systems are about as usable as Windows systems. For example, one usability study comparing

GNU/Linux to Microsoft Windows XP found that it was almost as easy to perform most major office tasks using GNULinux as with Windows: “Linux users, for example, needed 44.5 minutes to perform a set of tasks, compared with 41.2 minutes required by the XP users. Furthermore, 80% of the Linux users believed that they needed only one week to become as competent with the new system as with their existing one, compared with 85% of the XP users.” The detailed report (in German) is also available.

Does this mean that OSS/FS always have the lowest TCO? No! As I’ve repeatedly noted, it depends on its use. But the notion that OSS/FS always has the larger TCO is simply wrong.

8. Non-Quantitative Issues

In fairness, I must note that not all issues can be quantitatively measured, and to many they are the most important issues. The issues important to many include freedom from control by another (especially a single source), protection from licensing litigation, flexibility, social / moral / ethical issues, and innovation.