On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 2:07 PM, Tony Caduto
<tony_caduto@amsoftwaredesign.com> wrote:
> David Fetter wrote:
>>
>> What they want to have is a huge entity they can blame when everything
>> goes wrong. They're not interested in the actual response times or
>> even in the much more important time-to-fix because once they've
>> blamed Oracle, they know the responsibility is no longer on their
>> shoulders.
>
> That is only a perceived sense of risk avoidance, if you read the EULA etc
> that ship with Oracle, MS SQL server etc, they are not responsible
> for anything that may happen to your data. Sure management could blame
> them, but that's about it. They would get the same amount of satisfaction
> from blaming the FOSS community. No matter what management says any blame
> rests squarely on their shoulders and the people they have entrusted to
> create their corp projects/products when something goes wrong.
I had a boss (great one, really) who was getting a lot of crap from
upstairs about our use of open source, and that was one of the PHB's
arguments above him. When he parroted the thing about having someone
to blame, I asked which would let him sleep better at night, having
someone to blame, or a system that didn't break? I made it clear that
all he'd get was someone to blame, and nothing else.
At that time I'd tested several commercial components and found them
wanting compared to open source. One component was LDAP, and at the
time, OpenLDAP was a solid, fast, lightweight choice, while everything
else was a hog. The recommended memory for a linux OpenLDAP server
was something like 256M, while the memory for the "big name" vendor
was something like 1 Gig minimum, with recommendations for 2Gig or
more.
I think he repeated what I'd said to him to upper management, and we
went ahead and installed OpenLDAP, and it was still running complaint
free the day I left years later.