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Stories of Open Source Failures? 99

Posted by Cliff from the learning-from-the-mistakes dept.
ahodgkinson asks: "We often hear about companies, government agencies, schools and other organizations that migrate from Microsoft to open source based systems. We sometimes hear about organizations that evaluate Open Source and then elect to remain with their existing proprietary system. Both of these events represent represent a 'non-failure' for the open source movement. I'm interested in knowing more about the Open Source 'failure' events, namely when organizations move away from open source to a proprietary solution. Does anyone know of organizations that have moved from an Open Source based IT solution (back) to a proprietary system? Or where such a move was contemplated but not made? I'm specifically interested in larger organizations that have 'undone' a strategic move to Open Source, and their reasons why. Given your examples, is there anything we can learn from them?"
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Stories of Open Source Failures? More

Stories of Open Source Failures?

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  • obligitory.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, 2003 @06:45PM (#6186453)
    those receiving (and believing) threats from SCO for using Linux....

  • There are two (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @06:48PM (#6186484) Homepage Journal
    • VA Software
    • SCO
    Oh, and one more thing Balmer: we're not fooled by your clever pseudonym, we know its you.

  • Epic Games (Score:2, Informative)

    by Joe Tennies ( 564856 )
    Epic Games open sourced the UT engine in hopes of getting big sales on Linux and other non-Windows OSs. They eventually pulled back out of it. Basically it took too much time and resources with too little gain.

    • Re:Epic Games (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ann Coulter ( 614889 )
      They open sourced the game logic code, not the graphics rendering engine. Keep in mind that Epic is selling licenses to the Unreal engine for $350000.
    • but that was about selling games for Linux, which might in fact be tough thing to do for non-Windows OSs. I think the poster was asking about organizations choosing to build their datacenters and applications on Linux, doing so or significantly attempting to do so, and then switching to Windows for whatever reason.
      • I truly believe that Sony is the only company that can make Linux gaming a successes. I don't see why they aren't motivated to do so wen you consider that PS2 is based on Linux and the fact that M$ as stepped on its turf.

        Heck they can even include a Live ISO in their game CD so user won't have to install Linux.

        Come on Sony put your back into it!
        • The PS2 is not based on Linux. It can run Linux (as can the Xbox and Dreamcast), but it has nothing to do with Linux unless you buy the Linux kit.

      • Re:Epic Games (Score:3, Funny)

        by TC (WC) ( 459050 )
        but that was about selling games for Linux, which might in fact be tough thing to do for non-Windows OSs.

        It's probalby even harder to sell games for linux on the Windows OS!

        [RIMSHOT!]

  • Here's mine (Score:4, Funny)

    by PD ( 9577 ) * <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Thursday June 12, 2003 @06:57PM (#6186559) Homepage Journal
    This one time I started writing a program. I built my makefile, put COPYING into the directory, and even made a test program that printed out hello world. Then I got tired of it. I lost the source code a couple years ago. I think it was on a disk that I mistakenly threw away.

    It was an open source failure.

  • This is a hard statistic to gather... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by greck ( 79578 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @07:05PM (#6186606) Homepage
    ...because I'd wager that in most cases, people choosing to deploy open source solutions are driven, and do not accept failure. There have been plenty of times where I could have allowed an open source solution to fail, but persevered and eventually made it work the way I wanted. So while I've had plenty of setbacks, I've had precious few actual failures, if any.

    • > ...because I'd wager that in most cases, people choosing to deploy open source solutions are driven, and do not accept failure. There have been plenty of times where I could have allowed an open source solution to fail, but persevered and eventually made it work the way I wanted. So while I've had plenty of setbacks, I've had precious few actual failures, if any.

      OTOH, in my experience, techies who have a vested interest in the status quo have amazing abilities to "discover" that something new doesn'

      • Good point... usually, I end up with tasks that sound like "hey, when you get a minute, I've got this Red Sea here that needs parting before the CoB". So I've been "lucky", in the sense that when people's toes are on fire, they aren't as focused on the way they USED to have the fire put out, as they are how fast I can do it this time.

        And you know, to further complicate things, sometime the status quo is the right solution, and the shiny new features (with small, breakable parts not suitable for toddlers o

  • Still rather early. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @07:09PM (#6186633)
    It's still rather early in the game for there to be many failures. Though the momentum is growing, there are still very few businesses that have made the jump to Open Source. With only few businesses trying it there are only few chances for failures.

    I'm sure that there will be failures. There are always failures, even in proprietary software shops. There are many major IT projects that have been based on well known and respected proprietary applications like SAP or CA Unicenter an a slew of others that have failed miserably.

    The failures will be due to many factors, poor planning, poor implementation, poor software or who knows what else. There will always be failures and as Open Source spreads into enterprises around the world there will be IT projects based on Open Source that will be abysmal failures.

    But, the fact that there will be failures doesn't mean that the concept is a failure or even that the software is a failure. As I said there have been many multi-million dollar failures with the likes of SAP and CA but, I don't think that anyone would classify either of these companies or their products as failures.

    One last note: If you are looking for failure, you will surely find it. Why are you looking for failure?

    • Re:Still rather early. (Score:5, Informative)

      by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @07:18PM (#6186708)
      One last note: If you are looking for failure, you will surely find it. Why are you looking for failure?


      We learn from failure and ignore it at our peril. Read some books like "To Engineer is Human" and "Why Buildings Fall Down" to see how much more we learn from failure than from just keeping on doing things the old way.

      • Or, "if you do what you did, then you get what you got." If you got failure, then you want to know what you did so you don't do it again.

      • Re:Still rather early. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by andy@petdance.com ( 114827 ) <andy@petdance.com> on Friday June 13, 2003 @12:13AM (#6188173) Homepage
        We learn from failure and ignore it at our peril. Read some books like "To Engineer is Human" and "Why Buildings Fall Down" to see how much more we learn from failure than from just keeping on doing things the old way.

        "Every building code is written in blood."

      • Microsoft needs to find examples of open-source failures for future PR material. What better source of expertise is there than Slashdot? :)

        Seriously, though, it is likely the question's author is asking because his company's (SoftXS) clients are asking the same question. Alan uses open-source tools widely in his business, so an awareness of what can go wrong (especially from a political standpoint) and how to prevent it are of critical importance. Indeed, it is important for everyone in the business of pr

  • Hotmail (Score:3, Insightful)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @07:10PM (#6186639)
    Well, there's Microsoft switching from FreeBSD to Windows. But does that really count as a failure of open source? After all, other than during the many failed attempts at transitioning to Windows, Hotmail ran extremely well. And the cost factor is rather skewed when you get as many copies of Windows as you need for free. And it was corporate pride/image, not technology, that drove the change. Still, they did finally change. ('course then they blew up their DNS and ended up outsourcing to someone running it on *nix so I guess there is balance in the universe.)

  • When is a failure not really a failure? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stanwirth ( 621074 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @08:09PM (#6187001)

    On one project, we used PostGreSQL's GIS extensions, PostGIS under SuSE for the prototype, as the prior GIS DP methodology was to do all the GIS processing by hand on a windows desktop--which read and wrote .shp files. Gross! After developing a prototype DP stream in PostGIS, which is OGC compliant, it was fairly simple to migrate the DP methods (all SQL with OGC-compliant GIS data formats and stored procedures) to DB2 Spatial for the bulk processing, which could handle even larger data volumes, and much, much faster. By about an order of magnitude. Hours instead of days. Is it an "open source failure" to prototype a process using an open source tool, then migrate it to a proprietary product that's actually better? Both still ran under SuSE. It demonstrated the utility of doing the GIS processing required with a spatial database rather than a silly little pointy-clicky windows app. Without the OGC standard that both PostGIS and DB2 Spatial adhered to, however, it would have been a real nightmare.

  • Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, 2003 @08:13PM (#6187024)
    I could cite one example. A company I know of ([having worked] or [working] there), had their mailservers running on a dual processor linux box, using qmail and ezmlm. Due to the age of the machine, the scant resources thrown its way, and what appeared to be a general on-going cleansing of Unix-knowledgeable people from the IT staff, the machine started having problems. None of these were linux's or qmail's fault, considering how it was running mostly unattended and was holding up remarkably well under the swelling load as the staff kept growing.

    What killed it was a combination of
    1. managers thinking a 300 meg inbox, accessed over IMAP, was "too slow" (not to mention ate a lot of disk space)
    2. expecting the machine to handle internal people mailing 10 meg+ attachments to 900 people at once and not buckle under the load
    3. a rather apparent focus of the director-turned-VP of IT on only hiring people with MCSEs
    4. refusal to invest any time in upgrading the machine to something that would even be considered a low-end *desktop* by the standards of the day
    5. Microsoft's Exchange marketing spiel (shared folders! forms! scheduling!)


    Now, they're running their mail system using around 10 (!!) high-end servers running Exchange. It sounds like every week, at least one of the servers is brought down for "maintenance" to keep it running (read: rebooted). I'm positive that the only reason POP and IMAP were left enabled was because the bread-and-butter engineers would have likely either quit or ignored email completely if they'd been forced into using Outlook.

    A failure? Yeah, probably. For whom? I can't really be sure...
    • Now, they're running their mail system using around 10 (!!) high-end servers running Exchange. It sounds like every week, at least one of the servers is brought down for "maintenance" to keep it running (read: rebooted).

      I think this is pretty typical of Exchange. Remove the one or two UNIX servers doing temendous work for their size and replace them with two to five times as many Windows servers, which prove to be less reliable.

      These are the primary advantages of Windows and Exhange:

      1) Bigger budget re
      • Well, if they are some commercial unix solution, remember that there isn't any open source solution (yet) which does what exchange+outlook does (e.g. shared calendaring, ...)

        • Untrue. PHProjekt [phprojekt.com] and PHPGroupware [phpgroupware.com] both fill that function nicely, and they do it through a browser at a tiny fraction of the client CPU/memory overhead of Lookout!

          Ximian [ximian.com] also has a few nice products in that area.

          I am a big fan of web-based solutions anyway--they're easier to run and maintain, you have control of the presentation, and in a company using Windows clients, where the browser is such an integral, inseparable, vital part of the OS , users should be perfectly happy reading their IMAP mail wit

    • Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @08:40AM (#6189776)
      expecting the machine to handle internal people mailing 10 meg+ attachments to 900 people at once and not buckle under the load

      Incidentally, Exchange handles this easily - it'll store one copy of the attachment and just put a reference to it in 900 mailboxes.

      Microsoft's Exchange marketing spiel (shared folders! forms! scheduling!

      If you need these things, you'll need Exchange or Notes. Open source simply doesn't have those features. Sure, you could probably implement them using Open Source (i.e. writing Perl CGI scripts) but why would you?
      • There are several calendaring systems in the open-source world, either as open source applications or as commercially supported products that work well along-side open-source mail systems. Calendar features don't have to be directly integrated into a mail server or mail client to be useful, especially if the mail client can hand URLs to a web browser by clicking on them (which almost anything more GUI than pine can do.)

        As far as "why you'd implement them using open source", the answers include "one size d

      • Apparently you've never heard of Bynari [bynari.net] InsightServer [bynari.net]...

        ** DISCLAIMER: I don't work for them; I just heard some guys talking about their experiences with it on my LUG's [taclug.org] mailing list [taclug.org].

        About InsightServer

        InsightServer is a Linux based email server utilizing open source components to provide a highly reliable, scalable, and cost effective email solution for customers of all sizes.

        We built InsightServer to facilitate complete messaging and collaboration capabilities within the company. InsightServer

  • Which were not failures of the FOSS per se, but represented usually the success of an incumbent with a strong preference for Windows winning a political victory, and in a few cases the FOSS exposing existing problems and being blamed for those problems.

    For an example of the former, consider a client that owed me AUD$3000.00 when they went bankrupt from accumulated incompetence. They had a Linux system replacing a Novell box (and incidentally taking a load off several Windows boxes) at a site with a variety of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 95C, 98, NT4) with a 13GB x 2 RAID1 array and a UPS - and random networking issues which appeared to be in the wires since we replaced everything else and it still went funny every so often.

    Aaaanyway, an incumbent manager had achieved "golden boy" status by signing up a contract on the other side of Australia which was a complete shoe-in (my cat could have done it, just tuck agreement and pen under collar, put in pet crate, address and ship) and really liked Windows.

    He ran their time clock on his own Win98 machine and refused to acknowledge that this was an idiotic thing to do, even after many times losing most or all of a morning's time records because the machine had crashed before or during the arrival of their workers. He eventually would up shutting the machine down at night and having the BIOS wake it up at 4:30AM, thus cutting his data losses down to oince amonth or so... I'm sure you get the idea.

    Mr Golden Boy had arranged to get me kicked out of the place, bills unpaid, on a Monday and that Thursday they had a power failure. Shortly afterwards, one of their staff walked past the server room and noticed a buzzer sounding and a light, so being the helpful little sod that they were, they switched off the offending device - the server's UPS.

    When the power came back but not network services, somebody else figured out what had happened, and switched the UPS back on. After ten minutes, still no joy, so they called me in. Not Mr Golden Boy, not the uberManager, they got one of the few remaining staff with a clue, one of three in the place that I cared about, and got her to ring and plead for them. Scum!

    I drove half an hour to get to the place, looked at the server and it was mid-fsck (13GB software RAID one, old machine, you get the picture). As I left the server room I met Mr uberManager, who asked what was going on. I told him that the machine had been repairing itself after being interrupted and that it was taking a long time because of the large hard disk capacity, probably twenty minutes to go and it would fix itself. Mr uberManager nodded, turned away, and I turned around - to find Mr Golden Boy looking like Zeus on a bad day, red-angry and fit to apoplexy because their company's server and all of its data were going to be OK! What chance did I or FOSS stand in the face of an attitude like that? Hint: it comes between "9/(" and "-/_" on your keyboard.

    For an example of the latter, consider the first round of StarOffice Wars [fdns.net] some years ago, where they lawyers in question had sucky/random document structure and had to pay the ferryman anyway when their old Kyocera printer died and the new one had slightly different layout.

    In summary, you will get different answers depending on how people percieve your question. I predict that there will be many political failures, and a very few FOSS failures reported.

  • Honeypot (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, 2003 @10:00PM (#6187512)
    At work we were running a honeypot for about 6 months to collect some data for an upcoming security conference. It was a debian linux machine with ssh, httpd, bind, and nfs running on it. Unfortunately no new exploits were showing up on bugtraq at the time and all the scans we were logging with snort were for windows vulnerabilities. So we switched over to Win2K/SP3 and IIS and within 2 weeks the box was busted in half and we got the data we needed for our case study.

  • Mod me down, self-inflicted troll (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Thursday June 12, 2003 @10:41PM (#6187680)
    Slashcode?
  • Search SourceForge for "IRC".
  • We were considering moving an application from HP/UX to Linux, but decided not to. The problem was not strictly an OSS one though - it turns out that Sybase running on Linux is kinda crappy, and the software we are running only works with Sybase.
  • "In a good cause, there are no failures"

  • Mozilla failure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, 2003 @01:19AM (#6188413)
    I convinced a small office of around 10 computers to switch to Mozilla for mail and browsing. It was a disaster.

    It ran slow on their machines (some 200mhz, some 1ghz+ which ran fine). Sometimes wierd behaviour would start to occur. My solution was to get them to change the theme from modern to classic, or classic to modern, and that would solve their problems 95% of the time. It didn't handle attachments well all the time. Sometimes dates on e-mails were wierd. Occasionally contact lists would disappear.

    In short, no-one liked it. When they returned to Outlook (Express) they were happy again. Despite it's propensity towards viruses, etc, it looked nice, worked well and fast, and did the job. Really disheartening for me, being unable to find a suitable replacement.

    On the upside, Firebird looks promising and I hope the new mozilla mail clients actually work properly. Though for this particular place it will probably be a while before they consider open source email clients again. Firebird should be easy to roll out though. A few of them, after realising IE wasn't the only browser, switched to Opera instead of Mozilla - so that's a positive sign.

  • Actually (Score:2, Insightful)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 )
    We often hear about companies, government agencies, schools and other organizations that migrate from Microsoft to open source based systems

    We do, don't we? I'd actually like to hear some follow ups on these stories that are always promptly reported as a victory of sorts.

    For example, how long it took to actually migrate x,000 of servers and workstations after the [government | company | school] decided to "give M$ the shaft". How much money for re-training users? How much lost (or gained) productivity?

    • Re:Actually (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Phantasmo ( 586700 )
      You have to look beyond the fact that "money is being spent". You have to look at where it's going.

      If you stick with Windows, it's all going to Bill Gates' pocket. If you move to GNU/Linux or *BSD you spend the money that you save in licensing on training users and perhaps hiring support staff. The difference is that the money is going to many people in your community rather than one rich jerk on the other side of the continent who'll never let it go.

      You'll never save money on a large-scale deployment of

  • Client Moved Back To Win2k (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fuzzybunny ( 112938 ) on Friday June 13, 2003 @04:42AM (#6189004) Homepage Journal

    I set up a network for a previous client, a large private middle school, based around FreeBSD/Apache/MySQL/BIND. It was a nice implementation; very secure, utterly reliable and as much open source as I could get in there (I was not able to move some servers because of Windows apps the previous guy had installed on a few boxes that they just *had* to have.

    Our initial plan for this client was to move everything to Linux-based Xterminals (after all, what do they do? Edit some word docs, look at web pages, send mail) but management decided that the time wasted by some clueless idiot coming in after we'd left who didn't know what he was doing would outweigh the cost savings.

    So, I snuck FreeBSD in as their monitoring, web, DNS, and firewall server, not to mention software repository, UPS controller, and groupware server, along with a host of other functions.

    I still check up on their infrastructure occasoinally, and have noticed that the guy who took over their support after we'd left has been steadily moving everything back to Windows 2000 as fast as he can; he runs a small IT "consultancy" and just can't be bothered to learn how to use something that doesn't require point-and-click.

    Regardless, I consider it a minor victory that some of the services I set up (firewall, monitoring, etc.) have withstood any attempts to downgrade them to M$ brokenware--if only because nobody could figure out a way to do it better and easier....

    Sigh. Oh well, they paid their invoices on time.

    • So, in other words, you completely ignored their needs, current infrastructure, and future usage requirements, installed something that they neither needed, wanted, nor could admin themselves, and they're now forced to move it all back?

      I'm not trying to be harsh or antagonistic here, but that's how it winds up reading to me; especially since it seems you knew that the actual maintenance/day to day running of the network would go to somebody else....

      • I didn't read it that way at all. Apparently they needed and wanted the function that the software provided, or they'd not have paid him so easily for his services. He left it to the company to hire an appropriate admin for the system, which they did not do. IMHO, it is the company's fault for not finding an approprate admin, as well as the admin's fault for not telling them he wasn't experienced enough (and didn't care to learn) to support their system! However, it's the company's money, so if they want to

        • Many is the time that I've seen contractors come in, do something that has nothing to do with what the company needs, and get paid, quite cheerfully; after all, the company doesn't quite know *what* it needs, hence it brings in contractors.

  • A Recent Failure... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PapaSMURFFS ( 592303 ) <PapaSMURFFS@yaho o . c om> on Friday June 13, 2003 @09:01AM (#6189900)
    I can think of one failure I had recently trying to get the evangelical work done for OSS.

    At my work we are currently running a Win2k network. A piece of software we have to run over the network is this thing called âoeThe Agency Managerâ which is a closed-source buggy-assed piece of software. We toyed around with the idea of switching to a Linux (my bossâ(TM) suggestion) or BSD (my suggestion) network, but our use of T.A.M. wouldnâ(TM)t allow us. We also fooled around with WINE for a bit, and another agency which uses the same software has already done that and found that it still provides performance benefits. Unfortunately we were informed by the makers of T.A.M. that they only offer support for Win2k or WinNT networks, not *nix nor Novell. Because the software was so buggy we had no choice but to continue with Win2k.

    I know that at this point some of you are doubtlessly thinking âoeWhy the hell didnâ(TM)t you just find/make an Open Source alternative to T.A.M.â and I can tell you the answer is the other big failure in the Open Source model. T.A.M. is the paramount software piece for the insurance industry; however, it is not glamorous in the least. Iâ(TM)ve found that most Open Source developers would rather program a new web browser, or tool around with encryption, that make a bloated database front-end/accounting software and conversion tools from T.A.M.â(TM)s obscure data format (a db3 variant). As Open Source developers we would rather do something interesting then something needed because we are doing the work for free. This is probably (IMO) the biggest failure with the Open Source model.

    • Re:A Recent Failure... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This really isn't a failure of opensource. It is a failure of the insurance industry, and specifically your company to come up to the plate and take care of the situation. Open source is not your free software repository which you can take from without giving back. Hire a competent coder to look into doing an opensource of TAM.
      Not only does the general economy improve by having an employee that has ability to spend money, but you can sleep well at night knowing that you have also given something back to
  • It seems that this school-network-linux initiative in Mexico failed.

  • Sourceforge.net (Score:2, Informative)

    by Horny Smurf ( 590916 )
    Sourceforge was originally GPL open source, but they did a proprietary fork and abandoned the GPL version (they had copyright on the code, and rewrite the parts they didn't).


    Late last year, they switched from mysql to db2.

  • But... (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )
    I'm confused. Open source failures? That sounds like a contradictio in termina (or however you want to spell that)... Now excuse me, gotta go see my shrink.

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