Stories of Open Source Failures? 99
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?"
obligitory.... (Score:4, Funny)
There are two (Score:4, Funny)
Epic Games (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Epic Games (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Epic Games (Score:2)
Re:Epic Games (Score:1)
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!
Re:Epic Games (Score:1)
Re:Epic Games (Score:3, Funny)
It's probalby even harder to sell games for linux on the Windows OS!
[RIMSHOT!]
Re:Epic Games (Score:2)
Here's mine (Score:4, Funny)
It was an open source failure.
This is a hard statistic to gather... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: This is a hard statistic to gather... (Score:2)
> ...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'
Re: This is a hard statistic to gather... (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
Re:Still rather early. (Score:2)
Re:Still rather early. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Every building code is written in blood."
Re:Still rather early. (Score:1)
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)
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Re:Hotmail (Score:1, Informative)
The inital transition attempt to NT4 failed for various reasons and required Microsoft to maintain the *nix backend while transitioning the web frontends to NT. I'm uncertain if it was FreeBSD on the backend though - I was under the impression that FreeBSD was used for the web server frontends and Solaris with some sort of custom data store was used for the backend. Technically, I don't know why they weren't able to tra
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Re:Hotmail (Score:1)
Where did you get the information to the contrary?
Re:Hotmail (Score:3, Interesting)
Which goes to show that Windows doesen't scale, isen't robust and isen't easy to use.
If it took Microsoft themselved over 3 years to migrate off of FreeBSD to Windows - JUST FOR A SILLY WEBMAIL SYSTEM - imagine the pain of migrating somthing complex.
Windows is an ok server for new
Re:Hotmail (Score:3, Funny)
Windows NT 3.X was the first attempt. NT 4 was just the one that failed so visibly that most people think it was the first.
Since Microsoft did manage to finally get Hotmail transitioned as a whole.
Maybe all that Hotmail spam is really Windows kernel source code mailing itself to the world...
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Re:Hotmail (Score:1)
Would you like to share with us why you consider Hotmail a "silly little system"? Do you perchance run something bigger at home, maybe? At work? Maybe it's just perception but it seems to me that Hotmail is down right massive.
It may be a piece of shit service (IMO), but ~100 million people who use it every day and the folks that actually run it would disagree on the "silly little" part, I think.
Unless you're just calling it "silly" because it's owned by Microsoft. That
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Hotmail is a toy compaired to just about anything. If Windows can cut it with a webmail - why would I use it for anything important like, say, financial transations?
Pair.com services their 100,000 customers (each with several email addresses) with webmail without breaking a sweat using FreeBSD and Squirrelmail. No downtime, not hacks, no nothing. It just works.
Have you ever worked for a company that runs a large Windows
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Yeah, I know. Pair is much larger than Hotmail.
They host 80,000 domains - fully backed up, with databases, with client compiled software, with security, with barly any down time.
Hotmail can barly stay online for more than a week.
Re:Hotmail (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps you're confused. Let me guess - you subscribe to that myth that goes "OMFG M$ IS RUNNING HOTMAIL ON BSD!!!"?
Pair.com
I don't quite see the relationship here. Do you know how many active users Hotmail has? "Several email addresses"? Is that a joke?
Guess what Microsoft uses for their financial records
So? Do you know what they run on those AS/400 boxes? I know companies that are all-Microsoft shops and still keep HP-UX
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
No it not on FreeBSD anymore - Hotmail use to be relaible and fast. It crashes and has security problems - so I grather they did migrate to over to Windows.
BTW, off the top of my head, the Phillips-Conoco data center in Houston serves 120,000 transactions a day on six clustered Windows 2000 AS boxes.
120,000 transactions? - I'm *not* impressed - that's barely a transaction a second. Shit, I have a $2,000,000 manufacuter that does more transaction from the factory
Re:Hotmail (Score:1)
Hardly trying to "impress" you, because...
SINGLE 486 OS/2 box.
That's the problem with Windows - it doesen't scale
That's a nice, sweeping statement with no factual backup whatsoever. Companies like EBay and Dell would disagree with you. But what do they know, right?
You're oversimplifying the type of rig required to run a service like Hotmail. I can ascribe that to either naivete or just plain hostility towards Microsoft, I guess.
Re:Hotmail (Score:2)
Link (Score:2)
When is a failure not really a failure? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:When is a failure not really a failure? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When is a failure not really a failure? (Score:1, Informative)
(guess where I work?
Re:When is a failure not really a failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely not. You used an Open Source tool to minimize the costs associated with prototyping, learned a lot during the process, and deferred the tremendous cost of DB2 until absolutely necessary. Also, there was some chance that PostgreSQL would have been totally sufficient, and the prototype would have become the production system.
I say it was the most prudent path you could have taken.
Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:5, Interesting)
What killed it was a combination of
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...
Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:2)
Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:2)
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)
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?
Exchange-like Features on Open Source (Score:2)
As far as "why you'd implement them using open source", the answers include "one size d
Re:Exchange-like Features on Open Source (Score:2)
Re:Exchange-like Features on Open Source (Score:2)
Re:Exchange-like Features on Open Source (Score:2)
Re:Based on that definition of "failure"... (Score:1)
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].
I have had several "Open Source failures"... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I have had several "Open Source failures"... (Score:1)
Politics sucks.
Re:I have had several "Open Source failures"... (Score:1)
you don't really have to know much about ipsec to realize that yeah the public keys are okay to mail out, but not the private keys.
do you think there is a reason i don't werk there anymore?
Re:I have had several "Open Source failures"... (Score:2)
Honeypot (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Honeypot (Score:2)
Re:I don't know about organizations... (Score:1)
Mod me down, self-inflicted troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
Simple (Score:2)
Re:Simple (Score:1)
Sorta (Score:2)
As The Man Asimov said... (Score:2)
Mozilla failure (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Re:Client Moved Back To Win2k (Score:3, Insightful)
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....
Re:Client Moved Back To Win2k (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Client Moved Back To Win2k (Score:2)
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)
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)
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
Red Escolar (School Network) (Score:1)
Sourceforge.net (Score:2, Informative)
Late last year, they switched from mysql to db2.
But... (Score:2)