HappySqurriel said:
Soleron said:
Government IT contracts with Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, HP etc. etc.
replace it all with free software running in-house developed and maintained programs for vastly less, and run it on hardware that would have to be scrapped if forced to upgrade from XP to Win7/8.
When you give IBM a maintenence contract the first thing they do is hire 30 people to do it. Why not hire those people yourself, cut out the overhead, and get loyalty?
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Having met government IT people (at the municipal, provincial and federal level) that would be disastrously bad ...
It has been my experience that the larger the corporation a person comes from, and the longer they have been there, the worse they are as an IT professional. While there are exceptions to this, governmental IT departments are full of employees who are more interested in their pension than technology and the only way they can do their job is because it has been simplified by companies like Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, HP, etc.
I don't disagree with the concept that companies could save a fortune by moving towards Linux (both as servers and on the desktop), but a large portion of the reason why governments choose to hire large companies to design and implement their infastructure is because their employees are not good enough to do it.
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The other problem with this is you create a silo. When you use customized software you develop a skilled worker, yes, but you also develop a worker with certain job security. Again, not a bad thing, that is until they get promoted, fired, die, or leave the company for any number of reasons. All of a sudden you now have someone who has never done anything with this software that has to maintain and support it. Custom code is a necessity, but technology changes quickly and skill sets vary. You could be lucky and have a developer that can breeze through unfamiliar code and be able to maintain and support it, if not optimize it. However, you could also be unlucky enough to get someone who barely understands the code they're asked to maintain and support. God forbid they need to optimize it or worse do so at the fundamental level of an OS.
I worked in a business that relied on custom code. The belief that custom code is cheaper than a common consumer product is laughable. It often is actually more expensive, and if you have to customize everything from the ground up, it becomes even more expensive. You need standardized layers on which you put customized code. You don't want every layer of your IT infrastructure to be customized requiring a long build-up to productivity.
We had a situation where I worked where we had to fix code for a bug that was resolved in the OS. The code was only about 2 years old, but the programmer who wrote it was no longer with the company. The source code, missing because at the time our code repository was a file share on a directory server that no longer existed. The code had to be reversed engineered requiring a significant amount of time and resources all to resolve a bug that was fixed in the OS.
Now imagine in that situation, you have people routinely building OS components, as well as middleware components, as well as server-client software. Imagine you have a fluid IT employment base, meaning employees routinely move out of the company taking their skills with them. Now imagine after upgrading to the next Kernel revision of Linux because it closes some significant security holes, your entire company goes offline. Who do you turn to to figure out the problem? Everyone has developed their own error reporting in their code. Some are awesome, some non-existent.
If I have custom-code running on top of open source software, the only people I can turn to are my employees. If I have custom code running on top of commercial software, I can call up the vendor and get an engineer on site within 24 hours who can pinpoint the problem himself or send it back to a team at the home office to do it. It may cost the same amount of money in terms of employees and time, but in terms of getting my business back up and running it costs DEARLY less.
Again, working from experience, we had this very scenario play out during our back-to-school "season" requiring us to get two vendors on site working with us for four months to resolve problems within their products and our infrastructure. Granted, they told us to do the very thing I said we needed to do, but I'm a peon no-nothing. With the management that was in place at the time they would have been in a worse situation than without being able to rely on the vendors. BTW...that wasn't due to "poor management" that was due to "CYA management". No one wants to be responsible for making the wrong decision, so they all cover their own asses and rely on an outside vendor to make the tough choices for them.
Open source may often be free, but it bears a much higher cost in the long-term than commercial software. It's a myth that it's cheaper.