Semantics and Euphemisms

George Carlin laments the softening of our language through excessive euphemisms in his final tome and notes as an example that many things which previously were “free” are now “complimentary” - allowing the requester to retain a bit of dignity, instead of sounding like a “mooch“. With all the talk about free open source, commercial open source, enterprise or business class open source, some basics could be lost in the semantics. However you name it, the core term open source software implies a way of building and licensing software. Sometimes the software rises from a team of unpaid developers, and other times it comes from corporations paying for the development.

At the end of the day, no matter what adjectives we paste onto it, open source software exists and consumers of that software want it to fit a purpose, want to get answers if they have issues, and yes, very often want to be involved in the coding or contribute back if they engineer improvements. During development, free copies of open source software are useful for rapid prototype and development. At some point the result of this software development activity is going to go into an application that needs to be deployed, supported, and maintained. Free is not the most important word at that point.

Nothing is free at 2 am…

CIO’s don’t need free software in their production portfolio. We need efficient, effective, supportable software that we can rely on. We want resources behind the solution who we can call at 2 am if that application is mission critical or even subject to at least 95.95% availability. Sure with some open source, such as PHP, we rely solely on the community and our developers for support and that works perfectly well. For enterprise level applications though, I have found the subscription price for the right to access vendor supported open source software has been fair, and gladly pay it. For instance, at Ingres we have developed just about all our customer facing applications with open source tools and utilities, running on open source OS. We have seen tremendous benefits from the software deployed. In every case possible, we have a vendor behind each part of the production stack, and we pay for support. So to embrace some euphemisms, let’s agree to complimentary trial for development and funded support for production.

 

 Tags: CIO, George Carlin, Open Source

 Posted in Open Source

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.