Wednesday June 23, 2004

I was reading an article here that talks about open source licensing, but I want to focus on one comment made: "I don't think you could point to any open source product that was demonstrably better (or equivalent in most cases) than all of its proprietary counterparts". Talk about opening a can of worms, geez.

In general I think this statement is correct in that "open source software" isn't necessarily better than "proprietary" software, but I'll equally argue the opposite. This person made the rather bold comment of saying "any" open source product. Of course there had to be defenders of the faith responding with JBoss, Apache, FireFox, etc. My point of view is that what is better depends on the "user" and what is of value to them. Support, relationship, trust, integratability, available skillset, scalability, maintainability, quality, etc.

I don't buy arguments about open source market share meaning open source is better (apache was used as an example). I'll take a "technically superior" Porche over a Honda Civic any day but you will find far fewer Porches on the road. The price/performance of a porche isn't worth the value ... for me. For some, the ability to weave in-and-out of traffic at ungodly speeds is worth the price. Zues and the Java Enterprise System Web Server have value to their customers over apache, running some of the largest web sites on the internet.

Its a price/value judgement. Sometimes OSS is simply "good enough" to solve a problem and whether or not it is "better" is a moot point. I'll let others flame about product-by-product comparisons :) Its a never-ending argument because value systems differ.