Skip to main content

Open Source Is Free But Not Cheap

 have an open source competitor but I don't encounter them that much in Singapore market.

If and when I do encounter prospects using this open source solution now, I tend to avoid them. The reason for avoiding them isn't because I am competing myself with free, but rather, I have found these prospect have invested, not just time, but money and resource to maintain this open source software.

Let me explain.

While the open source solution is free for download from the source website, maintaining the open source solution requires effort. Interestingly, I found that IT teams that use this open source solution, have a manpower or two hired assigned just to manage this open source solution.

If these open source IT teams decided to use my paid solution, it would have meant that their investment, in terms of time and money, to get where their open source solution is today, have been a wrong decision from the start.

Unless I am to talk to new a IT director who wants to revamp their solution, it would be a lost cause for the IT person in charge to totally drop the open source solution, which time and money has been used, for a solution that would not have required him/her to spend that amount of time and resources in the first place.

This open source solution recently provided a premium support. Problem is that the service support comes from the US and the company is in Singapore. This means that support queries, for only by email, will be replied only after 1am Singapore time.

This means that if an issue occur at 8am Singapore time, the support answer will only be replied 16 hours later. If the Singapore IT team have questions about the support, it will be another 16 hours wait.

They use to say open source is for those with no money but lots of time. However, with time being an important commodity today, open source may be free but it won't come cheap.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How UOB's Paper Trail Amplifies IT Greatest Security Threat

UOB required you to do everything on paper. If you want to change your mobile number for your banking account with them or for your credit card, you need to fill up a form. Yet, this paper trail represented a potential security fail for the bank - Human Error. So a bitcoin expert walked into UOB to open a bank account. The bank employee had to print a form from a online pdf document to fill in this bitcoin expert's particulars. When it came to entering the bitcoin expert's email, that's when the forgotten art of handwriting was the most obvious of the digital generation. Wrote Robert Capodieci, My name is Roberto Capodieci, as most of you know. and my email address is very obvious to decode. It is not a p4l_l337_s0u1@gmail.com, but it is a more obvious roberto@capodieci.com, thing that, right after reading my name in the same form, should come out easy. Still, a data entry personnel of the UOB bank (or of a service provider the UOB bank uses) entered it as roberto
1 comment
Read more

NEL Train Fault Shouts Lack Of Crisis Communication

The North-East Line train fault of 11 April 2018 was my virgin experience of a rush hour train fault since I moved to Punggol. One would have thought that with the number of train faults experienced by the North-East Line operator, SBS Transit, they would have improved the communications and handling of train faults. However, my personal experience told another story. First, there were no announcements at the Punggol LRT stations of the train fault even though SBS Transit manages them. The train fault was reported as early as 7.10am as I had a friend who was also stuck in the train. I boarded the LRT at Coral Edge around 7.30am and I didn't hear of any announcement nor was there any signage to inform me o the train fault at Punggol Station. Second, the announcement kept saying that there would be a 15 minutes delay, but 15 minutes passed and the trains, on both side, wasn't moving. If the announcement would be more frank to say it will be a longer delay, commuters would
Post a Comment
Read more

Singapore radio personality in "hot soup" for reporting train delays based on Tweets?

Update - Hossan Leong has commented on this post to say " I'm not in trouble pls don't blow this out of proportion. Let it rest. It's getting silly. Thank you for your love and concern and I apologize for any misunderstanding." ~  Hossan Leong. Hossan Leong, a Singapore radio personality for The Gold Breakfast Show on Gold 90.5, was censured today for reporting on train delays on the Circle Line because he based the information on Tweets, rather than waiting for the official reports from the Circle Line operator, SMRT.  It is, however, unknown if the "warning" came from Mediacorp producers or SMRT. Tweeted Hossan Leong ,  OK...I reported it on air and now I'm getting into trouble for it?? The CC line is DOWN rite? I did nothing wrong rite? The SMRT Circle Line was reported to be down this morning during peak hours and started as early as 7am. However, local news only received official statement was received by the mainstream media at about 9
14 comments
Read more