this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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I find this attitude kinda simplistic and problematic. This attitude applied elsewhere can be used as justification for all sorts of terrible things, I don't know why it should get a pass in tech. Sometimes the best tool for the job is produced by an evil company you want to boycott. Sometimes the best tool causes lots of collateral damage or harm, or has potential to lock you into an ecosystem. Maybe you want to support the growth of other tools and are willing to sacrifice some performance.
Even if only profit is considered, I think it's reasonable for a company to conclude that open source software is inherently better due to reasons that go beyond immediate utility and profit making potential by thinking longer term.
Obviously you do what you can to avoid supporting bad/"bad" companies
But... me and my engineers aren't getting paid more to make a support tool for what we are paying or to help a project out with their teething issues. So picking a solution with poor support/poor capabilities just means we are putting in a lot more hours for work that we won't get paid for.
Versus having a budget to buy tools other people developed and possibly even support. Which means we have more cycles to dedicate to what our actual job is.
And our customers aren't going to say "Hey, good for you. Thanks for supporting this project". They will say "We have downtime. We either want to be compensated or will change to a different solution.
We're all free to make the calculation that makes sense for us. Not everyone wants to sacrifice everything for profit, and this is a viable tactic.
So.. not gonna read the response where I point out it has less to do with "profit" and more to do with the people who actually do the work for a company?
Good chat.
Well I agree with that part, when I'm saying using open source vs proprietary, I'm not proposing companies use alpha software in production. I was thinking more along the lines of avoiding MS Exchange in favor of of Postfix/Dovecot/CalDAV even though Exchange is arguably superior at managing one's emails and appointments.
For as much as we all hate MS Teams with a passion: It is not arguable. It is superior. And Exchange and Outlook couples well with MS Teams which gives you a corporate chat client, teleconferencing, document sharing, etc.
That hodge podge of tools? It is someone's job to maintain that. Likely someone who is maintaining significant parts of corporate infrastructure and doesn't have time to work through what the 55 year old waste of space refuses to even try to understand but will instantly get blamed in meetings with the c-suite if that idiot can't figure out how to write an e-mail.