Proprietary versus FOSS
“Digg.com”:http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/(Proprietary_software_)_Pay_a_little_now,_pay_a_lot_later has a story up right now with a link to an article discussing the benefits or evils of using proprietary software. The jist of the discussion is vendor lockin and the fact that we should use open source software and open standards. The interesting thing is that most of the discussion on digg is about the benefits of proprietary software and why businesses buy it.
From my own experience, whether the software is proprietary or FOSS, there is still vendor lockin. At work, we are creating an application using the “JBoss application server”:http://www.jboss.org. One of the problems that we face is that we can not port our app to another app server even though our app is based on an open standard–J2EE.
The problem though is, in addition to the vendor lockin, is that there is almost no documentation for JBoss and the community support is nill. And, no one in the organization is going to dig into the code to fix a bug. We are either going to work around it or wait for the next release and hope the bug has been fixed. We have done this with all the open source software we use (PostgreSQL, Red Hat, etc).
So what exactly is the benefit of using Free software?