Open source? No good for cost cutting, say CIOs

If they were totally honest, most CIOs would admit that Open Source cuts their own personal income, and that of their "cousins" in Switzerland.

Open source projects just can't provide that added incentive of Fine Dining to CIOs, nor can Open Source Projects "gainfully" employ ne'er do well younger brothers.

Open Source Projects just don't provide "educational" trips to beds-and-breakfasts in Lovely Washington State wine country, at the expense of the Project.

Since Open Source Pojects rarely want to "go public", they also can't provide stock options to Swiss "cousins" of CIOs, either.

> ...several CIOs said the costs of migrating to open source and the associated expenditure on retraining staff serve as a disincentive for adoption.

For the adoption of FOSS, yes. But never for those required proprietary software upgrades, which simply must be done (i.e., Microsoft Office 2007, including a Notes to Outlook migration, at my workplace).

@jdixon: Excellent point. The CIOs in question are guilty of the short-term thinking that plagues so many companies these days. Everyone looks at the quarterly report or for a quick return on investment. A migration to FOSS is an investment, one that yields positive financial results in the long term, not in the first quarter. Any honest-to-goodness cost/benefit analysis of FOSS vs. proprietary is going to favor whatever is incumbent in the short run. Unless there is a lot of custom code to migrate or a lot of business-specific software than only runs on Windows generally FOSS will always look better in the medium to long term.

Frist giggle!

Oh, fourth giggle. Anyway it proves that comedy is not dead.

Quoting:In contrast, several CIOs said the costs of migrating to open source and the associated expenditure on retraining staff serve as a disincentive for adoption.

This is how lock in works, by making it [too] expensive to migrate away. The on going costs of the proprietary offering may be higher than the on going costs of the FOSS offering, but in many cases businesses can find it difficult, or impossible, to justify the short term extra expense (which usually takes them over budget), and this is the point of what companies like Microsoft do.