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Re: Why Aren't Open Source Tools Being Considered?
Subject:Re: Why Aren't Open Source Tools Being Considered? From:Brian Gordon <elasticsoul2003 -at- yahoo -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:46:09 -0400 (EDT)
I think the migration from RH has already started for
many people. And let's not forget that someday we'll
be helping people migrate from Flare. :-)
I disagree that open-source necessarily produces a
competitive advantage. It depends upon various
factors. No software is free to the end-user: it takes
time (=money) to learn and implement. If a proprietary
solution is quicker and easier to implement, the total
cost may be much less.
For example:
RH: $2000 (or whatever)
But: lots of TW's skilled in RH, so learning curve is
0
OS equivalent: $0
But: If no expertise, you're paying a TW to learn the
software. How long does it take to become expert? Say
3 weeks: $60/hour x 120 hours = $7200. How do you
measure the cost of the first few documents being not
quite as good as subsequent docs, because they were
created during the early part of the learning curve?
How many hours does someone spend evaluating the
dfferent OS tools?
Don't get me wrong; I am all in favour of open source
software, and I will use it whenever I can. But there
are many situations where is simply is not a good fit
(yet).
As John Posada said, don't take it personally if
someone doesn't consider OS software for a particular
application.
>
> At this moment there seems to be a lot of startups
> about. Those that
> choose open-source have a competitive advantage. For
> tech startups,
> open-source lowers the price of entry.
>
> Today's proprietary tools are tomorrow's legacy
> applications. Soon
> we'll all be busy helping companies migrate off
> RoboHelp, FrameMaker,
> and IE web apps.
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