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I have been using socket.io for a while now and was wondering how they make money from giving software for free. They seem like a successful organisation. On their Github they have over 40 contributors, I wonder how they are doing this if everything is free?
It does not make sense to me.
This is the open source / freeware community. We love to build things together that goes way farther than what we could reach within our own enterprise. This is really free time we decide to give away to help built awesome project.
After, there's some company who're open sourcing some of their core modules - so they dedicate resources to maintain them. There's some people doing open source in order to get recognition or win credibility in order to take consulting contract on their open source product, etc.
There's some way people make money out of it. But mostly, it is free time gived by people who love programming.
Isaacs (actual Node.js project lead) wrote a really interesting article on the subjet recently: https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c
I'm working for a company that has an established application written in VB6. The application is stable and continues to provide the company with good income. However, it is beginning to show its age and noises are been made to port to a more modern platform such as .Net.
Since this is hardly ever a cut and dry decision I would appreciate input on when it is a good time to port a long standing application to a modern platform.
Some of the pros and cons that I have already worked through:
In favor of porting
Finding skills for an old programming language becomes harder and more expensive
Support from the platform vendor ends at some point
Leveraging modern programming practises on the old platform becomes harder or impossible
Rewriting provides the opportunity to improve existing practises
Moving to a modern platform is motivating for the development team
Moving to a modern platform provides marketing opportunities
Against porting
"If its not broken don't fix it"
The cost of rewriting versus the return
Risks associated with the transition from the old to the new application
Upskilling existing software engineers
Some related StackOverflow questions:
What makes code legacy?
When do you say that the code is Legacy code?
One of the things to consider is that porting an application can get more and more expensive over time. I have seen applications writen in 'ancient' languages that were very well developed. But, as happens many times, all the domain knowledge was in the code and in the heads of the developers, not in up-to-date documents.
So in situations like this porting means not only rewriting in the new sparkly language but also reverse-enginering the specs and picking the, hopefully available, brains of the developers. This becomes harder and harder over time.
An other thing is that 'porting' is hardly ever as easy as the Migration Wizard want us to believe. Many wizards produce a half-baked solution that is still constructed according to the constructs and features common to the 'legacy' environment and will hardly be using the new features and possibilities. This might not seem that bad but if you leave it at that level you are in fact making it very hard for developers that know the 'new' language to understand the code and make porting to the next platform or language even harder. That is what I call LEGACY in capitals. Dragging useless stuff around for decades.
The optimal moment to start porting, from a developer's point of view, was yesterday.
The optimal moment to start porting, from a manager's point of view, is tomorrow.
The optimal moment to start porting, from a competitor's point of view, is never.
There are a lot of other considerations to evaluate: opportunity cost (what else could we be doing), capacities for extensibility and growth (what else does the application need to do/be), sustainability with other moving parts (DB upgrades, OS upgrades), etc. The list goes on and on.
Specific to VB6, I would evaluate what limitations are in the way of product progress vs. moving up to the current .Net framework. Ask yourself -- is this really an IF scenario, or a WHEN scenario?
From a general standpoint, the worst time to port an application is when you HAVE to port it. Your situation sounds like an ideal time to begin code migration -- before it becomes a necessity. Given your legacy product's profitability for your company, any situation where you're forced to move to migrate brings pressures around deadlines, scope, etc.
All things considered, your situation sounds like an ideal time to port up to the .Net Framework, well before it becomes necessary.
Echoing jro and especially Erno,
Upgrade before there is a crisis.
Upgrade before the developers move on to other places where they have a chance at working on a modern framework.
Upgrade while the developers that built the original program are still around.
No competent developer will accept a pure porting job, it is not a career enhancing move. But the existing developers will be happy to learn the latest framework as part of a porting effort.
VB6 was released in 1998. March 31, 2008 Microsoft EOL'ed all VB6 support. Your company is so far into the danger zone with this code, it isn't funny.
To add some perspective,
Netscape was still an independent company and they just release Netscape 4.
Clinton was still president
The internet was still a new concept
Intel had just released their hot new Pentium II running at 450 Mhz
The Matrix was still filming
Google hadn't been founded (it was later in the year)
At some point, the company will be forced to upgrade the app because the operating system will no longer support the apis.
You should leave this company. It is career death to stay.
Update because Cody thinks "I am an individual developer":
#Cody -- Rethink your assumptions. I run my own company. Without fail, every time we have slipped behind the last stable release of a platform, catching up has been incredibly painful and expensive. The latest pain point is we are on dojo 0.4.3 and Tapestry 4. T4 and dojo 0.4.3 have this mutual interdependency that we are separating (slowly). Moving to Tapestry5 and/or jquery or even just to the more recent version of dojo is very slow and very painful. The porting has taken over a year because it has to be this long stretched process to keep other development moving along.
The choices are :
stay stuck on the old library
forever (with the problems around
finding/attracting talent),
try to run dual-mode (old/new) code (code doesn't always cooperate,
or freeze development on large chunks of the product during the
port
So far we have been doing a combination of #2 and #3.
Being on old version of either dojo or tapestry means that we have lost the ability of the community to support us and help us with the problems. The advantage of a framework is that other people are doing work that solves your problems. Nobody is solving any VB6 problems any more. Microsoft will not even take money to solve VB6 problems.
The OP's company is completely on their own. Note: that Google was just founded the year VB6 was released. I would suspect that VB6 knowledge has been disappearing from the web and that each year a Google search about any programming problem the OP's company makes will return fewer and fewer results.
This is a business viability risk.
The happy talk about MS supporting VB6 forever and ever is not a good idea. All it takes is some SVP at Microsoft saying: "We can ship the next Windows version in time to make Christmas if the teams do not have to fix these issues that affect only VB6. We will issue a Service Pack later." At some point this can and will happen.
A competitor can come along and introduce a competing product using the latest tools faster ( because the large pool of libraries available when using the latest frameworks.) The OP's company has lost the ability to be nimble because the latest tools and libraries no longer support VB6. (A 13! year old framework!!)
This is another business viability risk.
The fact that this needs to be explained to anyone is a huge, huge warning flag to any developer with any experience who is interviewing at the OP's company.
This reduces the quality and quantity of the talent pool enormously.
Not being able to attract quality talent is another business risk.
The original OP should bail.
Its not just Microsoft and will the Windows support the app. What about things like printers? or displays? Epson is under no obligation to release printer drivers that support a VB6 application.
What happens when the print function stops working for customers on their latest cool 4G-enabled printer?
What happens when customers try to use the app on the now-standard 2000x4000 display and the fonts look all goofy?
What happens when Adobe starts having Adobe Reader advise that the PDF file version should be upgraded?
Seeing a warning dialog popup, not being able to print, use the latest display well, etc will result in customers quietly moving to competitors. They will not even bother to tell the OP's company that they are doing this.
The OP should move on before the layoffs hit.
I was recently asked by a Team Leader (not mine) if I would be willing to undertake a programming project. The members of his team are currently pre-occupied with other more important projects. I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine. Recently I decided that I would like to pursue a career in software development. I accepted his offer so that I can gain some real-world experience and start building a portfolio.
In about an hour I'm scheduled to meet with the Team Leader to discuss the details of what he needs. From a short e-mail exchange with him, I know that the base project is to update an existing ASP.NET form—but I also think there's more to it than that.
Considering that I'd like to eventually put this project in a portfolio, what kinds of notes should I take at the meeting?
Take whatever notes you can that will best help you understand the use cases and the user requirements. Everything else is just technical details that can be figured out later.
I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine.
In that case, my suggestion is:
revel in your ignorance.
Make the most of the fact that you know nothing and you're being given an opportunity to learn - abuse the chance to ask as many questions as possible of the Team Leader in question regarding what type of questions you should be asking and how you should be documenting what you learn.
You only get one chance to be ignorant, once you've wasted it you have to spend the rest of your life as a know-it-all; take the chance to enjoy the learning process.
Get a list of people who are the intended users. Talking with them will allow you to flesh out the overview that the Team Leader gives you. It is likely that the intended users have a very different understanding of what the app is supposed to do than the TL does. So you'll likely be going back and forth for a while. It's well worth the effort though because you'll do much less re-coding.
Try to understand that the Team Leader him/herself might not even have all the requirements available right at the beginning. Be prepared to be hunting down people and writing all these requirements down as they come in.
Things will change during development, new problems and new requirements will always be popping up.
Three things:
What: What is the software supposed to do, the more detailed you can manage to get the other person to be, the better.
How: Are there any known constraints? For example, if it has to ask for a telephone number, does it have to validate nationally/internationally/not at all. Does it have to run on Windows 2008/2003/all
Who: Two sides:
Who will answer any questions you'll have, will you setup weekly progress meetings?
Who will use the software, can you get their early input on your prototypes, can you ask them for opinion/requirements?
One thing I've found very helpful is carrying a hard-copy of any existing requirements (use cases, wireframes, whatever) or any other potentially useful information in a 3 ring binder to any project meetings I attend. If the meeting strays off topic or questions about previous discussions or documents come up it is very nice to have the information at your fingertips in a format you can make notes on, pass around the table etc.
As a bonus, I find most people don't carry any documents to meetings, so you'll also end up looking like you are a real go-getter who is always prepared, which is never a bad thing.
Main downside to this is that you'll waste paper if the documents are updated and changed frequently.
Find out the where as well, where are the files you need stored on the network, where is the source control repository for the project, etc.
Since this is your first taste of doing a real world project, please please please make sure you use source control even if you are the only dev on the project. Your co-workers will thank you and you will thank you the first time you need to back out a change that didn't work.
I dont know what to say. About 3 days ago I released a script to the public. Today I realised, after searching on google that someone had already nulled (removed my protection) and pirated the script.
How do I stop users from pirating the script? It is written in PHP.
Please help or suggest some solutions.
Thank you for your time.
UPDATE By releasing to the public means that I have started selling it to users.
UPDATE My program is priced at only $49. Very reasonable for the functionality it offers. I do not understand how I should stop pirates from pirating my code. The replies which most people have given are rather sarcastic. I was hoping for some good advice. I know there is no silver-bullet. But some techniques which you have used in your PHP programs.
The only real way to prevent piracy is to not give the user the program at all! What I mean by this is have the logic you want to protect remain server side and offer a client interface.
There are a few companies that offer protection services, but these are expensive and can sometimes still be overcome.
If you're worried about this happening again, try obfuscating your code. Here is a free program to do just that on PHP code.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic here: forget about them. Here's my rationale:
You can spend tons of time trying to
prevent pirates from pirating your
stuff, or you can spend the same
amount of time giving your paying
users more functionality.
Extreme copy protection does not give your paying users anything but more
hoops to jump through to use your
application - which might lead them
to get frustrated.
Pirates will pirate your applications
no matter how much time you spend
trying to stop them.
Budget a certain
amount of time to put in basic copy
protection - just enough to keep the
honest people honest.
Most importantly: Don't irritate your paying customers.
They are the ones you need to make
happy.
There's not much you can do.
Be flattered your work was deemed worth the effort!
How do I stop users from pirating the
script?
Do not release sensible source code to the public...
[EDIT] After a few downvotes, I decided to comment on my answer:
Any code that is released public has a chance of being hacked. This is the number one reason why Javascript is not secure. No matter how much you will obfuscate it, compress it or translate it to some random japanese dialect, it is still source code that the user has access to. Hence it should not contain any sensible information such as passwords or such. All sensible data should be stored in the server side where it is kept hidden from the user.
If you are releasing a php framework containing both the server and client code; then you have no way of fully protecting yourself. PHP is, like Javascript, an interpreted language. You may translate it, compress it, or obfuscate it as much as you want, (and it's probably the best thing you can do) you will never fully protect it when released to the public.
Again... If there was a magic way to prevent code from being broken, it would have been known for a long time. No-cd patches / cracks for new games/softwares now are almost released the same day as the softwares themselves. It is, as noted by Paul, a form of flattery for you, even though I understand how sorry you may feel.
There are a few instances where programmers ended up with bullet-proof protection, but it usually involved high-end engineering.
With PHP, you're mostly out of luck. It's an interpreted language, which means that you are essentially forced to give away the source code. Sure, there are obfuscators (tools that "scramble" the source code to make it near impossible to read for humans), but they can be circumvented as well.
There are product like Zend Guard which seem to offer a better level of protection, but from my understanding, your customers need Zend Guard installed as well, which is almost never the case.
There are several methods of handling this:
Offer your product as a service. This means finding appropriate hosting in the cloud, etc. This removes access to your code base, thus preventing direct piracy. Someone can still reverse engineer your stuff, but I'll touch on that later.
Add a unique identifier to each version of the script sold. This can be done automatically, and is great to do with obfuscated code (another, complementing method). This will give you the ability to track whoever pirated your code. If you can track them, you can sue them (or worse).
Pursue legal action. You'll need to know who leaked the code in the first place for this. Their PayPal information or even an IP address should be enough. You go to your lawyer, ask him to get a court order telling PayPal/ISP to release the identity of the thief, and then start tracking them down. If they're located overseas, your only real option is to freeze/appropriate funds from PayPal/credit card. Banks will be sympathetic only if they have a branch in your country (which can be targeted for legal action).
Ignore it, and simply build your business model around the support that you offer.
The sad fact is that information cannot be secured completely. There is no way to prevent a team of Indian programmers from reverse engineering your program. So you just have to be better than them, and constantly improve your product (this is "A Good Thing (TM)", so do it anyways)
Also keep in mind that DRM and other solutions are often controversial, and will reduce your sales (especially among early-adopters). On a personal level, I would suggest viewing this as a compliment. After all, your script was useful enough that someone bothered to pirate it within a week!
PHP is easily decoded, so for people who really want to know, it's easy to find out the source code. However, there are certain obfuscator programs such as this one that'll make your PHP script almost unreadable for those trying to decode it.
What kind of protection did you think you had added to a PHP script, anyway? You should add a line of the form:
if ($pirated)
exit();
and then make it mandatory (in the licence agreement) that users set the $pirated variable accordingly.
Forget trying to prevent it
Go the way of CakePHP (see sidebar on front page) and many other open source projects and ask for donations.
People actually do it!
Contact the pirate and let h{im,er} know that you will be forced to take legal action against them if they do not abide by the license.
I agree with #Michael.
Try ionCube or Zend Guard. They are both commercial offerings, but you say that you are selling your software so it might be worth it. Although nothing is foolproof and can be reverse engineered with enough effort and technical skill, these solutions are probably good enough for the average PHP script vendor.
I agree with Samoz's suggestion to keep the logic server side, however this can often be hard to do. The best strategy is to make the user want to buy it by offering updates automatically to registered users, as well as installation, advice and good support. You are never going to sway people hell bent on pirating, however your goal should be to persuade those who are undecided as to whether to pirate or purchase the script.
Any obfuscation/decryption technique for PHP can be cracked
Jumping in very late to this conversation, but saw this question featured. Nobody mentioned contacting a lawyer and pursuing litigation. You likely saw the script on a server - hosted by a known hosting company - you can probably get a DMCA takedown to have the script removed. If you really press the case, you may be able to sue for damages.
Found this link to assist in going this route:
http://www.keytlaw.com/Copyrights/cheese.htm
You could always pirate it yourself to the internet and hope that any nuller will think "its already been grabbed" so don't bother. But pirate a real buggy version. When users come to you looking for help you'll know they have a pirate version if they question you about specific bugs you purposely added and you can approach them accordingly
If your script won't consume a lot of bandwidth, you could keep your "logic" server-side, as samoz suggested, but if your users won't use it responsively ( a crawler, for example ), this could be trouble.
On the other side, you could become a ninja ...
Attach a copyright notice to it. Some companies will actually care that they're using software properly.
Actually I think it's easier to protect PHP scripts than desktop software, because with latter you never know who is running the cracked copy.
In case of PHP on the other hand, if people run your software on public web servers, you can easily find them and take them down. Just get a lawyer and turn them in to the police. They could also be breaking DMCA laws if they remove your protection so that gives you even more ammunition.
Technical way to protect your code is obfuscation. It basically makes your code unreadable like binaries in compiled languages (like Java). Of course reverse engineering is possible, but needs more work.
In general it's hard to prevent users from stealing code when the program is written in a scripting language and distributed in plain text. I've found that http://feedafever.com/ did a really nice job of being able to sell PHP code but still give the code to users.
But the solution to your problem is very dependent on the domain of your program. Does this script run on the users machine with no internet connection? Or could this be a hosted service?
I'd also suggest looking at some of your favorite software, and seeing how they convinced you to pay for it initially. The issue I find isn't always "how can I prevent my users from stealing my software" but sometimes more "how do I convince my users that it's in their best interests to pay me". Software piracy often comes when your product is overpriced (Ask your friends what they would pay for a software package like the one you are selling, I've found that I have historically overpriced my software by 20%).
Anyway, I hope this helps. I'm glad that you are trying to create software that is useful to users and also not incredibly crippled. I personally of the mind that all software that isn't shrink wrapped or SAAS should be free, but I totally understand that we all need to eat.
The trick is not to try to prevent the piracy (in the long term, this is a losing battle), but to make the legitimate version of your product more accessible and/or more functional than the pirate versions.
"Making it more functional" generally means providing involves additional features or services to registered users, which cannot be replicated for free by the pirates. This may be printed materials (a users manual, a gift voucher, etc), services such as telephone support or help setting the product up, or online extras within the software.
I'll point out that companies such as RedHat are able to make significant amounts of money selling open source software. The software itself is freely available -- you can download it and use it for free without paying RedHat a penny. But people still pay them for it. Why? Because of the extra services they offer.
"Making it more accessible" means making it easier to get your legitimate software than a pirate copy. If someone visits Google looking for your software and the first result is a pirate download site, they'll take the pirate copy. If the first result is your home page, they're more likely to buy it. This is especially important for low-cost software: pirated software may be 'free', but usually it takes more effort to get. If that effort is outweighed by the low cost and lack of effort of simply buying it legitimately, then you've won the battle.
I saw anti-piracy working once only. Quantel EditBox systems (a post-processing video solution), Hardware+Software+Internet solution against Piracy. Workstation only works after checking if the bank received the monthly rent. If not, workstation was locked. Funny days when this happens... (Funny days for me, no work at all... No funny day for the hacker.)
Well, PHP is far away from hardware solutions... so I guess your only real choice is a server side protected against a tiny unsafe client pushing content, as pointed in some answer yet.
piracy != copyright infringement
There are known routes to litigate copyright infringers.
Does it really matter enough to hire a legal team?
Obfuscation do add something. It will not be fun to try to modify your code at least even if they can take the first version of it. In best case they will try to find some open source project that does something similar. Guess this would give you an fast fix at least for your problem?
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I'm currently a developer at my first job right out of college. I work for a large company, and the trend I notice with them is that they tend to go with more expensive, closed source software about 99% of the time, while there are perfectly good open source alternatives that are available, most of which are vastly superior to their closed-source counterparts. For example, we use this absolutely awful source control software that cost a ton of money, while there are quite a few open source and/or free options that in my experience, albiet limited, are much better and offer basically the exact same functionality.
I guess my question is: How would an experienced developer approach management about using more free software?
It appears there is another question very similar to this that did not show up when I made this one: How can I convince IT that F/OSS software isn't evil?
EDIT: Just come clarification. I'm not necessarily trying to change the company's procedure, I'm looking for advice on how to approach management about the subject.
Start using it in small utilities and things which are throwaway and don't need management buyin. This can prove the worth of an open source solution and put a crack in
the door for using it in other
projects.
Present articles from trade magazines showing that other people are using the open source solution.
Go with products which have commercial support options, such as MySQL, which enterprises seem to have an easier time swallowing.
Pick your battles carefully. Wait until they are suffering. If they are happy with what they have, they will not switch, no matter how much cheaper or superior the alternative is. You need to catch them while they're trying to think of ways to save money, or while they're disgusted with the problems of the current system.
Be very careful with what you refer to as free. There is a very large corpus of products that would be perfectly valid for a student to use without paying that an enterprise would have to pay for. Also never forget Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A lot of relatively expensive software is expensive because you get things like configuration and help support for them whereas that may not be the case for free software.
I think you are not asking the right question. To me, the challenge is to have my Big Corp to buy the BEST softwares for me, be it free softwares or not.
Paying for Windows or paying for Linux is not important (what is 100 $ for a Big Corp ?).
But having things done better is really important.
I think that your request to your boss should not be : "Hey, it's free and it's as good as XYZ, why are we using XYZ ?"
Why you boss would risk something trying the product you told when XYZ seems to be ok ?
It would be much more better to ask : "Hey, here is what I cannot do with XYZ : (your list). With my product, I would be able to do that and much more so fast than I would have a lot of spare time to test our own software !".
Small money is usually not a show stopper. Being able to work faster in order to do much more testing (or any other things that could help your boss have a better image) is definitely an excellent argument !
Best wishes,
Sylvain.
I work in a big company that has recently moved into being more enthusiastic about open source solutions. There have been a few big hurdles:
Customer won't support it - we're defense contractors. We do almost nothing without customer say-so. As the customer's opinions have changed we've been able to change our architectures and tool usage. That said, there are still scenarios were open source is unacceptable and we don't use it.
No tech support = scary - in several cases, it's been possible to make the point that open source may not have a single point of company tech support, but it does have huge communities that will support questios for free, and that there are consultants available as needed for the really hard stuff. Plus many, many releases of new versions for bug fixes. And, several competing expensive products have not been able to service tech support needs. Being able to point to specific internal examples with long. well documented, histories of support problems, has been key.
Fear of security issues - we had to develop a process for scrutinizing and controlling every peice of open source introduced. We've managed to find criteria for what we deem risky, versus what we deem relatively benign based on info-sec policy.
Fear of lawsuit - Being large, and profitable, we fear lawsuits, we're great targets. We now have a process for the legal team to scrutinize every open source license. This has proved to be a win - since the legal team now has briefings on every major version of the typical open source licenses, and they can quickly review most stuff.
Version control - fear that if those wacky developers can just download anything they like the world will self destruct. OK, well, practically speaking, the concept of "how do we know what's in a given product" - being able to show a FOSS version control process that is managed internally has been important.
It was definitely a slow process - small projects proved profitable and customers started encouraging it in proposals. That made it useful for executive management. It's helped that those that support it have been williing to put in some extra time to making the business case in terms of efficiency/cost savings, and have been willing to negotiate repeatedly with various parts of the corporate infrastructure.
Making open source work has taken the effort of IT, the info security folks, the legal team, the procurement team, and technical management. Knowing that before you talk to your manager is probably a key to success.
There's also some political savy - for a first project, don't encroach on any sacred cows - ie, those projects that may not be successful, but are high profile and owned by someone with lots of political power. Instead, choose some wacky new thing that isn't available right now and prove the cost savings in a way that is unlikely to provoke a defensive reaction.
When you try to introduce open source software to a big company (or even a small one, in many cases), the biggest counter-argument you're going to hear is "There's no tech support." Companies tend to be wary of using software that's supported by the community, because there's no guarantee (or in some cases, service agreement) that questions about the software will be answered within a reasonable time frame, or at all. In many cases, you can find a company that will provide support for the open-source package you want to use (for example, Red Hat does this for its Linux distribution, even though the contents of the distribution is mainly open source). Showing management a business entity that can support the software will often go a long way.
The other counter-argument to using open source software that I've heard the most often is "Open source software is buggy." This is a tough one; this opinion is pretty ingrained in some corporate cultures. Two possible responses are "The open-source community fixes bugs quickly" and "Since we have the source code, our engineers can fix bugs"--but that's often not what managers want to hear.
So, in essence, it depends on the company, their attitudes, and how much they trust you to make business-critical recommendations. I've used all of the arguments above with different levels of success in different companies.
Of course, in these economic times, the "free" part may go a long way. :-)
"Free software" doesn't necessarily mean your company is going to get software for free. Many successful open-source projects are also offered with licenses and services that cost real money and are geared to organizations that want or need to be assured of good support. MySQL is an example
The reason for a lot of big companies using closed software is that they can call support and the vendor will issue a hotfix, patch or cumulative update
Changing a large company's habits are often like turning an Oil tanker around... it takes a long time and uses a lot of energy.
If the company were in the process of evaluating the purchase of new software for a specific task, Then I would make sure to write a concise opinion memo about why my choice is better.
If the software is something I would use personally and not a server product that multiple developers are forced to use, then I would just ask my manager to use it.
If the software is in place, does the job (even if I don't like the way it does it), i'd learn as much as I can about it to give it as much chance of work for me, or at least make my life easier. If it still sucks really bad, I probably wouldn't try to change it until it was time for the company to pay for an upgrade.
If the software works but is just annoying... I'd do as above, learning all there is to know about it just to make my life easier and then deal with it.
You're probably right that the system you'd recommend is better than the one currently in place. But like some other posters said, choose your battles, especially when this is your first job out in the real world. You may become expendable quickly.
It's not really so much a matter of what's better, even if your way IS better, it's a matter of the culture and the way things are done and the cost of switching. Even if, hypothetically, their system can be magically transported to your OSS system, with no loss of data, dates, records, or anything, you're still going to have people who say "I liked the old way better."
Remember: Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. I know it may sound glamorous to be "the new guy who recommended a great new versioning system that everybody loved", but you also could just as easily become "that hotshot who insisted on a new versioning system that everybody hated." It's a much smarter career move to just play by the rules at least for a little while until you have some clout and can make some recommendations. In the meantime you may even learn why the old system is preferred, or learn to like it more the more you use it.
I know what you mean. It took us years to convince our managers that everything would be okay if we moved away from using Interbase (a commercial Relational DB) to it's opensource counterpart Firebird. Mostly it was fear of no support that blocked the move. I think the factors which changed their mind were:
tests showing better performance
that there are companies that provide and charge for supporting the OS alternative
constant pushing of the argument by passionate developers
I think cost savings would have played a part if our company were paying for the site licenses but in fact our customers were.
I look at this question like this. I work with the .NET framework. I could ask my employer to migrate to PHP. This is a disadvantage to me, as well as my company, for many reasons. Let's start with the obvious.
1.) I know PHP, but can do much more, and a lot faster, with .NET.
2.) Paying for a service, usually ensures a better experience. The Visual Studio IDE is second to NONE when developing an application.
3.) I can develop an application much faster in VS than hard-coding PHP.
4.) This is the most important one. If I work with a big company, I want my programmers to develop my app faster, and I expect it to run faster. PHP (an example Open Source language) is fast, and reliable, but if I can spend the money, I'll deploy ASP.NET.
Basically, big business, or even small business, wants to spend their money, as long as it's for a good reason. Your best bet is to say, 'Hey, if you want to deploy ASP.NET (or whatever), send me for some training. Then I'll be able to develop OUR application to my best ability'.
not to sound totally cynical, but:
an experienced developer probably would not approach management about something like this, unless he/she was already an expert with the open source package. Companies like to have a phone number to call and someone to blame when things don't work. Free open source packages do not provide this kind of 'accountability' (yes we know it's a joke, but management doesn't)
it is unlikely that management is going to listen to someone fresh out of college about any major purchasing or technology decision. You have to learn the business and earn everyone's respect first. [sorry!]
Same problem everywhere. Once an organization gets beyond a certain size (e.g., the Dunbar number) it starts to show a certain woodenheaded quality that will confound you. Lots of history, people, agendas that you aren't aware of. And getting everyone to agree on your solution is difficult.
Best to start locally. See if you can persuade your manager or PM to use SVN or CVS or GIT locally for a project and then get it to diffuse.
But that situation is true where I work as well. I use SVN locally for myself, but a commercial product for integrating with others.
Companies will use whatever will ultimately make them the most money. That means whatever software will make their employees more productive. If there is a particular piece of open source software you think they should use then when the time comes to purchase the software to do job X then as long as you can prove it will make the employees more productive and they are able to get reliable support just a phone call away as with commercial software then they will use it.
Big companies need to hire support staff for stuff like that. When they purchase software from a company, they are guaranteed support with the contract. Open source projects can die off a lot easier, whereas a large software vendor can be held responsible for much greater periods of time.
Every company has a culture, and fighting the culture can be something of an uphill battle. But if you're willing to try:
you'll likely have more luck getting BSD and BSD-like projects approved (MIT license, Apache, Boost, etc.); and it doesn't matter if most of the arguments against GPL and LGPL are mainly FUD
you should refer to the projects as "royalty-free"
you should make sure things are approved by somebody that can approve them (your direct manager) because putting the company in a bind -- especially when you're new -- (even if the "bind" is only in their head) is not conducive to long-term employment
you can probably go a long way by simply asking what the procedure is to choose a library or tool
From a configuration management perspective, having developers add free software stuff willy nilly whenever they feel like is a serious PITA to manage.
I've worked at companies where you were allowed to do it whenever you wanted and others where you could never do it.
There's definitely a balance to be found but if you're in a larger company with multiple projects, you do have to keep in mind that each time you add a new 'tool' it complicates the build process.