Chui’s Discount Paint

Imagine I used to run a business called Chui’s Discount Paint. To keep costs low, I’ve hired a new university graduate to run my computer systems. He advised me to use open-source software to make my costs lower.

We shifted to Linux, but he advised that I don’t buy commercial support from Red Hat or Novell, but rely on free support from the members of the Linux community. In addition, he suggested we migrate our applications from Oracle to MySQL because I didn’t have to pay for license fee. So I hired another university graduate to migrate our Oracle applications.

Today I no longer run a business called Chui’s Discount Paints. The community has decided that my cause is not high enough for them and they have more interesting problems than watch paint dry. Instead of servicing customers, my employees are learning how to recover from kernel panics, and how Gnucash crashes with this thing called Guile. My ex-employees are no longer working in the paint industry, they’ve moved on to high tech consulting after all the free training that I had paid for. They can now tell people how to avoid OpenOffice crashes by using a different Spell Checker dictionary.

The migration to MySQL worked, … sort of. The university graduate knew a lot about MySQL, but not about Oracle. We’d send the wrong paint to the irate customer, but the whiz kid has left, and I have to use this thing called USENET to talk about my problems.

Not that it’s bad, I always wanted to learn about computers, and now that I no longer have a business, I can spend my time learning Perl scripts.

Note: This is not a true story, but businesses should beware of believing every I.T. snake oil promise, open source or not. Closed source software does not have a monopoly on bugs. As a software developer I can assure you that having sources doesn’t mean that bugs once found are any easier to fix. Having sources certainly makes it possible, but doesn’t guarantee it being worthwhile.

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