Vendor Independence

Frank Scarvo reports results of a survey at ComputerEconomics.com that IT decision makers value “reduced dependence on vendors“.

This indicates that software buyers must feel some level of dependence on proprietary software vendors, from which they desire freedom. Such dependence includes reliance on the vendor for maintenance and support and the necessity for the buyer to accept version upgrades that the buyer may not need or want.

My take on this is a bit different. Open-source or not, the software buyer is dependent on someone skilled maintaining it, or who is able to make changes to it. I doubt if the entire Windows source tree is made available, even a company like IBM would be confident enough to patch it and deploy a customized version with full confidence that it is not going to break some existing program. Raymond Chen has a good stories of breakages when they try to change the private APIs - these range from disk defragmenters which assumed a certain number bytes exist on the stack, to hardware which wouldn’t function if they were plugged in the last ISA slot. Try deploying a change like to to 30,000 seats and you’d start to see the bug reports streaming in.

Even open-source software avoid fragmentation and the consequent death-by-a-thousand branches through only supporting the current mainline plus major point releases. Developers who program applications on top of Python prefer to develop with the most recent versions, i.e. 2.3 or 2.4 rather than 2.1, because there is no further development in the older versions, and it is often more costly to port libraries back to 2.1 than having them for free in the latest versions.

Given that being able to maintain software oneself can be more costly than depending on others, why is it that buyers wish to have less relationship with their vendors, rather than more?

• It’s a matter of trust - perhaps vendors haven’t told their side of the story well enough, that buyers feel they are being price gouged, and forced into an upgrade cycle. But come on, how can it be good for a software’s continued development if the development team has to support all the old versions?
• Perhaps reduced dependence is an empty wish. Like a teenager who’d like to move out as soon as possible but doesn’t anyway because it’s a better deal staying at home. For these IT managers, I wish them a happy trip to open-source and see it for all that is good and bad about it.