I found this slide deck, from a very large and visible software company (that I will not name, leaving it as an the exercise for the reader); I believe that it was created to provide a clear response to many popular misconceptions on open source software. Unfortunately, it seems to collect in a single slide most of the myths and false assumptions that I have already mentioned in our past work within FLOSSMETRICS.
First of all, “zero cost” is something that may be true or not- it simply is not the defining attribute of open source software. At the same time, saying that proprietary software has “lower ongoing cost” is not overall true (and I have tons of independent confirmation of that), claiming that proprietary has more features is (as before) not universally true, saying that proprietary software maintains backward compatibility generated substantial laughter across the poor people here in the office that has to provide support to our commercial customers, claiming that proprietary is “more secure” recalled the recent attack against DNS claiming that it was poorly protected freeware.
Should I continue? Open standards, anyone? And the last one, implying that only proprietary software is based on managed development? Any commercial OSS vendor would happily dismiss this claim as untrue. Commitment on support? I believe that my fellow three readers would not encountering any difficulties in thinking about proprietary products that got bought and buried underground, or that simply got scrapped altogether.
Ah, I would happily send my guide to this fellow slide author, but I believe that probably this would not change this company views a single bit.