Posts by amarsys

Platform clouds: The hot battle for developers' hearts and minds

Re: Open source lock-in

It makes no difference if you have spent 5 years building a mission-critical system using open source tools such as PHP, or closed source tools such as .Net. You are still locked-in to that platform, and it will be a major cost to migrate to another platform (regardless of whether it is open source or closed source).

Similarly if you need an ecommerce package you could purchase an open source or closed source package, but after you have spent time and money on training your staff, adding your products, and processing orders - you will be locked-in.

The converse of this is of course that there is no particular advantage to open source vs closed source - open source is simply a good marketing term. The only decision that matters is choosing the platform or package that provides the best fit and best value for your requirements.

Open source lock-in

I am struggling to see how open source somehow prevents lock-in as the article tries to imply. If your core business application is developed with, say, PHP and MySQL, and you have built it up over the last 5 years, you are locked in, just as surely as if you had used .Net and MSSQL.

I've used .Net since it came out. I got into it because PHP did not have any XML/XSL support at the time. My only concern over the years has been the ridiculous cost of MSSQL licences - I keep reading the MySQL migration guide in the hope that it will have caught up and I can switch over. The point is, it is about the functionality and productivity, not whether a tool or application is open source.