By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Director of  Academic Computing and User Services

Why Not Open Source Software?

In an essay elsewhere in this journal Michael Clark poses the following question:

"...There is a common misperception in the academic world among students and even those with Ph.D.s that if something is free in the software world it is not as good. This is very odd considering how many things we regularly receive free in daily life such as love from family members, meals provided by friends, books etc. from libraries, countless commonly used applications for computers and web-browsing, additional services if certain other conditions are met and so on. If a friend offers a ride to the airport, have you ever heard of someone responding that they'd rather take a cab because it's obviously better based on price?"

I too have encountered the same attitude regarding open source software, but I think the avoidance of such software goes beyond this attitude, even when the availability of the software and support for it are readily available. I'd say the most people are not willing to pay the time cost associated with switching to something like the R statistical language. There is little time cost in using Firefox, or even Ubuntu these days. However, given that R is a programming language (or at least a command-driven environment), it has a much higher time cost (even for me). If all of your training and experience supports it, it's much easier to use commercial products SAS or SPSS until the economic conditions change.

Economics 101

IT organizations find themselves in the business of preserving the status quo of economic conditions. As long as they (we) fund SPSS and SAS (or Windows or Office), there will be no cost advantage for people to switch to R (or Linux or OpenOffice). This is illustrated by a recent report that "Companies may use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity." Economic changes may break that habit, and drive companies to open source, but more likely to the cloud, where Google and Microsoft are both trying to entice users to an alternative to the desktop office suite. (I think in 5-10 years, you won't pay for a word processing program any more.)

A change in economic conditions may force a cost choice - pay for the commercial product or learn the free one. So, why would anyone choose the for-pay option? To borrow Dr. Clark's analogy, your friend might offer to take you to the airport for free, but also might be late and prone to getting lost. You might pay because you will have some assurance of making it to the airport on time. Likewise, people who have used SPSS or SAS all their life will not pay the time cost learning R when they know they can get to their goal via SPSS or SAS, and I fall into that category -- as much as I support and want to learn R, it's faster for me to go back to SAS when I need to do something quickly.

So, it's not enough to espouse the virtues of open source and free software. To change people's behavior, you must change their economy. Sub-$200 netbooks are on the way and they are running Linux by default. Why? If you want a $200 computer, are you willing to pay $100 in addition for the Windows OS? Linux looks really good when the functionality is equivalent for most common activities and it drops the price by one third. Scale that up -- Do you want the $2000 Linux HDTV or the $3000 Windows HDTV? Do you want the $20,000 Linux car or the $30,000 Windows car? Do you want the $200,000 Linux house or the $300,000 Windows house?

So, what will change the economy in favor of R? Some people would still pay the monetary cost for SPSS rather than pay the time cost for R. Ultimately, the payback for R must be much greater than the cost. That means effortless access, immediate support, powerful results, meaningful output, etc., and the most important of those is immediate support. The time cost is less when help is immediately available. This is why people are willing to pay for support for otherwise free open source software (i.e. RedHat, MySql, etc.) It's become a business model.

Just Google it!

Even without commercial support for Open Source software, there is quite a bit of support out on the Internet, and if you are willing to do a few Google searches, using open source software is no more difficult than changing a Windows configuration. Of course, if you're not willing to investigate and read, then you're probably not going to be changing your Windows configuration either. But, because of the de facto standard that Windows has become, it's more likely to find someone with a bit of Windows knowledge than the equivalent Linux knowledge. You can leverage some kind of relationship to get support, and the economic cost may range from a cup of coffee to a nice dinner. This kind of transaction, by the way, is the motive for the "No, I will not fix your computer" T-shirts which often adorn the IT knowledgeable, otherwise known as "geeks."

Is it really free?

I'm not an economist, but I have to say that there's probably no such thing as a free lunch or free software. There may not be a monetary expense for open source software, but there is a time expense in any attempt to do something new, whether it be running Linux, using R, or learning to play the banjo. However, if economic conditions make that time expense worthwhile, we could eventually have more people that are knowledgeable about Linux than Windows, although Microsoft is apparently doing all it can to prevent such an occurrence.

Pardon me while I tune my banjo...

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