License-free solutions cause more problems? Guess again.
Obsah
“Open source solutions can end at any time.” Well, yes, but so can the vendor lock-in ones
The changes in the provision politics of the VMware platform have again stirred up a lot of debate about the types of solutions from the point of view of licenses. It is still true that open source solutions are developed by interest groups and are provided without the need to own a license. Historically, older and more established solutions for software as a product from a particular company has required the purchase of a license, but also include the provision of support and development of such a product.
By unlicensed solutions I mean those that do not require a license, i.e. they are provided openly. We are not talking about illegally obtained licenses here.
A clear distinction made. Except that the licensing solution provider may change his mind at any time. VMware and its new owner have now reminded us of this. So what about the pros and cons of licensed and unlicensed tools?
Fundamental Paradigm Shift
Until recently, a relative level of security in IT was provided by common licensing. The company simply bought a license and could use the software forever or as long as the hardware which it was connected with was working. And even though the manufacturer continued to develop its product and released new versions, so that the original one no longer had developer support after a while, it was still possible to use it, relatively without restrictions (to this day, you can meet Office 2013 or older products in companies without major problems, it’s just enough for the people there).
But buying licenses is apparently over. Perhaps with absolute exceptions, all new software is sold in the form of a regular subscription, and as can be seen from the example of VMware, you can no longer rely on the fundamental building blocks of the IT world. Now there is no certainty at all whether the software that the company uses will be able to continue to be used. This is because a change may come that will say goodbye to the original provision of services and establish such conditions that will sometimes be less different and sometimes completely different (that is why the EU is now solving the complaint of several VMware customers).
Already with the first point, we encounter the refutation of the myth that open source solutions do not provide such certainty. Nowadays, we cannot talk about certainty even with licensed solutions of the most famous and stable brands.
Subscription
This is a word that is the pain in the neck of too many companies. The lifetime license expires and you must switch to a subscription to our services. And those who bought the original licenses? They are the unlucky ones. For example, this is how the well-known software provider for remote assistance and management TeamViewer conceived it. For its entire history they sold licenses as lifetime with limited support and the inability to update to newer versions, but still functional.
Recently, they switched to a pure subscription model, with the fact that customers with original licenses will gradually lose the application completely. I’m not talking about the unavailability of updates, etc., but about the fact that the application itself stops working completely. This is called a stab in the back of loyal customers.
Support
Another key point I mentioned in the introduction is the support that customers of licensed solutions receive. I will not focus now on the fact that open source solutions have detailed documentation, so that any problem can be solved with its help, nor on the fact that the community around the solution will usually advise you faster and better than a “trained” agent in the call center on another continent. We are now talking about the technical support service.
Lifetime licenses provided just this support. But ERP Bitrix24, for example, built a change in its model around this additional service. I speak from the experience of our company. We purchased an on-premise license that included all modules and was self-service – we installed and operated it ourselves.
But after some time there was a change that meant for us that either we will pay for technical support (which is really not a small amount), or our license, which we bought as a permanent one, will also cease to be valid when the prepaid support ends. Such is the certainty of contemporary licenses.
Pricing
The icing on the cake is the pricing of these new licensing models. Many of you, like me, and certainly quite rightly, would expect that the new business model will bring with it the distribution of one-time investments over a period of time, and with it a noticeable discounting of such licenses, since the provider has a guaranteed continuous and not a one-time income. But even here we are all wrong. Not only do the prices of the new model from the point of view of a year or two of use remain the same as for the original permanent licenses, some manufacturers, such as the just mentioned VMware, are significantly more expensive.
If I buy a beautiful and expensive encyclopedia, its contents will be valid until I destroy it. Although it will no longer contain the new discoveries and findings that humanity made after its publication, some statements may lose their validity, but it will be a good source of information from the global point of view for a very long time. But what if, after some time, the publisher calls you and informs you that from the first quarter of the next year, all content, text and images will disappear from the book, because he has decided to do so?
Previously, we calculated the TCO of software at 4 or 5, in some cases up to 10 years. With the new business model of some software publishers, we will easily reach the same costs in one or two years. So it is definitely not progress and change for the better. That is, if we are talking about customers.
Summary
I’m not saying that all software providers act in the way we’ve talked about. When we have mentioned the bad examples, I also have to mention one worthy of imitation – that is, especially for experienced (read older 🙂 very well known file manager – Total Commander. Its publisher has not abandoned the licensing method for almost 30 years. Yet.
Perhaps you have personally encountered the changes that shook other “stable” brands in the software market. You may have avoided them so far. But given that the current and future business operations depend and will depend on IT, it is necessary to talk about these changes.
I already mentioned the vendor lock-in connection. If you choose any solution for your operation that requires the payment of a license, you are fully subject to the decisions and whims of the provider. Vendor lock-in also means that we are locked into proprietary technology that may not even be possible to migrate elsewhere. You can therefore face a situation in which everything your company stands and runs on is not usable or becomes too expensive.
Please take this article as a warning against hasty decisions that are based on stereotypes that are no longer valid. Check the license conditions and if you can’t risk sudden changes or price increases in the systems, look for open source solutions. You might be surprised how high their quality is and how safe they really are.
