MalwareTeks Blog

While checking headlines at TechNewsWorld, I found this opinion piece by Gene Marks, 10 Technologies Not Yet Ready for SMBs. Can’t miss it. It’s the first article on the home page. Gene Marks is a columnist for Business Week.

I was rather enjoying the cheekiness of the piece, until I got to this:

Open Source Software. Sure, open-source software may be “free,” but the propeller-heads you need to actually get it working, customized, and supported aren’t.

Spending time customizing a software product, just because it’s “open source,” doesn’t mean that time is well spent. Business owners should stick to the boring, off-the-shelf stuff for now.

That passage alone tells me this guy, just doesn’t have a clue.

Gene why don’t you go ask your employer, MSNBC, what type of technology powers their web presence. If the answer is Apache on a Linux Server. Guess what? It’s Open Source Software.

I find that in general, people who make these kind of statements, like the above by you, have never used Open Source Software.

The ability to customize open source, to fit a particular need, is a selling point. Fact is, that the vast majority of the time, the software fits the need without customization. If a person can use MS Word, I bet they won’t have a problem using OpenOffice Writer. No need to pay some “propeller head” to install, configure, and customize Writer, to get it to work.

From the results of a Google search, I deduce this isn’t the first time you have been off the mark.