Bulldozer00's Blog

I love ironies because they make me laugh.

I find it ironic that some software companies will staunchly avoid paying a cent for software components that can drastically lower maintenance costs, but be willing to charge their customers as much as they can get for the application software they produce.

When it comes  to development tools and (especially) infrastructure components that directly bind with their application code, everything’s gotta be free! If it’s not, they’ll do one of two things:

1. They’ll “roll their own” component/layer even though they have no expertise in the component domain that cries out for the work of specialized experts. In the old days it was device drivers and operating systems. Today, it’s entire layers like distributed messaging systems and database managers.
2. They’ll download and jam-fit a crappy, unpolished, sporadically active, open source equivalent into their product – even if a high quality, battle-tested commercial component is available.

Like most things in life, cost is relative, right? If a component costs $100K, the misers will cry out “holy crap, we can’t waste that money“. However, when you look at it as costing less than one programmer year, the situation looks different, no?

How about you? Does this happen, or has it happened in your company?