I just saw a tweet from Jeff Potts, Chief Community Officer at Alfresco pointing to an article on CMSWire.com in which the CEO of Univa, Gary Tyreman, claims that proprietary software is safer, less bug free than Open Source Software. In fact, Tyreman goes as far to say:
"I’ve used them [Open Source Software] for personal projects at home, and I’ve even tried them at my own company," he admits. But he qualifies the second half of his sentence by pointing out that it was for an application which wouldn’t affect his company’s top or bottom lines. Besides, he adds, he has since replaced it with an internally written application anyway.
"You certainly can’t use Open Source for something that’s the lifeblood of the company," reiterates Tyreman.
The article follows with several claims that refute this from Jeff Potts and Matt Asay (10gen). Asay, is as bold as to claim:
that nearly every large and mid-size company uses Open Source somewhere (he’s willing to bet on 100% — his bet is based on Gartner’s 2008 finding that Open Source adoption was at 85%) and that its popularity isn’t because it’s free, but because it drives innovation in areas that matter most to Enterprises (Big Data, Cloud, Mobile) and because it is better.
I decided to check out a bit more on Univa to see if they might use Open Source themselves. Being in the 'Big Data' business it's probably a fair bet that their products run on Linux as that is what most clusters these days run. I actually found some far more interesting finds:
Their own website runs on an Open Source web server (Apache) and uses an Open Source templating language (PHP), and uses an Open Source Javascript library (jQuery). I guess so long as their website does not affect his company's top or bottom line then I guess that's OK then.
But it gets even better... Univa's main product offering, Univa Grid Engine, is a commercial derivative of the Open Source GridEngine project (originally from Sun). Now Tyreman can stick by his assertion as to how much they have committed to the code and the quality that his team may (or may not) have added. But the CEO of a company that builds a proprietary offering on an Open Source project as a core for their offering, turning around and rubbishing Open Source? Oh, don't make me laugh.