Re: Re: How to Save The World (was: Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories)

[Devdas Bhagat <devdas () dvb homelinux org>]

On 14/12/04 22:23 +0000, ucxfoe wrote:
> Marcus J. Ranum <mjr <at> ranum.com> writes:
>
> > Adam Shostack wrote:
> > > | Isn't this amazing, if you think about it? Enterprise IT managers are
> > > | such freakin' morons that they'd rather pay $50/year/desktop plus
> > >
> > > So, I totally agree with what you're saying.  But I'm curious:  Are
> > > they really morons, or is there a better explanation?  
> >
> > ... rather than spending (at most) $300,000 to just Solve Th
> > Problem, own it outright, and never pay maintenance.
>
> aside from the health insurance, vacation time and water cooler
> consumption of the person who will be responsible for it. Its
> people that are expensive. Choose your problem.

Hmmm, a team of competent coders isn't really all that expensive. I am
sure that you can get quite good coders here for about 12K to 15K USD/year
(that is about the top 10% of the coders)[1]. Not all that expensive. I did
a similar cost estimation yesterday (in terms of system maintainance),
and the prices of hardware were more than the cost of the administrative
effort involved (including downtime costs) for a 50 node network.

Also, you do not need the entire codebase to be unique to the
organisation. Some parts of it are unique, while large parts are just
standardisable libraries. Push the stuff tat is common to multiple
organisations into libraries, buy the libraries (or a license to use
those), and have your solution built on top.
The greatest strength of Perl is CPAN, which is just a very large
collection of libraries. 

Also note that you may not wish to have a coder charging you 120K/yr for
maintaining the system, but one who gets 60K/yr instead. Or outsource
it. And that assumes that your system needs maintainance and development
continuously. Business requirements do not usually change so fast to as
to warrant continuous changes in code.

Devdas Bhagat
[1] I am not a fan of offshoring, and definitely not for the reason of
"cheap".
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