http://www.wildcardcorp.com/news/wildcard-wins-fbi-subcontract

1. Last sentence in last paragraph under ‘Customization:’ Red Hat is NOT a proprietary OPERATING SYSTEM in the same way that Sirsi is a proprietary PIECE OF SOFTWARE that runs ON an operating system. Red Hat is Linux w/an enterprise support contract attached. It must be purchased with the contract. Otherwise, you will use Fedora 11, which is the free version of Red Hat. Besides, if an open-source ILS runs on Linux, no one will force you into any distribution of Linux unless they tailor their system to Red Hat or Ubuntu/Debian or openSUSE. What runs on one flavor of Linux _should_ run on another.

2. Last paragraph of ‘Security:’ should have added at the end, “just like has happened with Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec & McAfee.”

3. Networking: Nowhere does this paid opinion mention that a large majority of servers that serve web pages and run the protocols on the Internet are running on Apache, an open-source server. How’s that for “large-scale?”

4. Testing, 2nd paragraph: ALL the Linux distribution developers and most of the application developers have ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ test releases. True, it may be just “the developer and his buddies,” but WE must be a threat for you to even mention that crowd-sourcing our testing to catch bugs is ineffective. Additionally, the statement, “investigators have to go back decades in the list to find the same bugs open source platforms are fixing today,” implies that the proprietary guys have LET those bugs stay around for decades, while we open-source guys are actually fixing them. And you can back that up by looking at the bugs that Microsoft and Adobe let hang around — some of Windows’ bugs have existed since 3.1!

5. Open Source and Libraries, 2nd paragraph, last sentence: which also implies that with so many libraries looking to open source for change, there must also be something wrong with the proprietary systems in existence that is not being addressed by proprietary vendors.

6. SirsiDynix on Open Source: “We use open source software a great deal in our development efforts, in our software and in our company.” So in keeping with the licensing requirements of open source software, does SirsiDynix make this open-source code available to the public? If not, that’s a violation of most of the open-source licenses!

7. SirsiDynix on Open Source: “We easily support clients using the poster children of open source software – Linux, Apache, and Firefox. We have done so for many decades.” Linux was invented in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, Apache has been around since 1995 (http://bit.ly/4bLM8x), and Firefox (Phoenix v0.1 in September 2002, see http://bit.ly/y2HUn ) was born of the Mozilla browser (1998, see http://bit.ly/3dQdIL ) hardly “many decades.”

Well, this was fun! This is just another paid opinion (probably partly by Microsoft – that discouragement of running an ILS on open-source comment is a clue) that seeks to preserve “that which has always been” mentality. We’re going to look at the open-source guys regardless of how much our proprietary vendor cries.