I'm going to provide a voice of discontent here ...
Although I agree with the author, for the most part, there's a flip side as well. There exists GOOD enterprise software. Difference between good enterprise software and open source software is enterprise software HAS to work. For open source software, it's "cool if it works."
Of course, I'm horribly overgeneralizing open source software (kind of the like the author does with enterprise software), but hear me out. A valid analogy would be enterprise software is an adult, as it does things out of necessity, and doesn't care about looks, code elegancy, fancy algorithms, etc... And open source software is the cool kid on the block, who doesn't really need to do anything, but does it for the coolness factor.
Sometimes with pretty bad results. For example - back in 2004, we here at large Dilbertian financial company that I'm working nights to escape have tried using Groovy. It worked pretty well, and we were happy.. until we went to production. It was then we discovered that Groovy had a memory leak, and our mission-critical application hung every day during crunch time.
Moral of the story? This kind of thing is NOT tolerated among enterprise software (at least where I work)... and that memory leak in Groovy hasn't been fixed in a couple of years, and I don't know if it has been fixed at all, actually... I haven't checked Groovy in a while.
That's where the author (and myself) disagree, I guess. Enterprise software SHOULD work, but there's no reason to believe that it does any better than other software.
The moral of the story for me is to test everything before it gets put in production (wasn't Groovy brand-new in 2004?) There's no reason to assume open-source software works, and there's no reason to assume enterprise software works. Even if it's used by hundreds of thousands of businesses with no problems, there might still be a problem with your specific setup, whether it's open-source or enterprise.
Although I agree with the author, for the most part, there's a flip side as well. There exists GOOD enterprise software. Difference between good enterprise software and open source software is enterprise software HAS to work. For open source software, it's "cool if it works."
Of course, I'm horribly overgeneralizing open source software (kind of the like the author does with enterprise software), but hear me out. A valid analogy would be enterprise software is an adult, as it does things out of necessity, and doesn't care about looks, code elegancy, fancy algorithms, etc... And open source software is the cool kid on the block, who doesn't really need to do anything, but does it for the coolness factor.
Sometimes with pretty bad results. For example - back in 2004, we here at large Dilbertian financial company that I'm working nights to escape have tried using Groovy. It worked pretty well, and we were happy.. until we went to production. It was then we discovered that Groovy had a memory leak, and our mission-critical application hung every day during crunch time.
Moral of the story? This kind of thing is NOT tolerated among enterprise software (at least where I work)... and that memory leak in Groovy hasn't been fixed in a couple of years, and I don't know if it has been fixed at all, actually... I haven't checked Groovy in a while.