I already mentioned how my employer banned freetds and is buying a lousy ODBC driver. The joke is even better.
I found out how much my employer was billed for the ODBC driver. They're paying approximately $200k! The driver is a POS inferior to freetds. The only reason someone would buy this ODBC driver is if they worked at a corporation that banned freetds!
This is an impressive bit of propaganda. Follow the reasoning:
- Create an atmosphere of "OMFG! Free software is lousy! It can't be trusted!"
- Then, your friend who makes a POS closed-source driver makes a ton of money!
- Only a parasite or psychopath would bother writing a closed-source driver when there's an excellent open source driver.
6 comments:
Do the shareholders of the company you provide your labor to not care about making money?
Yeah, I'd say you're on to something there. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some cronyism or kickbacks at some point in the chain of events. People are never wholly rational actors, but that's one hell of an expense to have to justify when freetds was working.
I once worked for a company that wasn't really a software company at all. It did other kinds of work.
However the head of the company had some dodgy code written a long time ago and he wanted to make some money on it.
So he got two non-software developers (no experience, no qualifications) to "work" on the project. One of them told me he was was concentrating on getting a qualification instead.
The work they did was so bad, I thought that it was almost a fraudulent project rather than a rubbish project. Nothing worked, nothing was finished, nothing made any sense. Nothing could be extended to ever work.
He sold the software to a friend of his in a bank.
Eventually his friend left the bank and a new project manager in the bank was allocated.
The project manager told the head of our company that he should now try to sell the software to a new bank now that his mate was elsewhere!
The tone was obviously that he was a con man that was messing them around and now he should try to sell his rubbish and his con tricks to another bank.
At about the same time a do-nothing parasite installed at the bank on a consultancy basis that was another friend of this man was kicked out as well. It was pretty obvious this consultant had no work to do.
He was a "database" man and as the software wasn't finished and the database not installed, he had no work to do! But his money from the bank kept rolling in.
I work for a quasi-governmental monopoly. The shareholders don't care.
From my own experience it is about support. The huge corporation I used to work for would not buy any piece of software that did not have a maintenance agreement. So, they'd never touch something like Slackware Linux, but a Red Hat version that came with a support/maintenance agreement would be purchased.
I once worked for a start-up company funded by venture capital. They made very little money (maybe 200 pounds a year) from actual software sales to end-users.
Another group in the company had produced a software product. It was way too slow to be useable. On top of that it really had no real world use. It was technology without a real market.
So I was very surprised when they sold the software to a large trading company.
There was no way they could be actually using the software. Even if they did have a use for it, it was too slow.
Maybe the trading company was friendly with the venture capitalists funding the company and some sort of deal was made.
It makes the software company look better to have a real customer.
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