Comparing Disasters

A month ago I have described my disappointment with OpenAM. My rant obviously attracted some attention in one way or another. But perhaps the best reaction came from Bill Nelson. Bill does not agree with me. Quite the contrary. And he has some good points that I can somehow agree with. But I cannot agree with everything that Bill points out and I still think that OpenAM is a bad product. I’m not going to discuss each and every point of Bill’s blog. I would summarize it like this: if you build on a shabby foundation, your house will inevitably turn to rubble sooner or later. If a software system cannot be efficiently refactored, it is as good as dead.

However, this is not what I wanted to write about. There is something much more important than arguing about the age of OpenAM code. I believe that OpenAM is a disaster. But it is an open source disaster. Even if it was bad, I was able to fix it and make it work. It was not easy and it consumed some time and money. But it is still better than my usual experience with the support of closed-source software vendors. Therefore I believe that any closed-source AM system is inherently worse than OpenAM. Why is that, you ask?

Firstly, I was able to fix OpenAM by just looking at the source code. Without any help from ForgeRock. Nobody can do this for closed source system. Except the vendor. Running system is extremely difficult to replace. Vendors know that. The vendor can ask for an unreasonable sum of money even for a trivial fix. Once the system is up and running, the customer is trapped. Locked in. No easy way out. Maybe some of the vendors will be really nice and they won’t abuse this situation. But I would not bet a penny on that.

Secondly, what are the chances of choosing a good product in the first place? Anybody can have a look at the source code and see what OpenAM really is before committing any money to deploy it. But if you are considering a closed-source product you won’t be able to do that. The chances are that the product you choose is even worse. You simply do not know. And what is even worse is that you do not have any realistic chance to find it out until it is too late and there is no way out. I would like to believe that all software vendors are honest and that all glossy brochures tell the truth. But I simply know that this is not the case…

Thirdly, you may be tempted to follow the “independent” product reviews. But there is a danger in getting advice from someone who benefits from cooperation with the software vendors. I cannot speak about the whole industry as I’m obviously not omniscient. But at least some major analysts seem to use evaluation methodologies that are not entirely transparent. And there might be a lot of motivations at play. Perhaps the only way to be sure about the results is to review the methodology. But there is a problem. The analysts are usually not publishing details about the methodologies. Therefore, what is the real value of the reports that the analysts distribute? How reliable are they?

This really is not about whether product X is better than product Y. I believe that this is an inherent limitation of the closed-source software industry. The risk of choosing inadequate product is just too high as the customers are not allowed to access the data that are essential to make a good decision. I believe in this: the vendor that has a good product does not need to hide anything from the customers. So there is no problem for such a vendor to go open source. If the vendor does not go open source then it is possible (maybe even likely) that there is something he needs to hide from the customers. I recommend to avoid such vendors.

It will be the binaries built from the source code that will actually run in your environment. Not the analyst charts, not the pitch of the salesmen, not even the glossy brochures. The source code is only thing that really matters. The only thing that is certain to tell the truth. If you cannot see the source code then run away. You will probably save a huge amount of money.