tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237161444180571452.post5231341209144864601..comments2010-06-27T04:44:03.167-07:00lowkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02110530883983060094noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237161444180571452.post-8654052327704146922010-06-27T04:44:03.160-07:002010-06-27T04:44:03.160-07:00MattBD: Sorry to hear that the same scenario plagues your experience. Does it really make a difference so much if huge organization stands behind the software as a sue target if things goes south?lowkshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02110530883983060094noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237161444180571452.post-79528139233013938662010-06-27T02:56:56.405-07:002010-06-27T02:56:56.405-07:00Sadly, the mistaken belief that open source software is inherently unstable or insecure is prevalent everywhere.<br /><br />My employer is a large UK-based international insurer that&#39;s listed on the FTSE-100. Last year I got fed up of concurrency problems at work where we were using an Excel spreadsheet to record customer&#39;s details - basically because we were sharing a spreadsheet between many people, then if we set it so more than one person could use it at once, people would forget to save it till they closed it down and changes were overwritten and lost, while if we set it so only one person could use it, we were forever waiting for someone else to finish up, and someone would inevitably go to lunch with it open, locking everyone else out.<br /><br />In an attempt to resolve this I wrote a Python script using the xlrd and xlwt modules to create a Tkinter GUI to enable us to add new entries without having to open the spreadsheet itself - by using this method the changes were only made when the new entry was submitted, making concurrency problems far less likely. I then enquired about getting Python installed on people&#39;s computers so they could all run the script, but was told we could not do so. Part of the reason was that they maintain a number of software packages for installation that have all been thoroughly tested, and Python wasn&#39;t one of these so it would have to be fully tested, something which I can understand. However, they also said that there were security issues with open-source software, which I completely disagree with - in my experience security through obscurity just doesn&#39;t work, while open-source software has consistently been more secure.<br /><br />A better solution would have been to use a relational database (I was thinking that once it was working I would migrate the data to an SQLite database and create a new version of the script to update the database, as well as a second script to export the database to a spreadsheet), but I suspect MySQL would have been rejected for the same reasons, and while they did allow some use of Microsoft Access, they were trying to avoid paying for new licenses.<br /><br />So I don&#39;t think that attitude is limited to Malaysia - it&#39;s widespread in the UK too.MattBDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15070988462909190312noreply@blogger.com