At work, we use SAP to manage our most of our key aspects of our daily operations. It has made evident the weaknesses of using proprietary software, and how frustrating they can be.
Two of weaknesses are the most evident, and the ones that impact us the most. The first one, is the fact that when a fix is needed on the inner working of the software there is no way it can be done within the organization itself. We need to go the people who provide us with the licences so that they fix the problem. This means that it takes longer to solve the problem, and at times there have been some misunderstandings since the one who made the fix wasn't the one who received the information about it on first place.
In our case, we have people who are more than capable to fix any of the problems we have been facing. Yet, they have their hands tied because they can't do it because they don't have the access needed to make it so.
The other problem, is that we are in a position where the vendor has us locked to use their services. While we could move to another service provider, it isn't that practical because we just own the client side of the software. It's not the best position to be in, since the amount of data we produce is copious and we depend on the the software to be able to do business.
This causes a lack of flexibility that is problematic, since problems that could be solve sooner if the they could be worked in house simply can't be worked on the spot. The worst part is that, some of those problems haven't been completely solve and have been dragging simply because we depend on the them to give us the solution.
With an open source software, our IT department could be the one that handles most of those problems. While we could hire support to an outside company, access to the core parts by our IT department could be our first option to solve most of our problems.
In many ways, the more I use proprietary software the more I love open source software.
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