Lot of truth in what you say. However I have never met a CIO, CTO, or CFO who would care less who you pointed the finger at, just how much does it cost to fix the problem. If you have a support contract the risk is mitigated and the cost is known. This is actually an argument I used to start putting redhat servers into production at several places I worked. We could not easily get a cost effective support contract with MS, but we could with RedHat and Dell was happy to support even things like a samba connection between MS and RedHat. Of course, when support comes up for renewal you just show how it was never used and then you put in CENTOS instead of redhat and rely on your own talent pool. But you need to express every thing as a bottom line. As far as the legal team goes, they couldn't care less. Typically your insurance costs do not change with regard to a technology, only IT methodology, so they were only too happy when their was a third party who could, potentially, be put on the hook. -----Original Message----- From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Jason Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 6:53 PM To: Main PLUG discussion list Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re:newhotness?) On Mon, 2009-02-23 at 15:03 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote: > It's obvious from this discussion and > from things I have experienced, that software freedom is usually not > highly valued. Worse, it's not even considered in many cases. That is partially true. I do know of several..thousands actually..IT personnel who are seriously looking at using OSS. They are seeing the lockdown. I had an IT person say something to me awhile back that hit the nail on the head. This is paraphrased...it was a long discussion. "The reason we haven't moved to OSS is because then *we* would be responsible for fixing it. WE couldn't point the finger at Microsoft or McAfee when things go bad. We would have to take responsibility for our own configurations...and you know how well that goes with CIO's who just want to cover their own ass. They don't even look at our own competence and ability pool...they only care about who they need to blame when something goes wrong. And Microsoft is a good fall guy. Of course, the CIO doesn't know that they can point the finger all they want, but when it actually comes to legal dispute, our company doesn't have a foot to stand on." Then another guy came along and said... "Hey, we're using Red Hat! They can be a good fall guy too..." --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss