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..."
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