Is There a Need for a GNU Lobby?

Anonymous Coward writes "Data Warehousing is a field in which you dump data from a lot of different databases, transforming it in some way and load it in a new, business-oriented database. Somewhere along the way, you need to transform a HUGE load of data, and there are VERY expensive copyrighted tools that 'help' you do so. While working on a job for a client, we developed all of the transformation process using GNU tools (SunOS 5.6 and a nice E10K machine, if you want to know!) and found out that it was MUCH faster and even cleaner than with the particular transformation tool that we were 'supposed' to use. Our client (a big bank...) went berserk and started talking about 'lack of support', especially since the management had already bought the other tool and paid $200K for it, so they didn't want to look stupid. What they did was pay for the redevelopment using their transformation tool, only to find out in the the end that the process was taking 20 hours longer (approx 5x increase!) Now that we are going back to the original solution, I am thinking about what arguments I could have used 6 months ago(!) to prevent this? Maybe there is a market out there for consulting companies that offer GNU/Linux support and can reassure the management about these solutions?"