Selling Open Source Solutions to Upper Mgmt?

An anonymous reader asks: "I am the single member of the IT department at a small nonprofit. We were looking to replace our commercial content management system with a custom combination of open source solutions (Lucene, Jackrabbit, etc). However, since I was the sole developer, progress was slow and we have little resources to recruit potential volunteers. Recently, we had a closed source, commercial vendor demo their version of a content management system, and immediately upper management was willing to go along with their proposal, even at the expense of project requirements. Although I understand and accept the decision (and am quite relieved I am not expected to deliver as the sole developer), I am interested to know if there are resources for promoting open source software in a manner like closed source, commercial software. If not, is this a challenge within the OS community? It seems that OS solutions are primarily promoted to technical implementors rather than upper management. Of course, many technical implementors do not have the marketing skills to promote open source, but are there resources to help us do so?"

Good idea

[countSudoku()]

I like the idea of having some way of making FOSS a viable option to our managers when it comes time to do a proof of concept and ultimately head into a dev environment, or similar. However, like yourself, I'm wondering if there are any resources like that available outside of ourselves. The way I typically try to shoehorn FOSS into our shop is to; 1) point to existing, highly mainstream FOSS tools and services already in your environment (hello Java/Ruby/Apache/tomcat/Linux/some Unix OSes/openSolaris/etc), 2) point out the cost of support (beyond our admin efforts, like Nagios which will provide an enterprise support option to orgs who *really* want to pay for support) and the ease in the ability for that support to be passed on to "future generations of admins" ie. future maintainability, 3) do the footwork/homework for your FOSS app goals up front to show what can be made available in terms of features vs. gotchas and how long it's going to take to implement.
    There's probably some other things I'm forgetting, but those are the first that come to mind. It's not enough to point out huge, expensive proprietary software mistakes in the legacy of your shop, and probably not advisable on its own merit. Doing the homework on why your new FOSS app will be better, stronger, easier to maintain and ultimately cheaper than the "off the shelf" version of your solution is the way to go here. Good luck!

just do a demo

[conradov]

How about going to OpenSourceCMS.com and do a little research on which CMS fits better? That should take about 3 to 8 hours (depending on your level of geekness). There are demos for each system on-line, so you don't even have to install them. Prepare, and show them a demo of the system you chose. Another 3 to 8 hours. If they weren't impressed, but you are 100% certain it was because of lack of customization, download, install, customize, and do the last demo. That should take 1 to 3 days. If management is not impressed after that, give it up.