Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS? 369
mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"
Stallman's answer (Score:5, Funny)
I once asked Richard Stallman how to convince my school to go with FOSS instead of Windows, since most of our CS lab was on Windows.
His reply: "Defenestration! Throw Windows out of the computer, or throw the computer out the window!"
Re:Cost (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:3, Funny)
You say that like it's a good thing.
Re:Confluence did not impress me (Score:1, Funny)
Twiki? Years ago? I remember that. It use to output "Bidi bidi, bidi bidi" all the time.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:3, Funny)
My problem has been convincing them that they con't just pass of the cost of Windows to the customer. They like the fact that they can hire 3-4 MCSEs for the cost of one good Unix admin, but they don't realize that the Unix admin can set things up so that maintenance is much easier
That kind of math is pretty narrow minded, if you think about it. The whole world has become a better place because of computers, hasn't it? The "customers" for a lot of businesses are just ordinary people, and as such rely on Windows, and so far Windows has been quite reliable. Windows has brought joy and good fortune to these customers - is it such a bad thing then to charge them a little extra because businesses look forward to a better future with Windows?
The whole computer industry could not have evolved so quickly without the cash input from non-Unix users, and businesses find comfort in a unified computer industry. Businesses will buy into Windows as long as Microsoft and hardware makers are working on better technology. The free software is nice, but it has to be paid for somehow or else it doesn't keep up.
Indeed, only 15 years ago, when Windows 95 came into being, Unix computers cost as much as cars, so it was the Wintel combination that brought costs down to earth while making user interaction very intuitive. Without the efforts at Microsoft, we might have little choice than to buy really expensive machines right now and some clunky software choices.
FOSS and Microsoft together keep prices down. Without FOSS, Microsoft would be just as pricey as can be, but if Microsoft stopped, the motivation behind FOSS would be shrivel up.
Re:Wrong order (Score:2, Funny)
I didn't think they allowed pragmatism here on /. You're going to lose your account man!
Re:Stallman's answer (Score:3, Funny)
> As far as I can tell, the only thing that separates Richard Stallman from the bum that lives under a bridge near my home and rants
> incoherently at strangers is that Stallman has the ability to code.
You'd be surprised. I got into an argument with a bum under a bridge once about using sbcl instead of clisp. It seemed that decent multi-threading support wasn't important to him at the moment. Are you sure the incoherent ranting isn't just instruction mnemonics?
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:2, Funny)
- Ora... who?
- You know the datab..
- Office is from Microsoft not from some Greek company, used it all my life and I tell you it's Microso...
- No, I am saying Open Office, not...
- Look, I don't need to open office to tell you it's from Microsoft, now get back to work!
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm gonna get a karma beating for saying this, but sadly, Open Office isn't entirely reliable. Yes, it works well for smaller projects, is free, cross platform, and mostly compatible with MS office.
But there are.... issues. Like the autonumbering makes you want to axe murder somebody. Spacing in Impress has a beeeelion little weirds.
And... get this! The spreadsheet can't have more than 65535 rows! Here it is, 2010 and I have a roaring, quadcore laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a TB hard drive, and I'm limited to an architecture that was considered limiting 10 or more hardware generations ago?!?
OoO is sadly just not as good, and it isn't until you lose 100,000 rows of financial data that you start to appreciate just how bad this actually is. (Which has never happened to me but not everybody is as anally retentive about backups as I am)
I really wish I were an astrotufing MS shill, but I'm a Linux nerd with more than a decade as such...(check my UID)
Re:Cost? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Funny)
Tits.
Seriously. Thats all you need to do. Hire a stripper and write Plone across her tits. Show it to your boss.
You don't understand business if you try logic and reason.
Is this a dental survey? (Score:1, Funny)
My dentist is always trying to get me to floss. I find Glide works best.