[ Thanks to Hans
Bezemer for this link. ]
“What you can do is introduce FOSS technology in the
enterprise, step by step. Once it has proven itself you may take
the next step. Since mixing Microsoft and FOSS is a viable scenario
you have a multitude of options at your disposal.Warranty and support
The plain truth is that although most managers may have heard of
Open Source, they don’t have a clue what it is or how it works.
Most of them think it is something like public domain software,
stuff you can get for free, without warranty and without support.
So the first thing you have to do is to tell them you can get
support from reputable parties like Oracle, IBM, Novell and RedHat.
If you’re not happy with their support, you can change with more
ease than you could with closed source software.“Some CIOs are completely unaware that these parties provide
updates. They think you have to monitor a multitude of websites or
CVSes, search for the newest versions, download a tarball and
recompile it. I always tell them jokingly: “Well, I don’t know what
I’ve been getting all these months, but it seemed like
patches”.”