Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:27:06 -0500 From: leenix [email protected] Subject: FOSS Solutions 1. I agree with the philosophy behind FOSS 2. There are a plethora of plug-ins developed to help extend our infrastructure for our current (and future) needs 3. If we find that a piece of software we downloaded (or purchased) is broken, or doesn't do what we need it to do, we have the source code and (hopefully) the resources to fix/change it. 4. Not only are there several (competing) options for paid support, there are a ton of free message boards, mailing lists and IRC channels to get assistance from, making our virtual knowledge bank HUGE 5. Total cost of ownership is going to be a fraction of that of closed source products. 6. When needed, we can find closed source software to do what we need when we can't find a FOSS solution
7. Vendor lock in - Ensures greater access to the developers themselves as support contacts, if the need arises. Ensures that meaningful third party support will be available for mainstream products if abandoned or obsolesced by their original authors.
8: Tendencies towards standards compliance and openness in the FOSS community make it far more likely that related projects will be able to effectively and efficiently interact.
9: Simplifies license compliance - Closed-source shops have the added overhead of needing to account for licenses to proprietary products, the hassle and man-hours involved in paying license fees, etc. Applications for the operating systems used in these shops, be they Mac or Windows shops, are far more likely to be proprietary shareware or purchased software, adding to the transaction costs for adding new software.
10: (More a plus for *NIX than FOSS) Having more mature command line interfaces than are available in pre-Win2k7 builds of Windows Server substantially cut the amount of time needed to populate changes across multiple servers. Even after the adoption of the yet-to-be-market-tested server operating systems that ship with PowerShell, the size and maturity of the body of available code and documentation for shells used in UNIX and Linux administration will continue to vastly outweigh that available for Windows for some time. Note that O'Reilly books on the relatively young Bash shell have been through several revisions already.
That might help, Sean Crago