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How Would You Argue for Open Source?
Nate asks: "I am currently working for an international corporation, and the site I am working at was (until very recently) entirely run on Windows. We recently purchased a Solaris server, and I am in charge of setting it up and resetting the global UNIX standard. The problem is that management doesn't want to install software that does not have 24 hour, worldwide support available along with it, yet they want the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..) without spending insane amounts of money. I was wondering how the Slashdot community deals with convincing management that Open Source software is safe to use when creating a global standard, and what your solutions have been to supporting users working with open source software." Two years ago, Slashdot tackled the Enterprise Support question. Now, say you had that particular problem solved and the only thing left is that all-important pitch to Upper Management. What arguments would you use in your attempts to get their approval? What statistics and references would you point to, in order to back everything up?
I've had the same problem at all organizations I've been at, except for one.
It usually ended up in me in a shouting match
"We'll have access to the source code, and be able to update the app as needed due to new requirements or OS upgrade."
Worked for me.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
if they want to take responsibility for aligning their IT strategy to their business objectives, or their systems provider's.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
For statistics about open source software / Free Software, see my paper, "Why Open Source Software / Free Software? Look at the Numbers!", at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html . It has a large collection of information you'll probably find useful.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Show your boss how easy it is to ind online troubleshooting documentation for the various software packages you are proposing to use, as well as documenting the entire install so a monkey could reinstall the software if something breaks.
Your company wants to make sure that anyone who might administer those servers has access to the information they need to fix any problems that come up if the person who initially installed the software falls off the earth.
A 24hour support line is one method of getting that support, you just have to show that there are other less expensive support routes that are just as viable.
If need be remind your boss that it is your ass on the line if something goes wrong with the servers and you'll be the one showing up to work at 4AM on a Sunday to fix the issue.
Do you Gentoo!?
It seems odd to me to decide on a solution and then develop arguments to use that solution. IT is generally a service provider for business needs. You present the business users with the available options, outline the pros and cons, and allow them to decide. The other danger of engaging in proseletyzing is that if something goes wrong, everyone will be quick to point out the guy who did all the yelling about open source.
When telling my boss why it would be foolish to use Oracle for a web content database when MySQL is cheaper and faster (I know, I know), she wanted to know what the TCO is on it. Huh? I just said it was free other than labor. "Well I'll have to talk about TCO. My bosses don't believe that OSS is actually free." I wish they would just leave me alone and slip the checks under the door....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I guess it depends on how much money is considered 'insane'. RedHat offers support, HP sells contracts supporting Linux... I would think the support costs would not exceed a comparable contract supporting Windows systems.
.:diatonic:.
So give her estimated labor costs of installing and supporting MySQL vs cost of purchasing, installing and supporting Oracle. Don't forget hardware costs.
Talk about two things:
Cost: Cost of rollout of a commercial product is comparable or more than the cost of 3rd party support contracts for open software.
Risk Management: Buying proprietary software gives you support, but the support is with a monopoly supplier who can then choose to charge whatever it wishes down the road for both software upgrades and support. Tying yourself to a monopoly supplier is a poor risk, since every move a monopolist will make will not be for the benifit of your company, but for the benifit of thiers. Similarly, with Open Source, since our company has the right to modify the software, every change you make will be for the benifit of your company.
Upper Management does not grok Geek. Upper Management groks Dollars and groks Risk.
Just keep that in mind.
-- Funksaw.
that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..)
VNC and OpenSSH are available for windows so they might not be convincing. Try using ROI and TCO as persuaders.
Now, say you had that particular problem solved and the only thing left is that all-important pitch to Upper Management. What arguments would you use in your attempts to get their approval? What statistics and references would you point to, in order to back everything up?
I wouldn't even bother. I would call the local IBM Global Services office and ask them to pitch for the job, and dangle the carrot (whether it exists or not right now, it might to in the future) of outsourcing the management of said Open Source infrastructure to them. I assume that you don't actually care who runs it from day to day just so long as it's Open Source. They'll make a far more convincing argument that you can alone - remember they employ people full-time to do nothing but research and put together fancy presentations (as do all consulting firms... you don't think the slick performers doing the presentation will actually show up to do the work, do you?).
What you need are testimonials from others running mission-critical applications using FOSS.
One Fortune 500 executive won't achieve comfort with this kind of a spending and deployment decision (face it, they don't know the tech) until, unless, and, only if, they have seen more than one other Fortune 500 executive put their own necks on the chopping block, made a courageous decision, and have it succeed wildly with no glitches whatsoever.
Getting those testimonials might be hard for an individual on their own ("Mr. Big's office, how may I help you? Right...."), but the web is full of articles showing different businesses using FOSS successfully.
If you were tied into a vendor with a lot of FOSS contacts (eg, RH, IBM), then they could probably help you find those important reference testimonials. Sun is late getting on board the FOSS bandwagon, despite having produced a lot the standards and technology that has made it possible. Their Solaris servers will run FOSS just fine and interoperate with Linux machines, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
...give it to them:
Form a new company with you as the only employee.
Submit monthly invoice for $50,000 to your current company for "OSS Platinum Support".
Sit back and watch the money roll in.
This works to your benefit since they'll probably call you at all hours of the night to initiate the support call, anyway...
- Tony
There are so many different angles to attack this issue from, and unfortunately there are more sides to the issue than we'd like to admit. However I think there are several areas that would be good to discuss:
- Closed source has more bugs, and the exploits are typically more severe.
- Actual turn around time for Closed source is much slower than open source for new features and enhancements.
- Closed source hampers IT productivity as the fear of sharing "Intellectual Property" infects and permeates many people that work in closed source environments
one of my favorite all time articles is written by Clay Shirky, entitled In Praise of Evolvable Systems
This article addresses what many people consider to be open source's weekpoint. It is however it's strongest point. This is a fantastic read and is a must in any presentation to management about open source and open standards in general.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
software that does not have 24 hour, worldwide support available along with it
... and say hello to the 24 hour, worldwide support team.
Greetings,
We have a number of clients, from mid- to large enterprises, who have switched to *NIX/Linux over the last 3 years following our advice. The key for us was to define quantifiable targets in terms of $$$ and time-to-resolution, and kept statistics of similar environments running Windoze or commercial *NIX software.
Two test cases that immediately come to mind are Samba and VNC. In the first case the monetary quantification was instant: $0 against licenses for a 75-person department. There were no calls to support at all once we switched the servers. For the VNC case at another company, we pitted it against PC Anywhere. Once users understood the new logon sequence, they began champion VNC by themselves because they realized that *NIX machines and Macs were opened to their control, some of which had been closed before.
Both of my examples focused on solving specific problems, with a set time line and quantification targets. Don't try to implement everything in one single deployment because if something non-mission-critical breaks that affects a mission-critical app or service you'll invalidate your own case.
Good luck and have fun!
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
If your company wants 24/7 support go with a company that provides linux solutions. Buy IBM servers with linux on them and get a support contract. Likewise some Linux distros like RedHat provide 24/7 support contracts.
My software is free and that makes it better..NEENER NEENER NEENER!!!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
this guy if you want all the Microsoft dirt present and future.
http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit021.html
That is his latest. Look around on the site a little. Lots of stuff there with many current references.
Blogging because I can...
What makes you think that those developers were making "off-the-shelf" applications? It's likely that some of them are, but I'd wager that most are meant for internal use.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
MS has stopped releasing security updates for NT4, so companies using it are forced to decide between having security holes or paying MS for a newer version that locks them into a more draconian license agreement. How long until your company faces the same problem with whatever version of windows they use?
With open source, you can patch whatever version you're running, or just upgrade whatever is necessary without the draconian eulas.
Jason
ProfQuotes
They'll ask you "Why go with Solaris over any other Unix variant?" Better have that answer.
They'll ask you "Why not Linux?" Have an asnwer.
They'll ask you "Will it work with our existing Windows infrastructure?" Answer that as well.
They'll ask "How much will the rollout cost?" Better have those figures handy.
They'll want to know "Why not just stick with Windows, especially since Windows 2003 is about to ship?" Have a retort ready for that.
They'll want to know (if they're savvy) how the data crunching numbers will compare UNIX to Windows, MySQL to MS SQL. You'll want that handy, too.
And finally, they'll want to know why should they switch to a different platform when they're already so heavily invested in Windows. Got an answer other than "Windows sucks"? You better know those things, becuase bosses aren't about to "just take your word for it" they demand facts, figures, and spreadsheets for proof--and if anything goes wrong it's your ass. Switching is fine, but you better be ready for the backlash and have oodles of proof ready or the resistance will be an unsurmountable chasm.
Before you go to upper management find out how much the non-open source applications are going to cost. Factor in any consulting fees for setup. Then factor in the cost for global support on an ongoing basis over say the course of the next five years. I'd also suggest adding in any special hardware requirements.
Next find your open source "products". Then find developers who are very comfortable with the "products" that you are recommending. Factor in the cost of hiring them and their salary on an on going basis. They will be your "support" team. Also factor in hardware if needed.
The first hurdle is to prove that it will cost less or at the very least no more than the "off the shelf" products. Then you'll need to put your sales hat on and do a side by side "feature comparison" of the OSS alternatives to the products that you evaluated.
Most of all, be objective and very matter of fact about your presentation. Prove to them that OSS is the way to go becuase it costs less to aquire and maintian and has an equal or superior feature set. Apache is a great case study...
Good luck!
the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..) without spending insane amounts of money.
Since the two examples you cite are available on Windows, perhaps you need to get a better understanding of Windows. In fact, Windows Remote Desktop feature in XP is superior to VNC in functionality, response, and seamless integration, so VNC is hardly a compelling argument in favor of open source operating systems.
Perhaps you need to have someone with a more balanced perspective come into the organization and evaluate where Unix derivatives are the best choice and where Windows is a superior pick. Those who blindly promote *nix and open source as the solution to every computing problem are no more enlightened than those who automatically choose Microsoft products for every function.
Why do you think that they're going to be anything other than in-house apps?
Heck, I expect to write a Linux app in the next year. Frankly, I expect to be doing it in under 6 months. And nobody will ever see it since it's the core infrastructure for a service my company is offering. Pure backend stuff.
The vast majority of software written is not written for the commercial marketplace. It's written for inhouse use.
I work at a university, and over two years ago, they asked me to help evaluate authoring systems for online courses. One of their requirements was that the company we chose needed to be willing to partner with the institution to extend the capabilities of their software to meet our needs. We gave several suggestions, but I told them they should get on board with MIT's OKI and OpenCourseWare.
They had two concerns about open source solutions: 1. There is no company behind most open source solution. No company means no tech support. 2. OKI was just getting off the ground and would not be ready for prime time for a while.
Over a year later, the university finally chose a company to go with for their authoring system. We paid for a 30-day trial and got 5 days into it before we realized their marketing people had straight-up lied about its feature set.
So, we went with the company our university had ranked number two on the list. We worked with them for 6 months, hired one of their people to work for them on a university paycheck, and gave them a substantial fee every month for licensing. Then the company decided to get out of the authoring systems market, pulled our license and left us with nothing.
In the meantime, OKI has picked up steam, and the 11 universities that got on early with them have been developing solutions that will soon be GPLed.
The long-short is that having a company behind the product is a double-edged sword. Sure, they could give you tech support, but what happens if/when they're gone?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
In the beginning, no large company would use Apache because it was open source and therefore was not supported by any specific company. Nice thing about OSS is that large projects like Apache are supported 24x7 worldwide by MANY companies -- so if one company provides poor support, you can use another one. BTW, Apache is up to 63 percent of all websites now. :-) And now that it runs on windows, it will become even more popular. Same is true for Linux which has the backing of many large companies, so there is no shortage of technical support. And I haven't even touched on the web forums, newsgroups, list servers, websites, of free support avialable. And traditional media too -- books, magazines, etc all cover OOS projects like Apache, OpenSSL, Linux/*nix, etc.
Support is not an issue. I think the reliablity factor of running on a *nix platform will help a lot.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
No, I don't work for them, but Linuxcare has a professional looking website using the CEO-lingo that might comfort the big-wigs you need to convince. There are other companies that support Free Software too, check out Red Hat's Support Services. A site called OpenEnterprise looks to have a ton of resources on exactly what you're asking for.
Also, take a look at IT Management's special report on Linux. It offers a lot of ammo to you in making a presentation. You can point to the other heavy-hitters that are using Free solutions and have concrete examples of success.
The same site even has an article entitled Selling the 'Suits' on your IT project which looks to have some good advice for you.
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
convincing management that Open Source software is safe to use
Most Open Source advocates really need to think about something before they go charging in assuming OSS without vendor support is really better for all situations: Management wants 24x7 support not because they think the software is unstable, but because they cannot afford downtime when that software does fail.
"So what?" you say, "I've been using this stuff for years and I can solve pretty much any problem they might run across. I am 24x7 support!" What happens when you're gone? On vacation? What happens when you get burned out and sick of being the only guy capable of supporting an application that's taken off in the enterprise and now has a hundred installations all over the world? What happens when you have trouble finding someone with the skill sets needed to replace you?
This "guru" support model simply does not scale. This is why management wants 24x7 support: so that no matter what happens to their gurus, they always have a toll-free 800 number to call to get someone that knows what they're doing on the problem. If that person can't solve it, a good maintenance contract might even involve getting the vendor to fly an engineer out there to fix the problem. This is very much about making management feel good about getting the support they need to solve their problems.
The alternative is to spend an exceptional amount of money training a staff equivalent to the staff of the vendor to be just as smart and available as a vendor offering 24x7 support. It's not just about hiring two or three strategically-placed gurus.
Now, with that out of the way, OSS can still work in the enterprise, provided you approach the situation intelligently. Can your organization staff up a support group internally to support this application without requiring a maintenance contract with a vendor? (And can you keep them busy enough to make it cheaper in the long run?) Certain skillsets are pretty common nowadays, such as administration of Apache. It may be perfectly realistic to be able to staff up a small group to support common OSS applications in an enterprise. If someone leaves the company, it's realistic that they can be replaced or someone else trained to fill the vacancy, but you can never count on being able to hire a small army of "gurus" capable of adapting to any OSS application at the drop of a hat. This is very unrealistic (not to mention extremely expensive).
But not all OpenSource projects fit into this category. Frequently they'll be smaller projects that might be used plenty on the Internet, but either because there's a guru out there actually setting it up and administering it (that can adapt to just about anything), or because the author made it exceptionally easy for a novice to get it running. Neither of these options is acceptable in an enterprise setting! Your guru won't be there forever, and your army of novices won't have a clue how to fix a novice-friendly application when it breaks.
The bottom line is that you need to consider your company's true support expenses here: if an application needs 24x7 support, you either need to have a staff of people on-hand to guarantee support for this application (across your enterprise), at a significant expense, or there needs to be a vendor out there willing to assume 24x7 support for a fraction of that cost.
The article mentioned in the parent is a good one... I've used it successfully in several seminars on value proposition of open source software. It's generally been very well received.
As far as arguing with upper management, when I was working in cubeville, I never worried about it. I just implemented it the best way I knew how, and presented it as a completed solution.
Once the solution is in place, nobody ever seems to worry about it. Then at some point in the future, it's easy to point to it and say: "but we've *been* using open source all this time, and don't have problems with it".
I think that's still the most successful implementation strategy. It's the one Microsoft used for pushing Novell out of mid-sided businesses.
The March 15th edition of CIO magazine had a front page article about Open Source: http://www.cio.com/archive/031503/opensource.html. My favorite quote, very applicapable to this situation:
"We will guarantee the same [service-level agreements] for Linux that we do for proprietary OSs," says Dan Frye, director of IBM's Linux Technology Center. "Response times, fix times, uptime--we'll sign all those same contracts for Linux."
That pretty much says it all: 24/7 support with contractual guaruntees for Linux. There are plenty of other places willing to do similar for other open source software. Best point though: if you don't like the vendor you first choose for that support, you can actually pick up and move to someone else WITHOUT changing your software too!
"Actually, I enjoyed this in the same vague, horrible way I enjoyed the A-Team" P. Opus
I was once working for a leading financial information provider (>16,000 employees), and I was tasked with setting up a listserver, at minimal cost (read no expenditure beyond the cost of my own labour). I ended up opting for an open source SMTP-based listserver, which was far cheaper than the closest closed-source equivalent (free as in beer vs. over 11,000 pounds). I also used Mhonarc to provide a web interface to the message archive, with Perl bits bolted on to add functionality.
I had to put the listserver on the far side of the SMTP gateway, since the company was using some really fucked-up mail system. When I told one of the company software architects that SMTP played a role in the listserver functionality, he told me that SMTP was forbidden on the internal network. He then (very helpfully) pointed out that I should go ahead anyhow, since by the time the PHBs found out, the listserver would be up, running and proving its worth.
I left the company five years ago, but as far as I know the listserver still sees a great deal of use. The moral of this story is this: if the PHBs tell you to solve a problem, don't start evangelising about open source. Just implement the solution in open source, and after six months the software will have proven its worth. Hell, in my case I'm not even sure whether the PHBs realized the listserver was a) using SMTP, or b) using open-source software.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I've seen an argument that open source is only free is one's time is worthless. I work for a multi-national and we have similiar requirements of twenty-four hour worldwide support. From what I've seen in technology three is never a swiss-army knife solution despite what many people here on slashdot believe, open source is not always the best answer.
Nowadays, management has a very different spin on IT. Gone are the days where IT wrongly drove business and the CIO had the company by the privates. Management teams are now IT savvy, and no longer write blank cheques to IT based on IT's requirements.
The argument that, if it is broken we have the source and we can fix it is no argument at all. Unless you are an IT company, your core business is not the business of IT. Why would you pour resources into IT to develop a skillset in your company to maintain software? How does that improve profitability? It doesn't. The cost of having one expert to fix a handful of problems, will never be competitive against an organization who's business model revolves around maintaining their product.
Take a look at how commercial software is built and maintained. Direction is driven by customers and revenue. How is open source driven? I don't know, maybe someone can help me. Who manages the product life-cycle in open source?
I am not anti-open-source, nor anti-Microsoft. I believe that for your case, you should ask management for their requirements. If one of their answers is 24/7 world-wide vendor support. You just have to accept it and move on. Sometimes their answers are not technically driven. Remember you are probably working for a company built on capatilism. Again, accept it and move on. They sign your paycheques not the other way around.
-Many recipes are "open source." Why do people still eat out? You'd pay less than half, and have control over the source if you cook yourself!
The vast majority of software written is not written for the commercial marketplace. It's written for inhouse use.
Or embedded, or targetted at a specific industry. I've got *mumble* years of experience working on plenty of software that was sold to customers. It was written for specific target markets. It was never the sort of stuff that would fit in a shrink-wrapped box on a store shelf.
Anyone writing code that isn't targetted at desktop users (embedded, turnkey, server, etc.) who doesn't at least consider open source platforms is overlooking a possible area of cost savings.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Will someone please point to ANY example of a successful lawsuit against Microsoft (or IBM/Sun/HP for that matter) for producing faulty software that impacted someone's business???
The whole "gives us someone to blame" is a complete crock of manure. I used to write software for government apps... they always built a one year warranty into the product. Guess what we spent most of our time doing? Trying to prove a reported bug was actually a request for a new feature.
As far as contract support goes... those tend to be "time and material" peoples.... never seen a successful lawsuit there either...
Labor costs are not the only cost covered in the TLA you so quickly dismiss. Time spent rebooting the server? That time while the server is down instead of making money for the company costs money. Who rebooted the server? You did, you are payed. That costs money. Did this server hardware cost money? Add that to your TCO. Does the electricity it uses everyday have a cost? Add that to the TCO. TCO must include ALL identifiable costs - one-time fixed costs, capital expenses, and recurring costs need to be factored in. Nothing is free.
My point - there are many more factors regarding Total Cost of Ownership and young support jockeys need to get with the program. This isn't some geekfest where we all trade D&D stories while chewing on the latest OSS install. It's called business and time costs money. You don't like that? Find another way to pay the rent.
Personally when I got into this industry I also swiped aside everything management spouted as just "BS". Then I grew up and realized that a lot is riding on things we take for granted. You might think it's easy to run a business but it's not. _Everything_ affects the bottom line and has associated risks and there is no way around that. Identifying and quantifying that risk is part of the process of making an informed decision. Would you rather they just shot from the hip and hope to hit the target?
You better learn these acronyms and use them to your advantage if you ever want to play with the big boys. OSS solutions CAN compete with proprietary solutions in the TCO arena. But who is going to get them into the arena? Learn the lingo and play hard ball, or go whine in the corner about how everyone else is a bitch like you do now.
I ever so recently got a job for a company whose incomes relys heavily on Microsofties. Their big concern is that they wanted to support Microsoft as much as possible and I wanted to go towards an open source solution (specifically an LAMP architecture). I managed to get my way on everything but the server (still have to run Win2k) and am quite pleased with how much I was able to maneuver.
My best suggestion to you is do your research. Show those benchmarks. Show the community support (which is far better than 24 hr support because when you post to a news group, IRC channel or even a bulletin board, your solution will be found in a matter of minutes).
Also, show them the vast amounts of documentation freely available online (and with each product). Trying finding how to configure the intracies of IIS in comparison with Apache.
Also, look for product comparisons of software packages. For instance, MySQL vs. SQL Server; in recent benchmarks, MySQL was rated alongside Oracle 9i for speed and comes with it's own ODBC-to-ODBC bridge which SQL Server does not (and which can be purchased for $5400).
Make as strong a case as you can and gear it towards their pocketbook and level of tech experience.
And if that doesn't work, remind them that Code Red and Nimda took out 80,000 Windows machines; that's 80,000 machines that run proprietary code which is not cross platform compliant. Does ASP work on Unix, Linux, BSD or MAC? How about Visual Basic? IIS? You get my point. Cross platform compliancy is another good one because if they want to ever move to a different OS, they are screwed if they go with Microsoft.
The savings in cost, the community support, cross compliancy... what is there argument?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I've discovered that there is a time and a place for every battle. Sometimes it's better to let people figure it out for themselves. I've been down this road with companies that I've consulted for many times. They all follow the "hit-by-a-bus" strategy... if our admin gets hit by a bus, we need software that any other person can support if we need to bring them in. Sadly, there aren't many people out there actually worth their salt and too many of them only specialize in certain commercial apps.
:)
My strategy: Make the case to the management plain and simple. Open source software is constantly being improved and will [potentially] always be free (unless the author goes to the dark side...). Tell them they can save XXX dollars and get great features. If they still argue, say OK fine. Get quotes from all the major vendors of high-dollar commercial apps (i.e. Citrix Metaframe instead of VNC (yes there is a Unix version), commerical SSH (yes there are plenty) instead of OpenSSH, etc.) Compile all the costs, slap it on the CFO's desk and say "Ok I'm ready to implement all this just buy all that stuff." Then the CFO will scratch his head and say "Maybe this open-source stuff isn't such a bad idea after all."
Reminds me of a very similar battle I went through wtih a client some time back. The CEO *insisted* on M$ ISA Server (becasue people with "MCSE" after their names are a dime-a-dozen. Trust me, I know, I have one as well, only because my employer paid me to go get it) I told him that it was a waste of money. He didn't believe me. So I set up two servers -- one with ISA Server and one with Linux and IP Tables. He quickly saw the light when I dropped the $2400 quote on his desk to buy the license for ISA when the demo expired, and had no such quote for the other server.
Sun Tzu.
"management doesn't want to install software that does not have 24 hour"
;)
Tell them for about $40 a month, they can buy you a cellphone and make you their 24hr on call person. And of course since you'll be salaried, you won't get over time for those 2am calls. They'll like that.
I did not see anything about demos, installs or Gnome skins outside of your flames. Nor was there any good reason to flame free software as a "summer project".
Your points about presenting a whole solution are useful when you need to replace a whole system in a lethargic micormanaged work environment. All that "Oracle, Sybase, HP, Compaq, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, SAP, etc ... certifications" blah blah is so much dated marketroid bable with good bad and out of business mixed up. Wake up boss, HP is Compaq, Microsoft is worthless, Sun is good and IBM uses Linux. Well, OK, You've got a point about selling a "solution" in such an environement. It's negligence to not do your homework about the bottom line anywhere.
At the same time, it's a good idea to talk to people you trust about what free software is all about. It is important that management understands that free software is simply a co-operative community of software writers and users. They should know that such communities have always created the software that some companies tried to comercialize in a closed source way in the 1980s. The closed source experiment is just about out of gas, becasue the free software community has ignored it to create viable alternatives. Corporate managers understand co-operative research as well as they understand bottom line issues. Free software is not such a great leap at reasonable companies and most people are tired of being jerked around by comercial software pimps.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That argument only works assuming you have people in your company who actually have the skill to play with the source code. It seems that the longer I'm in this field, the more apparent it becomes that there are only a small number of people who actually know what's going on when they look at code, and maybe a smaller number who have actually have the skill to modify it to their needs.
Your management has legitimate concerns, but these can be addressed with some open source packages, if the project is sufficiently mature and well-supported. This is where I see you making a common mistake: you speak of open source software as if all open source projects are the same.
For some of the very well-known open source projects -- such as Apache, much of what constitutes Linux, sendmail, Perl -- the documentation is excellent, the online resources are extensive and up-to-date, there are many opportunities for simple customization, and above all, there are full-time consultants and consulting firms who know the stuff very well and can be hired to help. In fact, if the latter is true, then your management can get exactly what they're looking for: full-time support.
Many other open source projects are obviously someone's part-time diversion, and it shows. There are many missing features and a few bugs, and no one who can get around to fixing them. The options for configuration and customization are limited. The documentation was done as an afterthought, it has whole critical chapters saying nothing more than "TBD", and it was apparently never proofread by a native speaker of English. (Sorry to have to add that last one, but unfortunately it's an all too common problem.) This is the stuff your management wants to stay away from, and they have good reason.
You mentioned two specific services you need: VNC and SSH. So why don't you research the quality of the available open source solutions? Evaluate them with respect to project maturity, online resources, quality of the documentation, and especially, find out if you can hire someone to provide support. I personally don't know what you can get, but if you're lucky, you can present your management with a professional solution that will satisfy their needs. And if you can't find that, then you shouldn't be going with the open source stuff anyway -- then your bosses may have saved you from a lot of heartache.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Red Hat's primary business is support, unlike MS which regards its primary business as writing code. The biggest difference between commercial open source support and proprietary support is that there is *more* support for open source software. Why? Because open source code is supportable by more than just the original vendor. You want support? You can hire the original coder or a third party. You can choose to debug the code yourself, add features, or change features. You have options.
What options do you have with proprietary software? Well, you can guess at what's causing the problem and change configurations. If the problem is an actual crash or something, you can reboot, reinstall the offending program, reinstall the OS. If none of that works, you can call the vendor (who will start by having you follow those three steps, along with applying patches, blame the hardware, etc.). The vendor may or may not be able to help you. Further, it is entirely up to them whether they give you real support or not (for example, if behavior is considered to be a feature, you cannot make a software vendor change the behavior). If they choose not, then there is no recourse for you (other than switching software).
A university where I worked considered switching to one of those MS license all your software from us and we'll give you a really great deal. As part of that, they considered moving the yellow page servers to the MS product. The deal was sold, they were ready to start. They asked MS to make a tool that would convert a flat text file generated from the information stored in the previous software's format into the MS format and MS refused. They had a nice point and click interface, and they expected the university to manually retype 60 *thousand* accounts with it. An overnight batch job would have become a multi-month project. Yellow pages info now resides on OpenVMS boxes with a custom written interface that took a couple of weeks to design.