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Experiences with F/OSS as Marketing Ploy?
TempusMagus asks: "My company developed a custom content management system for a large arts organization. Our relationship with them was great and the value of the software was appreciated by everyone. Recently they put in place a large Management/Ticketing/CRM solution for events and ticket sales (essentially a huge transaction heavy Microsoft SQL server database). The CRM system was sold to them as a community based, non-profit software application perfect for other non-profit arts organizations. Here's the interesting part: the 'community' arts management software was developed by a -commercial- company who just so happens to be the -only- vendor they recommend. In fact, when we inquired about the system with the software company in order to integrate it into our CMS all of the sudden the client received tons of calls from the 'approved' vendor to convince them that no one but themselves were capable of integrating with it. Basically, the client has been frightened into using one vendor and is going to throw away a perfectly wonderful (and non-Microsoft based) system. Has anyone any other experiences with companies who use free/open source software or 'community' development to simply lure customers as a front? Do you think we'll see more of this type of behavior as the popularity of F/OSS increases?"
Also, just because the software is open-source doesn't mean it's easy to integrate with. Just look at all the Perl out there. If you can't detect if the code is binary or ascii, it's hard to interface with :)
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
My company is clobering the competition by the judicious use of open souse products.
Perhaps you should obtain an "open souse" spelling checker.
Our bids are lower and our re-work costs are lower.
Your bids to do what? To rework what?
In fact, I hope the goodness of open-sourse doesen't come to light - it's a distinct competitive advantage that I don't want my competition to know about.
Please! You can't even spell "open source." You're some high-school or college kid trying to pretend to be in business.
Raking in the money with little effort is FUN.
Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say. All those customers just dying to pay your "firm" for your secret open source software. Here's a reality check for you: There have been numerous studies done regarding the use of open-source software for business and there is not some tremendous monetary advantage in most cases, so you are not "raking in the money with little effort."