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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?"
Just because software is "open-source" doesn't mean it's good or that its vendor is benevolent. "Open-source" means that you get the source code along with the package; that package may be free, or it may not, and that source code may come encumbered with all sorts of funky licensing, or it may not. It's beneficial to have the source, in case you need to tweak it for your particular application or to accommodate for new hardware, but it's not a cure-all. What sort of open-source license is this company providing? Proprietary? GPL? BSD?
No one should decide the system they use solely on whether it's open-source, or even on whether it's proprietary. You need to consider the whole cost, including hardware and support.
Sounds like *your* software wasn't open-source. Maybe that was the problem all along and why the "Arts organization" dropped you in favor of your open source company.
Are you serious? Most organizations don't care at all about whether software is open-source. They are looking for software that meets their needs.
Given two packages that perform equally well, the organization is going to make their decision based on support. And "support" doesn't mean some college student in Finland who gets on IRC at night. It means an employee or local consultant who will answer the phone, maintain the systems, and meet with the customer when needed.
The delusions under which so many open-source proponents labor is incredible. It's like a shipping clerk who convinces himself that the rest of the company is really excited about his use of recycled packing peanuts.