Is Fear Reducing the Publicity for Open Source?

sebFlyte writes "Are companies deliberately keeping quiet about moves to open source because they are afraid of the reactions of proprietary vendors they still have relationships with? ZDNet raises and tries to answer this question in a two-part special report, 'Open source behind closed doors'. It comes to the conclusion that, in all probability, companies are keeping quiet to avoid reprisals of one sort or another. One part of the fear of publicizing migrations is nicely summed up in the second part by Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe: 'Guys are really shy -- it's the Munich Linux thing. They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.'"

Comments

Re:Yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason with him in terms he can understand: throw a chair.

Re:We don't tell the managers

[Anonymous Coward]

To a very large extend we, as IT proffesionals, don't tell the managers that we use OSS.

John, could you step into my office for a moment?

Your Boss

It's because open source is communism:)

[max born]

And communists always do things in secret.

There was a CNET interview with Bill Gates earlier this year in which he suggests:

There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

Let's make the MS fanboys happy:

[Hosiah]

They've been complaining about the Billy-as-Borg icon for years. Let's get rid of it...and replace it with Billy-as-the-Godfather. Really, they aren't Borg anymore, they've been busted down to "common thugs"...still fearsome, but no longer insurmountable. The fact that they have to resort to such tactics proves this.