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

More likely...

[intmainvoid]

More likely what's happening is the IT department sees a need for X, draws up a budget for X with the company's current platform, and gets the budget rejected. So they just do it anyway with the open source solution, present it as a working solution and off you go.

And of course, when it comes to doing a big deal, companies can always try and get a discount by offering to be a case study for the vendor. So their adoption of the vendor's technology gets some press. When a company adopts an open source solution, there's never going to be the same PR push behind it. You are always going to hear more about things that someone can sell than you are about things you can just download for free.

Really ?

[karvind]

I just searched for earlier slashdot stories:

Oracle Continues Warming Up to Open Source

Intel Begins Support for Debian

IBM Turns to Open Source Development

IBM And Sony Form Linux Alliance

Linux Tablet to be Released in Two Days

There are only few of the many stories. Does it sound if companies are keeping mum about open source adoption ?

True story.

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1996, I was working at a Fortune 500 company, and we were planning to migrate many of our systems from Big Blue to Microsoft. I was in charge of choosing the best C++ tool, and after some meetings with programmers I chose Microsoft Visual C++. We had a conference call with some Microsoft sales people one day, and while there were only 2-3 of us speaking with them, the move to Microsoft was a really big deal in the company, and a lot of people were opposed to it, so there were several big wigs in the room just listening in. Microsoft got on the line, and they immediately started shouting. They asked me questions and then cut me off before I could answer them, they swore at us, and they said that if we didn't choose their product that they were going to go to our managers and show them how daft we were, etc. We were buying the product! After a couple minutes of this, we just sat in stunned silence. It was my meeting, so I said "Alright, I think we're done here." and hung up. I was completely flustered and terrified, and my hands were shaking. We all filed out of the room, and I tried not to look at anyone in the eye. A year later, I was writing Java code.

Re:Nope.

[kesuki]

I would. Because a 'security' patch from my then dialup ISP broke my windows networking based filesharing between my desktop and laptop PC (connected via 10 base T) I spent months in frustration trying to get files to copy between my computers, but then i read about this thing called 'linux' and bought this book on it with slackware.. well slackware and me didn't get along, so searched on the internet, and viola, i heard of this thing called 'FreeBSD' well, the installer was so slick and nifty (to me, at that time) compared to linux, and it had all these handbooks i could use to set up and configure ppp to auto dial, use compression, etc etc.. i got consistantly better dialup results than i ever had with windows, usenet binaries were downloading almost 3 times faster (because of the compression that i had set up in the configuration) and it was all golden, I never dialed out from a windows or bothered to try from linux again, ever. that freebsd box (a lowly 486, with external 56k modem) gave me almost 7 years of use as a dialout box... and when i went to cable modem, I used freebsd (albeit on a k6-2 based system) as my firewall, and even though windows had a zillion problems and issues through those years, my windows experience was delightful and problem free the whole time. All because i had heard of this thing called 'open source' because windows had so many problems for me.

all because of a security patch from my isp, that turned off a feature of windows that i was using on a daily basis even though it had gaping vulnerabilities.

yup, i didn't learn about open source because of FUD, it was because windows was broken. all this spyware crap that are causing people to abandom computer in the trash should be causing a dramatic rise in open source adoption too, because the 'easiest' way to secure a windows pc is to take it off the internet, and use an open source pc as your 'internet pc' or even to go so far as to use a CD rom bootable linux distro 'internet' and to use 'windows' for everything else.

That might be true in government

[HangingChad]

In government, at almost any level, if you try an open source implementation it's very wise just to keep quiet about it. Then when the reaction comes you can inform them their system has been running on an OSS platform for the last six months without a hitch. If MSFT gets wind of it they'll be calling legislators up and down the chain reminding them how much money proprietary software brings them. And if there's the slightest little problem the NBMers will seize on that to discredit the entire project.

My business customers don't seem to give a crap. If it works, they'll use it. MSFT can whine all they want and it'll get them nowhere. On the other hand if MSFT offers them a compelling deal they're not going to have any more loyalty to OSS.

Ballmer is engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole. And the moles are popping up faster than even the mighty MSFT can keep pace with. The fact that Ballmer has to waste his time to personally strong-arm organizations is the highest compliment he can pay to those of you involved in OSS projects. Not only can you change the world for the better, you can get under Ballmer's skin and make him burn some avgas in that expensive plane he flies around in. Hehe. Bonus.