Dealing with Corporate FUD About Linux?

Lumpy asks: "After this morning's IT conference call, Linux was once again attacked here in the company by the upper management as 'a threat' to our company security. With articles, like the recent one from Information Week, fueling the Upper management with outdated information and half truths, how does an IT professional defend his position and educate upper managers to take those articles with a tiny grain of salt and trust their experts? Should we as professionals expect to be attacked for our decisions, even though Linux has prooven itself (time and time again), for over 5 years in our company? How do you deal with all of the baseless claims, that your superiors may read in the mainstream media?"

Comments

Ignore them

[Vellmont]

If your upper management is still believing FUD about linux after all this time, there's nothing you're going to say to them to disuade them. These guys just like believing garbage. You say you've been using linux for 5 years in the business, so someone must believe in it. Just ignore what the upper management is saying since it doesn't sound like they're micro-managing things down to the level of "we aren't using linux, period". Continue to make the right decisions about what OS to use and justify them with good evidence. Don't worry about the personal opinions of upper management, since they shouldn't be making those technical level decisions, and they should know that.

On a personal note, at one job I had the CTO once said "we'll never use Linux in the Enterprise". About one year later we were running ten low end linux servers to replace a single, very poor performing AIX machine. The CTO ate his words and admited the mistake. A lot of these guys just like to talk big just so people think they know what they're talking about.

Dealing with FUD

[db32]

Honestly I have never really had a problem with the FUD. There are so many articles and studies surrounding Linux that its fairly simple to dig up better studies, or facts showing why the biased ones are biased. Or you can simply do demonstrations. The tricky one for me is the more experienced/educated users. Windows admins that have been doing it for some years are much harder to convince of the merits of any *nix based OS. I know alot of /. folks don't like to think about it...but there really are some very sharp people that only use Windows. Most of the ones I run into latch on to one little gem of Windows knowledge and tout they are experts, but I have run into quite a few that really do understand the ins and outs of that operating system very well and can get it to impressive things through registry manipulations and other things.

Don't argue - just tell them to get the facts

[filesiteguy]

Of course, the facts won't be found in your average MS website. Simply add to your blog, journal or whatever. Also, I'd suggest start hosting "open source" and "Linux" seminars during lunch. I've done it. In the past year or so, weve gone from zero linux servers (out of several hundred) to twelve full-time production RHE servers. I know it is a small amount, but it is a start.

Re:my advice

[grcumb]

"It *is* always going to be easier to stick with what you have already."

Damn, and I was going to mod this thread....

I think you're almost on target, but not quite. The easier decision is to stick with what you've got, and it's often much safer to avoid changing horses in mid-stream, but it is not always easier to stick with what you've got.

Case in point: A large government agency in the country where I live had incredible problems managing its Internet traffic, to the extent that sometimes messages would take over a day to cross from one department to the other. The delays were mostly due to a bottleneck caused by placing all the content, spam and traffic filtering on the same box. An acquaintance of mine quietly installed a(n experimental) Linux box on the network to take up some of the slack, and even though traffic problems were significantly reduced, the decision was made to spend USD 25,000 more to beef up the existing system, because 'That's what we know.'

In other words, a conservative viewpoint with regards to technology is good, but it can lead to situations where the well-trodden path isn't nearly as efficient as clearing a new one. As a wise man once said, 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'