Slashdot Mirror
Selling Open Source Solutions to Upper Mgmt?
An anonymous reader asks: "I am the single member of the IT department at a small nonprofit. We were looking to replace our commercial content management system with a custom combination of open source solutions (Lucene, Jackrabbit, etc). However, since I was the sole developer, progress was slow and we have little resources to recruit potential volunteers. Recently, we had a closed source, commercial vendor demo their version of a content management system, and immediately upper management was willing to go along with their proposal, even at the expense of project requirements. Although I understand and accept the decision (and am quite relieved I am not expected to deliver as the sole developer), I am interested to know if there are resources for promoting open source software in a manner like closed source, commercial software. If not, is this a challenge within the OS community? It seems that OS solutions are primarily promoted to technical implementors rather than upper management. Of course, many technical implementors do not have the marketing skills to promote open source, but are there resources to help us do so?"
Well you stated that your process of developing own CMS was slow and the system was incomplete. Your manager had to choose beetween yours not working system and some other system that probably works and can be used now. Manager role is to manage and get things done, not to embrace any ideals. So it is obvious that he preffered working and proven (I assume) but closed solution than open but nonexistant one.
I don't see how that is not obvious? The manager really have no choice there.
One issue you should investigate is if this new closed system stores data in a way that it (data) can be transferred to other system if not you will be stuck with this system or will be facing need of reinputting everything from scratch (and this can be very painfull) if you decide to switch.