Advocating Linux / OSS to Management.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm the Senior Developer at a fairly large agency, we're currently a 100% LAMP shop, but I've heard a reliable report through the grapevine that the management a few levels above our office wants to standardize our region on MS .NET. As I'm sure most of you can appreciate, to do such a thing would be... counterproductive, and I could really do with a hand conveying this to a manager whose only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"

Comments

Who gives a fuck?

[Progman3K]

Just do your job and install and maintain whatever the hell management decides.
Linux is not going to go away simply because a few chowder-head PHBs don't know anything about it. If that were true it would never have gotten established like it has.

If YOU want to use Linux, install it at home and use it there. Let the employer have whatever s/he wants, the employer IS the one spending money, not you. It isn't your job to go on a crusade to change their minds.

When your shop will have spent lots of money to convert from your current set-up to whatever they want and you wind up with more problems to boot, THEN they might start looking for solutions and be more open to something other than .NET

There is nothing less attractive than people trying to force things on you, don't be one of those people yourself.

As the world continues to explore and adopt Linux, things will change, but there will still be people running archaic outdated and sub-par systems, even when Linux will dominate.

Re:Created with love

[drgonzo59]

It all depends on how individuals see the world around them. I think managers, who are mostly business school educated, don't see the world the same way the rest of us (developers) do. They probably don't understand why someone would work for free or why someone would volunteer at a soup kitchen. Most of the managers would never think that work could be fun unless it payed lots of money. Manager-types chose business school just as a way to get more money, it was a pretty good shortcut -- you go to school, pick business as your major, party for 4 years with buds, and then one of their dads hires you as a manager -- the system works great. Developers became developers because they like to write software. Most found ways to get payed for it, but they didn't dream of reaches first, then thought that becoming a developer would get them there and chose 'computer science' as a major in college (those that did do that, probably ended up switching to 'communication', 'business administration' or 'comparative literature' before the 2nd year.)

So it will be an uphill battle to get managers to see this other 'work-for-fun' worldview. It is best to altogether bypass that explanation and go straight to stuff like 'saving money' or 'security'. The security aspect is good to mention when choosing an OS. The argument is that critical components of a system such as the 'operating system' should be open and not controlled by any single company. It is also useful to point out the deficiencies of open source such as many incomplete projects with lacking documentation, but it is good to mention this only when choosing an already established open source product that is complete, stable and has good documentation ;-)

Why It's Free

[Bob9113]

only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"

While I can't help much with the advocacy side, I may be able to help you with this one.

If your manager went to business school, he probably took price theory. If he did that, the question above is very easy to answer. Just ask him, "In a free-market capitalist society, what is the efficient market price of a mass market good whose marginal cost of production is zero?"

WARNING: If he has not taken price theory (and even if he did but did not really "get" it) and you present this to him, chances are he will not understand. In that case, he may react much like a gorilla presented with a clear box full of fruit that is closed with a latch that he does not understand.

Price theory says that the efficient market price of any mass market good is equal to the marginal cost of production. The marginal cost of production is the difference in cost between producing the first unit and producing the second unit (it's a little more complex than this, because marginal cost tends to not be a straight line curve, but it is a flat straight line with operating systems, so it works). With something like an operating system, the marginal cost of production is zero - once you make the first copy, the second copy costs nothing to produce. Therefore, the efficient market price of operating systems is zero.

The following is from the Wikipedia entry for price.

Theory of price asserts that the market price reflects interaction between two opposing considerations. On the one side are demand considerations based on marginal utility, while on the other side are supply considerations based on marginal cost. An equilibrium price is supposed to be at once equal to marginal utility (counted in units of income) from the buyer's side and marginal cost from the seller's side. Though this view is accepted by almost every economist, and it constitutes the core of mainstream economics, it has recently been challenged seriously.

In short, the more interesting question is, "Why would any corporation in a free market capitalist society pay for an operating system?" It makes sense to pay for service because the marginal cost of an hour of technical support is significantly non-zero. It does not make sense to pay for an operating system.

Re:A better answer

[Allador]

A couple inaccuracies here.

3) a move from a solid, peer-reviewed codebase where users and developers actually talk to eachother to one where marketing runs everything. This is quite inaccurate. Plenty of us have open relationships with MS engineers and product managers. The latter in particular have alot of influence on how products evolve over time. Lots of professional-level MS users talk to MS developers.

4) scrapping all existing code and building everything from scratch. This is true no matter which direction you go, unless you've made a point of using platform portable tools from the get-go. So its a moot point as you get this effect no matter in which direction you move.

On the flip side there are costs as well, mostly having to do with choice. Choice can be a double-edge sword from a business perspective. Take moving from .NET to Java for your enterprise apps, for example.

On the MS stack, there is a prescriptive recipe for everything. Best practices are all up on MSDN, with some great samples and advanced guidance from the Patterns & Practices group.

On the Java side, things are much more complicated. You have at least 5 reasonable frameworks to choose from for your web UI stack. You have several to choose from on the DB interaction, even if you do ORM. Even transaction management isnt simple, and there are choices there too. Then there's the whole, should we do Tomcat and roll everything ourselves or use JBoss/Commercial container.

This much choice has a cost. It can sometimes take years working on big apps in some of these stacks to really figure out some of the deep & dirty gotchas with them. And sometimes they just expire because a competing stack wins an overwhelming mindshare (eg, Apache OJB).