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

Re:Don't be fooled, it's the FUD

[ditoa]

I suggest you print out Microsoft' EULA from things such as Windows, Office, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, highlight the paragraph stating you can't do anything to Microsoft if use of their product results in damage to your company, hardware, finances, etc. then leave it on their desk along with a cost of migrating from your LAMP environment to Windows Server/.NET

People think that because you pay for it you get support or compensation when it goes wrong but you don't. You cannot do anything, when you agree to that EULA you agree that it isn't a perfect solution, it may screw up and your business might lose billions because of it. If that happens tough luck, you c^Hshould have bought Enterprise Edition and had a clustered solution :P

Saying that I don't hate MS. For some thing Windows is fine and I am happy to use it just as I am happy to use Linux or Solaris or AIX.

At the end of the day if the company you work for wants to change to MS that is up to them, if you feel it is a bad move for the company explain why. If they still switch to MS you can always find another job if you hate it that much. Their are plenty of FOSS based companies around.

stick it out, try to hold on to some linux

[louzerr]

I work in a more political environment, so the "let's switch over to MS so consulting firm XYZ can have some tax dollars, too!" rings through the halls fairly often (believe it or not, GOP or DFL are both equally willing to toss people's money to their buddies every chance they get). However, since it usually moves at the speed of politics, it almost never fully comes true. The price tag is either too high, or the solution is too impractical - even if we start down that road, we never finish (oh, you bet the consulting firm still makes out like a bandit).

Moving to Microsoft takes a big decision, and a big investment. A lot of things tend to go wrong along the way. The LAMP option meanwhile can sit on a back burner until either the MS solution doesn't live up to it's hype, or the cost of ownership starts to impact your business and you start looking at other options.

LAMP can also be a great integrator. We use Apache in places as a reverse-proxy for various IIS servers running proprietary commercial software. While the IIS server is still vulnerable to attack on port 80, all other attack vectors on that platform are cut off. The Apache web server in the front also allows for central (and extremely customizable) logging and better error reporting & handling.

There are ways to keep LAMP in the MS shop, and generally when the money counters DO realize the difference in the cost of ownership, LAMP (in one fassion or another) tends to succeed in the long run.

Perceptions

[HangingChad]

Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.

There's something to that observation. If management spends millions on Microsoft products and something stops working, there's the convenience of blaming Microsoft. Strangely, that appears to work. There's no accountability assigned to the people suggesting they spend millions on products that require near constant tweaking to keep working right. Or that a less expensive and more reliable solution was overlooked.

I'm a hired gun so I'll use whatever the customer wants. It all pays the same whether I'm setting up a LAMP server or 2003. I do make certain to present both alternatives, so when the costs of the Microsoft environment balloon out control I can point back to the fact that they made the choice.

They just never seem to learn. Once in a while the light bulb comes on. I have one small office customer replacing his laptops and workstations with Macs. Not all at once, just as the machines are due for replacement. Many of those office workers would have been fine on Ubuntu, but he just wasn't ready to go that far yet. Another mid-size customer lost their Windows-or-die admin and want to talk about replacing the 20 seats in their call center workstations with Linux. That's pretty much a slam dunk since the call center apps are all web-enabled.

Some signs of progress. :)

Show them the Money!!!

[filesiteguy]

I am upper management, and I advocate OSS whenever possible.

As a manager, I'm interested in two things - cost and productivity. If I can use a piece of software and get the job done faster and cheaper, I'll use it. End of story.

There are no other variables.

Now, as a technology geek - I have two 24" monitors on my desktop (running XP) and a 17" laptop (running SUSE) with me all the time - I want to use OSS because it is cool and because I despise Microsoft's business model. However, that philosophy will not fly with executives. They simply want to know how I'm going to save money and get stuff done faster. They don't give a sh-- about Linux vs. Microsoft.

One other thing. I personally have a $7M budget for FY 2007/2008. About $1.5M of that is for software services and supplies and another $2M is for hardware. That means the majority of my "expenses" are for personnel. Again, executive management wants to know how to make things cheaper / faster / better. If I need to spend more on personnel to get an incremental savings in software, it ain't gonna look good.

A better answer

[einhverfr]

Management types like *business* reasons. So here is what I tell people.

The fundamnetal difference between open source software and Linux is not whether people pay but rather who pays for what when. Microsoft pays developers to build software and absorbs all of the costs themselves. They then charge license fees to recoup those costs and make a profit. Open Source software costs money at the development stage too, but only the people or businesses that need those changes enough to pay for them must do so. Consequently the difference is that open source software spreads the cost of development around up front on an on-demand basis, while Microsoft charges in arrears and must control certain aspects of the use of that software to make money.

As a result, moving to Microsoft software would require:
1) paying license fees
2) paying someone to track software licenses
3) a move from a solid, peer-reviewed codebase where users and developers actually talk to eachother to one where marketing runs everything.
4) scrapping all existing code and building everything from scratch.
5) The loss of a large measure of control over your own existing infrastructure.

Furthermore, Microsoft tech support is pretty much worthless these days.

Additional points the management should consider if there are concerns about Linux:
1) IBM is far larger than Microsoft and is putting substantial development effort into Linux. Linux is no longer the hobbiest operating system and there are a lot of people working on making it work well on high-end hardware.
2) If .Net is desired, it may be better to focus on Mono instead. Mono is compatible in most cases with .Net (and will run even some Microsoft .Net tools like WIX), and it is fully cross-platform unlike .Net. If you write Mono code, you will be able to run it on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, but if you write .Net code, you may not.

If they are not convinced, take a look at my web page and call the sales number :-)