Slashdot Mirror
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"?"
Warning! Number 4 may cut both ways - if the overall company (i.e. compare your 'LAMP' region to the overall) is a predominantly MS outfit, then the argument might even backfire - why keep this codebase, when everyone else is developing for the other? -- Especially given if your region and the rest of the company might occasionally both need to code the same thing just so that all regions may start offering a new service 'xyz'.
But - given the original management style of "if it's any good, why do they give it away for free?", that also has a simple opposite - "if it were no good, why would companies like IBM support it, and companies like Dell starting to deliver machines with Linux pre-installed?" (i.e. if the free software was crap, these companies would be massively cutting their own flesh to provide it to customers).