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Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS?
mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"
My problem has been convincing them that they con't just pass of the cost of Windows to the customer. They like the fact that they can hire 3-4 MCSEs for the cost of one good Unix admin, but they don't realize that the Unix admin can set things up so that maintenance is much easier.
Windows is ingrained in business culture here, for the most part.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS? If the open software isn't as good it just isn't as good; just because it's FOSS doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all to solve your problems. Compare features, stability, cost, and support; if your boss is actively against FOSS make a point to explain it's advantages (and disadvantages if you want to be fair) and leave the decision to him. After all, it's entirely possible that the closed, proprietary solution fits your situation better; basically, its dishonest to make your decision and then go digging specifically for evidence to support that decision.
Perhaps the question you should be asking is, cost aside, which would better suit your needs? Sure FOSS is great but if there is a better fit for your needs and someone else is going to foot the bill, who are you to say that management is looking in the wrong direction? I, for one, believe that there is a place for both commercial and FOSS in the business (and in the home for that matter). Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done. Ultimately the decision needs to suit the needs of the business and not the ideals of the employees.
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Plone is only "free" in software. In my experience with open source CMSs -- Plone, Typo3, Drupal, Joomla -- you get best results by paying an expert to program and set it up initially to your specs. It looks better, runs smoother, etc.
I'm not that expert, by the way. I've just worked on projects that lacked an expert, and projects that had one, and the difference in result was night and day. The expertly-configured sites ran much better.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
No they don't. We use a proprietary, closed source "ticket management system" for lack of a better word. This thing is horrid; it has no recordkeeping, no search to speak of, no customization.... I could go on. We also have no direct access to the database; all we can get is a CD of what are essentially static pages of a particular issue.
It's also pretty close to being abandoned. No new licenses are sold and no new features are being added; the whole thing is in maintenance mode.
They jumped the subcription about 6 fold last year. I argued strenuously for something like RT, even worked out the cost of adding our needed features - 1/10 of the cost of the annual subscription of the proprietary product.
No dice. Not windows based, not supported by a major vendor, not approved by MS.
They're back to evaluating other, closed source, proprietary, locked in systems. So basically some people never learn.
I washed my hands of the whole deal when I was told "That's not how we do enterprise" as a response to my suggestion to use FOSS.
If you want to make a solid business case, you need to approach it objectively; what option will cost the least, in the short, medium and long term?
Maybe it's OSS, maybe it's not. But drop your bias right now before you research associated costs.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
> Both are unhinged advocates for changes that will NEVER happen without first finding a genie.
Stallman's changes are already happening and as far as I know he has no access to a genie. If he had a genie he'd share it.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Maybe he would wait until December 25th and share it as a Grav-mass gift.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that separates Richard Stallman from the bum that lives under a bridge near my home and rants incoherently at strangers is that Stallman has the ability to code.
How someone's personality disorder became a religion is beyond me. Oh, wait - *All* religions start that way.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Well, the source is open to you, therefore it is open source. Nothing else matters.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Depending on corporate culture(and the exact policies RE: demos of the proprietary vendor) cost can actually be a huge factor; but not for the obvious "cheap=better" reason.
In some institutional cultures there is a surprising power(assuming you don't step on the wrong toes) in Just Fucking Doing It. Obviously, unless you have really impressive guts and not too much sense, this doesn't mean putting a production server on an internet facing IP and hacking the company's DNS records to point to it; but showing up with a solid, functioning demo that everyone can gather around the projector and poke around at on their laptops can really sell something.
If a proprietary product isn't either available as a free demo version, and not through some subscription program you have to sign up for, or so expensive that the company will send a guy in a nice suit to do the demo, hand out some swag, and give everyone a really nice handshake, doing that with a proprietary product is hard and/or illegal.
Doing it with a FOSS(or freeware, admittedly) product is easy. You just throw something together in a VM and show it off.
That was my experience when I was trying to convince my employer to drop sharepoint for a wiki. They weren't turned off by the cost of sharepoint; but the fact that I was able to ask my boss for some time at one of our department meetings, get behind the projector and say "Hey, I threw this demo together in a weekend and put in some example content so you can get an idea of how we would use it. Easy web interface, versioning, strong ability to create links between otherwise disparate pieces of technical knowledge, check it out at $INTERNAL_IP..." Everyone pulled out their laptops, poked around a bit, there was some discussion, and the boss green-lighted it.
Had I given a speech about how we had to, like, fight the proprietary power, man, it would have gone nowhere. However, being able to just sit down, turn on, and show off, all without any serious backing or funding(because everything was free) allowed me to go from "nothing" to "green light-full production status". "Free" never entered into it in a hard financial way. However, had it not been free, I couldn't have done what I did. Now, Anecdote doesn't equal data, much less proof; but it is something to consider.
Point out that the vendor can and will kill off a product and support for that product OR charge like a wounded bull for specialised support OR that the company may fold, and that they are not legally obligated to continue a product that the company may become dependent up. Then point out that in the case of open source, it is possible to hire someone to develop the product further and support it, and that even if there is a cost penalty it won't be extortionate.
All other arguments are a waste of time for mission critical applications. Open source may or may not be cheaper.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer