And that may happen if Charney's plan goes into effect on popular web sites. At least, I predict a sizeable community of Windows users leaving for other options.
This concept will immediately raise the perceived TCO for running Windows. Maybe not in cost, but even "general" users will see the delays and effort required just to access basic services (the Web) from Windows. If my mom has to let her bank, or Facebook, or her Yahoo!Mail run their virus software on her computer before she can access her favorite sites, this will not go down well. Running a virus scan takes a long time on big drives - and you do need to scan the whole thing to make sure it's secure and not "tained" with malware or a virus...
That's an important point - Charney probably expects this to apply to Windows only, because that's all he sees. What about Linux? What about Mac?
More importantly, what about iPads, or smartphones, or tablets, etc that are increasingly used to access the web? Will Charney's plan work for all these devices? Apple doesn't like third-party apps to execute on the iPad - so good luck getting this to work with iPads. And if all it takes to "bypass" the scan is to fake your browser's user agent string to that of an iPad Safari browser, this won't be very effective.
Think of it this way: would you mind if a web site ran their own programs on your computer, before they let you use their site? Maybe that's your bank, that's one example. Maybe he wants this extended to the cloud, like Microsoft's Office365. Taken to the extreme, what if social networking sites (Facebook?) decide to do this?
Charney's proposal to put the onus on the end user is going to get old really fast. And I see it causing more problems than it solves. If users have web sites running their "scan" software on their home PCs, how long until malware starts getting injected? Your bank probably takes precautions to make sure the virus scan is safe, but some sites will take advantage of this. Or get hacked, and have the scan software replaced with malware. You think the zombie botnet Windows PC is a problem today, wait until Charney's plan gets implemented somewhere.
Microsoft also talked about the importance of multi-tasking, and claims it can now offer fast task switching without causing serious detriment to the battery life. In particular, Microsoft said, this will improve the experience of using third party applications. In a demo, a Microsoft engineer showed how a music application called 'Slacker' could keep music playing in the background while the user moved between different applications.
I consider that basic functionality. Listening to music while flipping between apps is something I do all the time. Go to lunch, listen to a podcast or some music - maybe surf the web on my phone and respond to a few emails.
How did Windows Phone 7 even hit the market without this basic feature? The 3 people who bought WP7 must be happy Microsoft is fixing it.
Apart from all its strengths it suffered one HUGE flaw.
It had the flaw of the most extreme console platformers. The HUGE "how the fuck was I supposed to know THAT" flaw.
...
For many the game held a lot of promise but since it was all about speed its "run a bit, fall, reload, run a bit more, fall, reload" gameplay just wasn't it. It appealled to the kind of person who gets a kick out of memorizing a Mario run through....
That 99% of the time there was only one path didn't help either.
Your comment hits ME's problem right on. It advertised itself to be a first-person freerunner game, dodging pursuers, sprinting out of gunfights. The potential for multiple avenues seemed awesome. I played the demo, and I was even ok with the occasional "knock the gun out of his hand, then beat him unconscious" because it felt like part of the "escape".
But that wasn't the game I bought. It really was a "one true path" game. I got stuck more often than I'd like, and you had to figure out what the level designer wanted you to do rather than the way I wanted to do it to get past several levels. I got stuck on a level where I couldn't figure out how to get to the exit. I could see where I was supposed to end up, but couldn't figure out how to get there. Trial and error just lead to death, respawn, retry, repeat. I eventually just gave up. Later, I checked a walkthrough and found I was about 3/4 through the game, but I didn't feel like finishing it.
Well its all an act / business to him. He did his stint on CNN but exploiting fear in liberals is difficult compared to exploiting fear in conservatives. The current liberal market is younger and college level educated. The conservative market are older and although contains college level educated individuals its not as high as the liberal market.
It's a great act! Why, this is an almost spot-on impersonation of Jon Stewart's impression of a neo-con pundit. Right down to the glasses, the pointer stick, answering his own questions, and overall tone.
I saw someone compare a DDOS to picketing, which is legal in some countries. I have no idea what the laws are in the various countries involved, but the question is like this: assume I don't like a store, and I go in front of it and try to stop people from going in. If that is legal (with certain conditions), than what type of action am I allowed to take against websites?
At least in the US, picketing is legal if you do not prevent people from going about their business. As soon as you prevent people from going into the store, or keep workers from crossing the picket line to get to their job, etc. then that's illegal.
Basically, picketing is based on the concept of free speech, and protected by the First Amendment. March up and down all you like, on the public sidewalk in front of the store, or in other public areas. Carry your signs, chant your slogans, that's all protected speech. The analogue for websites is that you can feel free to discuss the relative "badness" of a website (for example, HBGary) in the comments section on their website, on your blog, whatever. But that does not mean you can take down their website and replace it with an image/message of your own.
Here's the thing - I own a PSP. Guess what kinds of games I play on it? Puzzle games, short-attention-span games, platformers. I've played the hell out of PixelJunk Monsters and Lumines.Daxter and Loco Roco were each a ton of fun, but honestly was probably the limit for what my attention could bring to a portable device.
Basically, I play this thing when I ride the bus to work. Anything that can be done in short spurts works great.
They're talking about putting some big titles on the "NGP" - Killzone, Resistance, Uncharted. Those are awesome PS3 titles, don't get me wrong. But I just don't know that I'd play them on a portable device. My tastes differ when I'm on the go. A lot of that power will be wasted on me.
Hopefully, someone will come up with a witty game that really takes advantage of the "NGP" without aiming for a port from a PS3 franchise.
I was going to mod you up, but you're already at +5. So I'll post instead.
I've wanted (and suggested) a feature in Facebook for them to automatically delete my photos after X days. I do that anyway - my online photos are generally short-lived. For example, last weekend, I deleted our Christmas photos from Facebook. It's been a month, family and friends who wanted to see those photos have already looked at them by now.
Anything you put on the web is effectively public. Encrypting photos so they are unreadable after X days? That's not going to work. You can already do privacy settings on Facebook to limit who sees your stuff, but ultimately it's better to just delete those photos after a while anyway, rather than risk leaving them up forever.
Seriously, Opera 11? I used to be an Opera fan, back in the day. But ever since I starting using Google Docs, I just can't use Opera. The killer bug was that Opera doesn't render Google Spreadsheets properly.
In the meantime, I'm still using Firefox (B9) and Chrome.
Before that, there was ARTILLERY for the Apple II. I remember also playing a variant called BERTHA that let you abort your shot (if it was too powerful) by typing "ABORT" within 1 second.
I don't know your particular circumstances.. maybe you have a family and working those hours is unacceptable. Maybe you are single and don't mind. Whatever. But if you decide to do long programming days, you need to get additional compensation for it.
You mentioned everyone is on standard industry rates - that rate doesn't assume 10-11 hr days. Raise the salary (or go OT, or some other compensation that seems fair to you.) Else, say no.
(BTW, I'm amused that your boss had to read that "the best way to get new customers is to add new features". Seems obvious.)
Our first home/personal computer was a Franklin ACE/1000 (clone of Apple II.) So the storage was 360k floppies. This was early '80s.
Later (~1985?) we bought one of the many IBM-PC clones. Still had those 360k floppies, but also a 10MB "hard card". That was huge for the era. No more keeping a separate stack of floppies for games, another stack for my documents, another for my brother, mom, dad. Everyone just got their own area to store stuff in, on the "hard card".
I think our next computer after that was a '286, dual 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, but I don't recall the hard drive size.
By the time I went to university in 1990, I had a 80MB (or was it 100MB?) hard drive on my '386SX PC, single 1.44MB floppy, and 2MB of RAM. This was very good for the era. This was also the first computer where I installed Linux (SLS 1.03, if I recall correctly - with kernel 0.99 pl 11 or pl 12.)
After that, it becomes a bit of a blur.
To compare: the laptop I'm using now has a 160GB hard drive, and sitting on my desk is a ~500GB USB hard drive. My laptop bag has an 8GB "pico" USB flash drive, about the size of a US nickel.
I took a similar tactic. I run Linux (Fedora 14) and simply created a Startup entry that deleted my local Adobe Flash storage whenever I login to GNOME. Since I logout at the end of the day, this effectively clears out my Flash cache. Flash can keep what data it likes, but it can only keep it for a day.
In GNOME, click System - Preferences - Startup Applications. Then click Add to add a new entry. For the command, I just typed rm -rf/home/jhall/.adobe
I use OpenOffice.org on my Linux laptop, but I'll tell you that it doesn't get used too often. I write, edit, and review almost all of my work documents (DOC, XLS, PPT) using Google Docs. We are a university, and have signed up for Google Apps for Domains. It works great. Unless you're a power user of Office, Google Docs will work just fine.
And by "almost all" I mean "all except one". That one XLS file needs some special formatting that Google Docs just can't do (I rotate the column header text by 90 degrees.) If I didn't need to have that feature for formatting, I'd do it in Google Docs.
(Disclaimer: I'm an IT Director / CIO for a smallish organization, and I do run Linux on my desktop.)
I know nothing about your environment, but my guess to you is that you're trying to jump into this too soon. What value does your plan provide to your users, or to the organization as a whole? Remember that your IT director and your CIO don't care about the "coolness" or running Linux on the desktop. Instead, they will care about overhead, costs, long-term support, integration, and IT strategy. You're doing an IT inventory, which could be the start of crafting a new strategy, but you're not there yet.
Rather than try to make an immediate push to integrate Linux into your IT environment, I'd recommend a phased approach. You seem to advocate running Linux in your work desktop architecture. So these are the general phases that will get you there:
1. Take an inventory
That's what you're doing now. Are there applications that are only available for Windows? Do any of your "power users" require obscure features in, say, Microsoft Office to do their job? Maybe your users need to work with an outside web application (perhaps a vendor web site) that requires IE. Is your hardware Linux-compatible? (Check wireless network cards and high-end video cards.) Or your printers?
Most importantly, understand why you are moving to Linux. Why are you asking to make the move? If you don't have a good answer to this, you're going to have an uphill struggle the rest of the way.
2. File formats
Look at what other files your organization produces and consumes. Can Linux work with them all? What applications read and write them? This may have been covered in step #1, but match them up anyway.
3. Web applications
Do you have applications that can run via the web? Maybe you have a group calendar system that also has a "web client". You mentioned GMail, and that's a great option, but your legal department will want to look closely at any SaaS agreement. Does Firefox on Linux support these web applications?
4. Desktop applications
You won't be able to move all applications to web delivery (whether SaaS or supported in-house) so what applications must live on the desktop? Are there Linux versions for these? Or are you stuck with some Windows-only applications? Those will be your roadblocks. Your IT Director and CIO will not look favorably to mixing the desktop platform options further, raising the effort required to support your desktop environment.
5. Protocols
Do you have any Microsoft-specific protocols running on your network? Are you running Active Directory? Microsoft Exchange? The thing to look for at this stage is that Linux apps can talk to all your back-office applications.
6. Early adopters
Once you have set up your users to use web applications and open desktop applications, you can start thinking about migrating users to the Linux platform. Do you have a smallish group of users, who would be excited to make the switch? These are your early adopters, and who (if you do things right) could become your allies. Maybe this is your server support team, or your database administrators, or some other "technical" team.
But ultimately, it will depend on your particular environment. As I said, don't get ahead of yourself. You're in the information-gathering stage; that's what you said the assignment was about. Maybe you aren't ready to start recommending a major shift in the desktop ecosystem - not yet, anyway.
At first, I got really excited because I thought there was a TV show about digital archaeology that was revealing new information about the ABC show 'Lost', through interconnected web sites. 'Lost' used "args" (alternate reality games) via hidden web sites, to keep up fan interest between seasons.
Then I realized I must still be too addicted to 'Lost' even though it's now off the air. I should find something else to do.:-)
Actually, it was probably that iDOS included a bunch of abandonware games in their image. In the US, just because a publisher has stopped supporting an old game/software doesn't mean it's free for all. You still can't use it without a license.
(In some countries, I understand that abandonware is up for grabs, you can use it for free, and it's legal.)
My guess is that Apple approved iDOS without realizing it contained this old abandonware. Once they did realize it, they had to pull it.
"My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system... 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?"
You hit the important point in your post: you cannot use idealism ("FOSS is neat!") to get your manager on your side.
When pitching any new idea to a manager, it's important to note the differences in priorities at each level. For examaple: with a line-level technologist (i.e. most geeks) technical knowledge is important, relationship-building and strategic planning are [generally] very unimportant. I'm talking about what's important to your job, not what's important to you.
But it's pretty much the opposite for managers, especially the further up the management chain you look. At the CIO level, strategic planning is the #1 most important thing, followed closely by interpersonal skills (CIOs often need to navigate lots of committees and meetings to get things done.) Individual technical skill is very unimportant to their work (some CIOs maintain some technical knowledge, but it's not used in their day-to-day work.)
I gave a talk about this very topic at Penguicon 2009, called "Linux in the Enterprise". My 1-hour talk used only a few conceptual slides, but you will be interested in the chart on slide #4. It presents this idea about "framing" very clearly. You can find the presentation at my blog, but the actual presentation is from May 2009. I think the data in the chart originally came from a Harvard Business Review study.
Your question indicated you were going to present this idea to a manager - I'm assuming (based on your wording) that you don't mean an IT Director or a Chief Information Officer, but instead an IT manager (probably your group manager.) Look closely as the chart from my presentation, and note the "Mgr" area of the graph. The "importance" lines all converge for the manager. That's not an error in the graph - that's indicative of managers stepping out of the "team lead" role, before they can make a transition to a "Director" role.
In the talk, I discussed how IT managers often have a hard time leaving their "tech person" role, moving into a manager role, because the IT skills that got them to the "manager" position won't carry them to the next level. And everything tends to have equal importance, because managers act as the filter between the technology teams and the director. So technical knowledge has about the same importance to their day-to-day job as budgeting and strategy. But I digress...
You'll need to make a case to your manager that addresses the points that he or she will find important, while at the same time thinking a step ahead to the level above your manager. Emphasize points that will be important to your manager's director. That means you need to de-emphasize the technology ("it's FOSS") and address the strategy. Does Plone fit into your organization's strategic IT plan? (Does your group even have an IT plan?) How easy can Plone integrate with other parts of the IT infrastructure? Can you tie Plone into your central authentication system? Who supports either package (patches, updates, new features, etc.) Your manager and director will not want to take on this effort, so be sure to mention commercial support options for Plone (usually this means "help desk"), the Plone developer community, and if it's available as a standard package in the Linux distro your sysadmins already run (meaning it would get updates by default as they regularly update the OS - which would be either good or bad, depending on your manager's preferences for testing after patches.)
It's not enough to say "FOSS is free". Especially because it really isn't. Talk about
Activism from the left is dead in the US. There's no significant, effective opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the concentration of wealth, the crushing of unions, the decline in wages, or the tax benefits enjoyed by Wall Street. (All of which would have been unacceptable to the Eisenhower administration, an indication of how far to the Right the US has moved.)
The activist organizations that accomplish anything are either on the Right, funded by big business, or church-based. Or they're purely self-interested, like gun owners and gays.
In my circles, I find that people on the Left just aren't going for "activism" because they try to understand the other side's point of view, then attempt an argument on the other person's terms. "Well, I can see why you say that, but..." That may work in an academic context, one professor having a disagreement with another professor, but totally kills any sense of activism. There's nothing to get worked up about. I live in the Midwest, so maybe that's just "Minnesota nice" getting in the way?
But the Right gets all up in your face about it, completely ignoring any contrasting opinion. It may make them look like narrow-visioned morons, but it's pretty effective to whip up something like a Tea Party frenzy.
It's like my friends on the Left just don't get worked up over anything. There's lots we should get worked up about, but we just don't. Man, it would be easier if we could all flip a switch in our brains, and ignore what the other side is saying. Like the Right.
I hate to be the one to defend Microsoft here. $60 may seem like a big number, but do the math: $60 per year is $5 a month. That cost is nothing compared to what you're already paying for Internet or cable TV service.
Slashdot Mirror
And that may happen if Charney's plan goes into effect on popular web sites. At least, I predict a sizeable community of Windows users leaving for other options.
This concept will immediately raise the perceived TCO for running Windows. Maybe not in cost, but even "general" users will see the delays and effort required just to access basic services (the Web) from Windows. If my mom has to let her bank, or Facebook, or her Yahoo!Mail run their virus software on her computer before she can access her favorite sites, this will not go down well. Running a virus scan takes a long time on big drives - and you do need to scan the whole thing to make sure it's secure and not "tained" with malware or a virus...
That's an important point - Charney probably expects this to apply to Windows only, because that's all he sees. What about Linux? What about Mac?
More importantly, what about iPads, or smartphones, or tablets, etc that are increasingly used to access the web? Will Charney's plan work for all these devices? Apple doesn't like third-party apps to execute on the iPad - so good luck getting this to work with iPads. And if all it takes to "bypass" the scan is to fake your browser's user agent string to that of an iPad Safari browser, this won't be very effective.
Think of it this way: would you mind if a web site ran their own programs on your computer, before they let you use their site? Maybe that's your bank, that's one example. Maybe he wants this extended to the cloud, like Microsoft's Office365. Taken to the extreme, what if social networking sites (Facebook?) decide to do this?
Charney's proposal to put the onus on the end user is going to get old really fast. And I see it causing more problems than it solves. If users have web sites running their "scan" software on their home PCs, how long until malware starts getting injected? Your bank probably takes precautions to make sure the virus scan is safe, but some sites will take advantage of this. Or get hacked, and have the scan software replaced with malware. You think the zombie botnet Windows PC is a problem today, wait until Charney's plan gets implemented somewhere.
Maybe I should have included a link to the Jon Stewart segment in question.
It's a great impersonation of Beck.
From the summary:
I consider that basic functionality. Listening to music while flipping between apps is something I do all the time. Go to lunch, listen to a podcast or some music - maybe surf the web on my phone and respond to a few emails.
How did Windows Phone 7 even hit the market without this basic feature? The 3 people who bought WP7 must be happy Microsoft is fixing it.
Your comment hits ME's problem right on. It advertised itself to be a first-person freerunner game, dodging pursuers, sprinting out of gunfights. The potential for multiple avenues seemed awesome. I played the demo, and I was even ok with the occasional "knock the gun out of his hand, then beat him unconscious" because it felt like part of the "escape".
But that wasn't the game I bought. It really was a "one true path" game. I got stuck more often than I'd like, and you had to figure out what the level designer wanted you to do rather than the way I wanted to do it to get past several levels. I got stuck on a level where I couldn't figure out how to get to the exit. I could see where I was supposed to end up, but couldn't figure out how to get there. Trial and error just lead to death, respawn, retry, repeat. I eventually just gave up. Later, I checked a walkthrough and found I was about 3/4 through the game, but I didn't feel like finishing it.
I'm glad they canned the sequel.
Well its all an act / business to him. He did his stint on CNN but exploiting fear in liberals is difficult compared to exploiting fear in conservatives. The current liberal market is younger and college level educated. The conservative market are older and although contains college level educated individuals its not as high as the liberal market.
It's a great act! Why, this is an almost spot-on impersonation of Jon Stewart's impression of a neo-con pundit. Right down to the glasses, the pointer stick, answering his own questions, and overall tone.
I thought it was hilarious!
I saw someone compare a DDOS to picketing, which is legal in some countries. I have no idea what the laws are in the various countries involved, but the question is like this: assume I don't like a store, and I go in front of it and try to stop people from going in. If that is legal (with certain conditions), than what type of action am I allowed to take against websites?
At least in the US, picketing is legal if you do not prevent people from going about their business. As soon as you prevent people from going into the store, or keep workers from crossing the picket line to get to their job, etc. then that's illegal.
Basically, picketing is based on the concept of free speech, and protected by the First Amendment. March up and down all you like, on the public sidewalk in front of the store, or in other public areas. Carry your signs, chant your slogans, that's all protected speech. The analogue for websites is that you can feel free to discuss the relative "badness" of a website (for example, HBGary) in the comments section on their website, on your blog, whatever. But that does not mean you can take down their website and replace it with an image/message of your own.
IANAL.
Here's the thing - I own a PSP. Guess what kinds of games I play on it? Puzzle games, short-attention-span games, platformers. I've played the hell out of PixelJunk Monsters and Lumines. Daxter and Loco Roco were each a ton of fun, but honestly was probably the limit for what my attention could bring to a portable device.
Basically, I play this thing when I ride the bus to work. Anything that can be done in short spurts works great.
They're talking about putting some big titles on the "NGP" - Killzone, Resistance, Uncharted. Those are awesome PS3 titles, don't get me wrong. But I just don't know that I'd play them on a portable device. My tastes differ when I'm on the go. A lot of that power will be wasted on me.
Hopefully, someone will come up with a witty game that really takes advantage of the "NGP" without aiming for a port from a PS3 franchise.
I was going to mod you up, but you're already at +5. So I'll post instead.
I've wanted (and suggested) a feature in Facebook for them to automatically delete my photos after X days. I do that anyway - my online photos are generally short-lived. For example, last weekend, I deleted our Christmas photos from Facebook. It's been a month, family and friends who wanted to see those photos have already looked at them by now.
Anything you put on the web is effectively public. Encrypting photos so they are unreadable after X days? That's not going to work. You can already do privacy settings on Facebook to limit who sees your stuff, but ultimately it's better to just delete those photos after a while anyway, rather than risk leaving them up forever.
Seriously, Opera 11? I used to be an Opera fan, back in the day. But ever since I starting using Google Docs, I just can't use Opera. The killer bug was that Opera doesn't render Google Spreadsheets properly.
In the meantime, I'm still using Firefox (B9) and Chrome.
Before that, there was ARTILLERY for the Apple II. I remember also playing a variant called BERTHA that let you abort your shot (if it was too powerful) by typing "ABORT" within 1 second.
I don't know your particular circumstances .. maybe you have a family and working those hours is unacceptable. Maybe you are single and don't mind. Whatever. But if you decide to do long programming days, you need to get additional compensation for it.
You mentioned everyone is on standard industry rates - that rate doesn't assume 10-11 hr days. Raise the salary (or go OT, or some other compensation that seems fair to you.) Else, say no.
(BTW, I'm amused that your boss had to read that "the best way to get new customers is to add new features". Seems obvious.)
Okay, I'll show my age here:
Our first home/personal computer was a Franklin ACE/1000 (clone of Apple II.) So the storage was 360k floppies. This was early '80s.
Later (~1985?) we bought one of the many IBM-PC clones. Still had those 360k floppies, but also a 10MB "hard card". That was huge for the era. No more keeping a separate stack of floppies for games, another stack for my documents, another for my brother, mom, dad. Everyone just got their own area to store stuff in, on the "hard card".
I think our next computer after that was a '286, dual 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, but I don't recall the hard drive size.
By the time I went to university in 1990, I had a 80MB (or was it 100MB?) hard drive on my '386SX PC, single 1.44MB floppy, and 2MB of RAM. This was very good for the era. This was also the first computer where I installed Linux (SLS 1.03, if I recall correctly - with kernel 0.99 pl 11 or pl 12.)
After that, it becomes a bit of a blur.
To compare: the laptop I'm using now has a 160GB hard drive, and sitting on my desk is a ~500GB USB hard drive. My laptop bag has an 8GB "pico" USB flash drive, about the size of a US nickel.
I took a similar tactic. I run Linux (Fedora 14) and simply created a Startup entry that deleted my local Adobe Flash storage whenever I login to GNOME. Since I logout at the end of the day, this effectively clears out my Flash cache. Flash can keep what data it likes, but it can only keep it for a day.
In GNOME, click System - Preferences - Startup Applications. Then click Add to add a new entry. For the command, I just typed rm -rf /home/jhall/.adobe
> Think about it: Novell hold the copyrights and trademarks to UNIX. They would make for a nice addition to Microsoft's portfolio, don't you think?
Maybe not. According to this old press release, Novell sold the UnixWare IP to Santa Cruz in 1996.
I use OpenOffice.org on my Linux laptop, but I'll tell you that it doesn't get used too often. I write, edit, and review almost all of my work documents (DOC, XLS, PPT) using Google Docs. We are a university, and have signed up for Google Apps for Domains. It works great. Unless you're a power user of Office, Google Docs will work just fine.
And by "almost all" I mean "all except one". That one XLS file needs some special formatting that Google Docs just can't do (I rotate the column header text by 90 degrees.) If I didn't need to have that feature for formatting, I'd do it in Google Docs.
(Disclaimer: I'm an IT Director / CIO for a smallish organization, and I do run Linux on my desktop.)
I know nothing about your environment, but my guess to you is that you're trying to jump into this too soon. What value does your plan provide to your users, or to the organization as a whole? Remember that your IT director and your CIO don't care about the "coolness" or running Linux on the desktop. Instead, they will care about overhead, costs, long-term support, integration, and IT strategy. You're doing an IT inventory, which could be the start of crafting a new strategy, but you're not there yet.
Rather than try to make an immediate push to integrate Linux into your IT environment, I'd recommend a phased approach. You seem to advocate running Linux in your work desktop architecture. So these are the general phases that will get you there:
1. Take an inventory
That's what you're doing now. Are there applications that are only available for Windows? Do any of your "power users" require obscure features in, say, Microsoft Office to do their job? Maybe your users need to work with an outside web application (perhaps a vendor web site) that requires IE. Is your hardware Linux-compatible? (Check wireless network cards and high-end video cards.) Or your printers?
Most importantly, understand why you are moving to Linux. Why are you asking to make the move? If you don't have a good answer to this, you're going to have an uphill struggle the rest of the way.
2. File formats
Look at what other files your organization produces and consumes. Can Linux work with them all? What applications read and write them? This may have been covered in step #1, but match them up anyway.
3. Web applications
Do you have applications that can run via the web? Maybe you have a group calendar system that also has a "web client". You mentioned GMail, and that's a great option, but your legal department will want to look closely at any SaaS agreement. Does Firefox on Linux support these web applications?
4. Desktop applications
You won't be able to move all applications to web delivery (whether SaaS or supported in-house) so what applications must live on the desktop? Are there Linux versions for these? Or are you stuck with some Windows-only applications? Those will be your roadblocks. Your IT Director and CIO will not look favorably to mixing the desktop platform options further, raising the effort required to support your desktop environment.
5. Protocols
Do you have any Microsoft-specific protocols running on your network? Are you running Active Directory? Microsoft Exchange? The thing to look for at this stage is that Linux apps can talk to all your back-office applications.
6. Early adopters
Once you have set up your users to use web applications and open desktop applications, you can start thinking about migrating users to the Linux platform. Do you have a smallish group of users, who would be excited to make the switch? These are your early adopters, and who (if you do things right) could become your allies. Maybe this is your server support team, or your database administrators, or some other "technical" team.
But ultimately, it will depend on your particular environment. As I said, don't get ahead of yourself. You're in the information-gathering stage; that's what you said the assignment was about. Maybe you aren't ready to start recommending a major shift in the desktop ecosystem - not yet, anyway.
At first, I got really excited because I thought there was a TV show about digital archaeology that was revealing new information about the ABC show 'Lost', through interconnected web sites. 'Lost' used "args" (alternate reality games) via hidden web sites, to keep up fan interest between seasons.
Then I realized I must still be too addicted to 'Lost' even though it's now off the air. I should find something else to do. :-)
Actually, it was probably that iDOS included a bunch of abandonware games in their image. In the US, just because a publisher has stopped supporting an old game/software doesn't mean it's free for all. You still can't use it without a license.
(In some countries, I understand that abandonware is up for grabs, you can use it for free, and it's legal.)
My guess is that Apple approved iDOS without realizing it contained this old abandonware. Once they did realize it, they had to pull it.
"My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system ... 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?"
You hit the important point in your post: you cannot use idealism ("FOSS is neat!") to get your manager on your side.
When pitching any new idea to a manager, it's important to note the differences in priorities at each level. For examaple: with a line-level technologist (i.e. most geeks) technical knowledge is important, relationship-building and strategic planning are [generally] very unimportant. I'm talking about what's important to your job, not what's important to you.
But it's pretty much the opposite for managers, especially the further up the management chain you look. At the CIO level, strategic planning is the #1 most important thing, followed closely by interpersonal skills (CIOs often need to navigate lots of committees and meetings to get things done.) Individual technical skill is very unimportant to their work (some CIOs maintain some technical knowledge, but it's not used in their day-to-day work.)
I gave a talk about this very topic at Penguicon 2009, called "Linux in the Enterprise". My 1-hour talk used only a few conceptual slides, but you will be interested in the chart on slide #4. It presents this idea about "framing" very clearly. You can find the presentation at my blog, but the actual presentation is from May 2009. I think the data in the chart originally came from a Harvard Business Review study.
Your question indicated you were going to present this idea to a manager - I'm assuming (based on your wording) that you don't mean an IT Director or a Chief Information Officer, but instead an IT manager (probably your group manager.) Look closely as the chart from my presentation, and note the "Mgr" area of the graph. The "importance" lines all converge for the manager. That's not an error in the graph - that's indicative of managers stepping out of the "team lead" role, before they can make a transition to a "Director" role.
In the talk, I discussed how IT managers often have a hard time leaving their "tech person" role, moving into a manager role, because the IT skills that got them to the "manager" position won't carry them to the next level. And everything tends to have equal importance, because managers act as the filter between the technology teams and the director. So technical knowledge has about the same importance to their day-to-day job as budgeting and strategy. But I digress...
You'll need to make a case to your manager that addresses the points that he or she will find important, while at the same time thinking a step ahead to the level above your manager. Emphasize points that will be important to your manager's director. That means you need to de-emphasize the technology ("it's FOSS") and address the strategy. Does Plone fit into your organization's strategic IT plan? (Does your group even have an IT plan?) How easy can Plone integrate with other parts of the IT infrastructure? Can you tie Plone into your central authentication system? Who supports either package (patches, updates, new features, etc.) Your manager and director will not want to take on this effort, so be sure to mention commercial support options for Plone (usually this means "help desk"), the Plone developer community, and if it's available as a standard package in the Linux distro your sysadmins already run (meaning it would get updates by default as they regularly update the OS - which would be either good or bad, depending on your manager's preferences for testing after patches.)
It's not enough to say "FOSS is free". Especially because it really isn't. Talk about
BTW, I find it really ironic that my comment has been marked "Troll".
Activism from the left is dead in the US. There's no significant, effective opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the concentration of wealth, the crushing of unions, the decline in wages, or the tax benefits enjoyed by Wall Street. (All of which would have been unacceptable to the Eisenhower administration, an indication of how far to the Right the US has moved.) The activist organizations that accomplish anything are either on the Right, funded by big business, or church-based. Or they're purely self-interested, like gun owners and gays.
In my circles, I find that people on the Left just aren't going for "activism" because they try to understand the other side's point of view, then attempt an argument on the other person's terms. "Well, I can see why you say that, but ..." That may work in an academic context, one professor having a disagreement with another professor, but totally kills any sense of activism. There's nothing to get worked up about. I live in the Midwest, so maybe that's just "Minnesota nice" getting in the way?
But the Right gets all up in your face about it, completely ignoring any contrasting opinion. It may make them look like narrow-visioned morons, but it's pretty effective to whip up something like a Tea Party frenzy.
It's like my friends on the Left just don't get worked up over anything. There's lots we should get worked up about, but we just don't. Man, it would be easier if we could all flip a switch in our brains, and ignore what the other side is saying. Like the Right.
I used to bullseye womprats from my T-16 back home. They're only about 2 meters.
So why the big deal?
:-)
I hate to be the one to defend Microsoft here. $60 may seem like a big number, but do the math: $60 per year is $5 a month. That cost is nothing compared to what you're already paying for Internet or cable TV service.