IMHO, the managers are not aware of the fact that GNU/Linux based operating systems do have a fairly mature collection of device drivers for most wifi devices though this area is still a work in progress. I feel the reaction from the managers were more due to a lack of awareness about the possibilities of FOSS based operating systems to do wifi that caused them to react to you the way they have.
On your part you can point them to sites like http://linuxwireless.org/ or conduct a small awareness campaign the the University of Melbourne about the possibilities of using Free/open Source Operating Systems for wireless networking. Since you have identified a need, you can even make that a academic project if you want to.
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IMHO, the managers are not aware of the fact that GNU/Linux based operating systems do have a fairly mature collection of device drivers for most wifi devices though this area is still a work in progress. I feel the reaction from the managers were more due to a lack of awareness about the possibilities of FOSS based operating systems to do wifi that caused them to react to you the way they have. On your part you can point them to sites like http://linuxwireless.org/ or conduct a small awareness campaign the the University of Melbourne about the possibilities of using Free/open Source Operating Systems for wireless networking. Since you have identified a need, you can even make that a academic project if you want to.