Convincing the Boss to Accept FOSS

This is a very realistic picture of how to sell FOSS. The things that tend to matter to FOSS advocates don't generally matter to business people. The philosophy carries zero weight in business and, indeed, may be seen as contrary to business. Support is key to business people. Technical superiority is hard to sell to someone who doesn't understand technology. Overall cost savings is a string sellinbg point.

Too many FOSS advocated forget that from a business perspective FOSS is not free as in no cost. There are always training and conversion costs. The idea is to show a cost-benefit analysis that is realistic and favorable.

Also never underestimate something the article did not discuss: inertia. Even some hard core techies will fight you if it means learning a new skill they aren't familiar with and feel insecure about.

When I saw the Boss, capital B, I thought maybe somebody was working on Springsteen

Well... he'd certainly be a spokesman who would have appeal to some people the typical FOSS advocate can't reach L:)

The one thing left out -- and something I have had luck with -- is that the software is free as in libre.

You don't put it that way, because you'll sound like some kind of head case, but freedom has a lot of pull in business if you understand it properly.

Freedom is the ability to put together a pilot project on a shoestring and then scale it up as interest and/or budget arrives. More to the point -- the ability to do that without having to get legal, licence compliance, etc involved.

> Well... he'd certainly be a spokesman who would have appeal to some people the typical FOSS advocate can't reach L:)

Sorry, he's too busy hobnobbing with all his politician buddies and accepting "of the decade" awards from Rolling Stone magazine.

Cost is not really always a selling point either. There's this mentality going around that if it's not expensive, it can't possibly be any good.

Quoting:Support is key to business people.

You know, I hear this at work, but when I as a developer exercize this marvelous, wonderful commercial "support", I'm not blown away by its majesty.

From DCE support from TransArc, to CORBA support from Borland to DBMS support from Oracle, I can't think of a single good experience, much less a great experience. I get treated like a know-nothing baby, even when I have example code that causes a problem. The customer service reps tend towards the snotty, with a sprinkling of glad-handing, back-slapping frat boys who suck up to the director-level management rather than deal with mere user problems.

I suspect this comes from the same vein that causes technical superiority to be a hard to sell to The Business: they doesn't understand technology. They don't even like technology, for the most part.

Like Henry Ford once said, if I'd asked my customers, they would have had me make a faster horse.

"From DCE support from TransArc, to CORBA support from Borland to DBMS support from Oracle, I can't think of a single good experience, much less a great experience. I get treated like a know-nothing baby, even when I have example code that causes a problem. The customer service reps tend towards the snotty, with a sprinkling of glad-handing, back-slapping frat boys who suck up to the director-level management rather than deal with mere user problems."

I have experienced that first hand too and totally agree with you. Hopefully it gets better but I won't hold my breath.

Actually, Red Hat really does have excellent support. Novell isn't as good but it isn't half bad either, both for NetWare and SLED. I've also found HP support to be solid. Granted, I usually don't have to call the help desk and have access to higher level support which makes a huge difference.