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The more I see the less I think of arguments like this.

Story: Open Source could use a face lift.Total Replies: 0
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dinotrac

Oct 07, 2005
7:05 PM EDT 		I'm beginning to find pieces like this to be silly. I presently spend a lot of time working with a large corporate IT group that is very definitely relying on Open Source software to meet its goals, and moving work from both Unix and Windows platforms to Linux.

Here's what I have come to know:

Organizations with astute IT management -- the kind whose support for logistics helped to turn Wal-Mart into a retail powerhouse, for example -- don't give a rat's ass what Eric Raymond or Richard Stallman or anybody else has to say.

Their concerns are very prosaic:

They need to provide services that will help their company to make money, preferably to make more money more effectively and more cheaply than the competitors.

Open Source software is part of that process. It is malleable, it is flexible. You can configure it and its supporting hardware to fit your business needs rather than your vendors licensing schemes.

Microsoft may or may not be evil. It does, however, tend to charge lots of money for software that is painfully licensed and insufficiently robust for heavy duty enterprise work. That doesn't go over well with people who need to move the enterprise forward.

Let everybody jabber all they want. Until talks starts affecting the bottom line, serious IT folks won't care.

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