Bruce Toback <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


>
>It's certainly turning out to be a delightful irony that open source
>products are gaining market share because they're perceived as more
>likely to be there for the long haul than fee-for-license products from
>major manufacturers. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of corporate
>management, IT staff have long been asked to justify perfectly reasonable
>decisions in terms of management's looking-glass views (viz., the Gartner
>Group thread).
>
<snip>

To a certain extent this has long been a CYA issue as much as anything else.
The purchase of a product or license to use comes with an expected warranty
from the company concerning both support and longevity. If it doesn't work
as advertised you have someone to blame. Public domain types of software
comes with neither support nor longevity "guaranteed." Thus, you have nobody
to point a finger at except for the person who recommended using said
software.

For many people it was (and still is) easier to spend money than it is to
make a decision that potentially could reflect badly on their self.

That line becomes increasingly blurred when a company such as HP takes
public domain software (such as linux, samba, apache) and distributes it
with their OS and guarantees some level of support for it.

Doug.

Doug Werth                                     Beechglen Development Inc.
[log in to unmask]                                       Cincinnati, Ohio

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of Beechglen Development. They might, but not necessarily. They represent
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