guy keren wrote:
On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, 013-Danny Lieberman wrote:
1) Dont get seducted into bashing
Linux and Open Source people tend to be zealots - and bash MSFT with no
apparent reason
besides hating Bill Gates and XP SP2 for writing buggy software.
2) Give economic reasons not ideological reasons:
neglecting the ideological issue completely is, well, not such a good
idea. much of your "open source software" wouldn't have been there,
without the ideology.
We choose Linux and Open Source because its a good fit for us.
In addition tothe economic benefit of not having to pay for licenses you
can rely on the open source
community for support - almost always with better quality and response times
than big closed source vendors
OR
you can rely on local expert vendors (like you) whocan give personalized
local support and
whose livelihood depends on it (as opposed to some customer support
representative in India who could care less).
Better quality support translates to lower TCO and higher success rates for
product development
don't mention the word TCO ("whatever you say, don't mention the war").
It might be one tactic - MS is trying to define the rules by mentioning
the TCO, but quite a few recent press items and analyst papers state
that even by "MS's rules" they loose - OpenSource software have proven
record of lower TCO and excellent ROI (return on investment) for those
who already made the switch (i.e. it's not a specualation like the
"funded research" that MS brings to "prove" its point but real-life
accounts of organizations who "did it").
So my advise (and I admit not being an expert) is that if you do intend
to tread the TCO path and give an answer, make it as clear as possible -
try to address all the issues already raised by MS until today in that
area (learn their "get the facts" and hamakor's "learn the facts"(?)
papers).
you can, however, mention the ministry of education's signing with
microsoft on a very reduced price, as a win for open source - without the
open source, the ministry of education would have had to pay the older
higher prices - so open source brings competetion where a monopoly does
not allow competetion via normal capitalistic means.
You can take it further and say that open source:
1. Creates a market of multiple suppliers, so if/when the ministry
of education would have jumped ship to open-source, it would also
benefit from the competition of multiple suppliers, wereas "Microsoft
Soaftware" can have only one supplier - Microsoft.
See http://www.osia.net.au/content/view/full/422, for instance (it's
important to know the background of this particular statement in order
to fully understand it - the NSW government opened a tender for open
source suppliers, and the opposition minister, in his idiocy, warned
about being reliant on "single open source supplier". OSIA took steps
to correct him using typical sarcasm).
(this entire archive is full of eloquant arguments for Open Source,
IMHO, it's worth a scan as part of your preperations for this show).
2. Solves the problem of price of compatible software for students
as well. Better than any agreement Microsoft can offer (and as far
as I know the latest education ministry agreement doesn't address
at all)
3. Whatever the money is payed for OpenSource, more of it will stay
in Israel than money payed for MS products and services (is this a
correct argument?)
HTH,
--Amos
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