> If you look closely at the phrasing of the question your CEO asked, you > can see that it builds an unnecessary fence around the answer. "Why > would you build a wonderful product and then just give it away?" serves > to throw you into a defensive posture, with the likely outcome of > looking foolish. It is much more of a statement of opinion than a > forthright question.
Let me rephrase the question that I was asked. We had just shown the CEO the SugarCRM app. The question/statement sequence went like this "Wow! This is great! How much work did you guys put in on this?" (1 day) "How much did this software cost us?" ($0) "The software was free? What do you mean free? How can someone just give this away? I mean, I guess they can, but why would you write something like this and just give it away?" As most of us know, nothing is truly free. I don't think that he was trying to shoot holes in it, I think that he was just looking for the 'catch'. In business, when someone tells you that their product is free, you better start looking over your shoulder. I gave him 'my version' of the open-source spiel and he now understands it for the most part, but still eyes it with more than a healthy dose of suspicion. Look at it from a non-IT standpoint. (If that is possible in this group...) He is used to having a $5000 server running $2500 worth of M$ software, to run mail, web and file services. Salesforce CRM is $995 per year for only 5 users and $65 per seat after that. (Not to mention $ to run SQLServer.) Thjis is all on hardware that constantly needs upgrades to keep up with M$'s ever progressing requirements. My partner and I tell the him that we are going to run Ubuntu (free) with MySql (free) and SugarCRM (free) on hardware that the current IT department stopped using 1 1/2 years ago. And, on top of that, our stuff will run twice as fast with half the problems while doubling the amount of services that were available on the m$ system with 95% more uptime. If you didn't have any open source/linux experiences to draw on wouldn't you be suspicious? To me, Open Source is about giving back. Pure and simple. Despite having over 22 years in the industry and being a fairly proficient M$ programmer, I'm nowhere near as savvy as some, maybe most, people on this list. I can't crack open Ubuntu or Sugar and start coding away. So, the way that I plan on giving back is to promote and further Open Source every chance I get. What I am doing is adding section on our website and our promotional documentation that explains how Open Source has worked (and is working) for us. I want to show our implementation and encourage others to do the same. So, I'm really looking for anything I can get on the open source philosophy. Thanks for all of the links so far. Keep 'em coming. Regards, Mark. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
