Kclug Digest, Vol 39, Issue 9

[cragos at gmail.com]

> Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:27:06 -0500
> From: leenix <leenix at kc.rr.com>
> Subject: FOSS Solutions
>      1. I agree with the philosophy behind FOSS
>      2. There are a plethora of plug-ins developed to help extend our
>         infrastructure for our current (and future) needs
>      3. If we find that a piece of software we downloaded (or purchased)
>         is broken, or doesn't do what we need it to do, we have the
>         source code and (hopefully) the resources to fix/change it.
>      4. Not only are there several (competing) options for paid support,
>         there are a ton of free message boards, mailing lists and IRC
>         channels to get assistance from, making our virtual knowledge
>         bank HUGE
>      5. Total cost of ownership is going to be a fraction of that of
>         closed source products.
>      6. When needed, we can find closed source software to do what we
>         need when we can't find a FOSS solution

7. Vendor lock in - Ensures greater access to the developers
themselves as support contacts, if the need arises. Ensures that
meaningful third party support will be available for mainstream
products if abandoned or obsolesced by their original authors.

8: Tendencies towards standards compliance and openness in the FOSS
community make it far more likely that related projects will be able
to effectively and efficiently interact.

9: Simplifies license compliance - Closed-source shops have the added
overhead of needing to account for licenses to proprietary products,
the hassle and man-hours involved in paying license fees, etc.
Applications for the operating systems used in these shops, be they
Mac or Windows shops, are far more likely to be proprietary shareware
or purchased software, adding to the transaction costs for adding new
software.

10: (More a plus for *NIX than FOSS) Having more mature command line
interfaces than are available in pre-Win2k7 builds of Windows Server
substantially cut the amount of time needed to populate changes across
multiple servers. Even after the adoption of the
yet-to-be-market-tested server operating systems that ship with
PowerShell, the size and maturity of the body of available code and
documentation for shells used in UNIX and Linux administration will
continue to vastly outweigh that available for Windows for some time.
Note that O'Reilly books on the relatively young Bash shell have been
through several revisions already.

That might help,
Sean Crago