donnz's Journal: Why Use OSS?

I have written a document (avaible in Open Office) outlining a business case and economic case for using OSS. I'm not very clever. A large number of /. people are.

Soooo, if you come across this journal entry and have comments that will help me refine, condense and improve the agruements please let me know.

Please also be aware that the target audience is non-technical. Politicians, CEOs and so on.

The New Zealand Open Source Society have kindly posted an html version up on their site.

Monkey-boy said it best:

[benjamindees]

"tough competitive force. . . . It's non-traditional, it's free and it's cheap,"
-Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, referring to Linux

Pay yourself with OSS

[im a fucking coward]

I had a three hour flame fest with a Windows zealot, and accidentally stumbled across the personal / business use cash rational. It's mostly PR, and I hate PR, so refinement is in order.

Current install cost of XP Pro and Office Pro: ~ $1400 US.
Current cost of expensive OSS and OpenOffice: $80.
Difference: ~ $1300

If you pay yourself to learn a Linux gui, say $100/hour, you can effectively learn to do everything in Linux that you could learn to do on Windows in 13 hours.
If you don't realistically mak

Re:Pay yourself with OSS

[donnz]

Thanks for that. As I said the target audience is politicians and people who don't know/care about OSS so I figured PR and background is required...But it is PR that is lacking in some solid examples and refinement is definitely required. I take it your costs are list prices, is there a quotable source?

Re:Pay yourself with OSS

[im a fucking coward]

I'm going to be honest with you here. My small company makes ~20-30% on every MS OS we install, and an additional 1 - $5000 in support costs over the life of that machine. So we're not exactly thrilled about Open Source to be honest. Most of this industry is the same, so if you're looking for an honest white sheet to say the obvious, you're going to be hard pressed to find it.

We've been running tests on RedHat's 9 release with our largest clients, and have found that aside from a small lead in training tim