Re: [Hampshire] Opportunity for Linux advocacy?

Mike Dwerryhouse wrote:
> Many people still believe that free (as in beer) stuff can't be any good.
> Arguments like "who are you going to sue?" etc. Like you are going
> to sue Microsoft for a bug in Word, or Outlook.

The "sue" bit is very very important to many corporates. My employer funded
a relatively critical perl module and we had numerous large corporates
and multi's sending threatening emails, phone calls and faxes during the Y2K panic.

Roughly half the UK banks, a number of other car makers as well as a number of
US banks and other businesses were sending us threatening letters directly or
via thier solicitors - probably at great cost.

We also recieved a large number of "compliance" forms to fill in. Our response
was always to ask to which consultancy, development or support contract were
they referring? Only one major car manufacturer responded - with threats.

Some of the compliance forms were well over 20 pages long - it would have taken days
to fill each one in - and they were all heavily biased towards liability.

Jacqui

.nhs.uk and .gov.uk use floss as a way to get MS discounts - hey have no intention of
cutting costs as this would entail cutting budgets. Which department head wants to
take an effective "pay cut"?

Also MS (tier1 resellers) offer free/subsidised training courses/jollies which are seen
as perks of the very lowly paid euc sector IT job. FLOSS cannot compete in this arena
unless the cost of such jollies are factored into the cost of provision.