Keith, From my experience, large organisations adoption of OSS depend on two things: 1) how you sell OSS 2) how "authoritarian" Management is
It is easier to "sell" Firefox/Chrome in a company than Office/Thunderbird because there is the perception that the former are faster and safer than Internet Explorer. On the other hand Thunderbird and Open/Libre Office appear "dated" when compred to the latest Office suite. People tend to prefer the tools they are used to. If you explain that there is a cost and that costs effects the bottom line they might listen unless they PERCEIVE that the company is profitable, already wastes a lot of money, so not buying the MS products is just a way of making more profits at the expense of the workers. Note "perceive" is the key word, so the conversion to OSS is not merely an exercise in installing OSS, but also an internal sales exercise, something most technical people are not so versed in doing. My two cents... of course we can take it all up at the next meeting. James On 10/05/2011 16:31, Keith Vassallo wrote: > I've been getting reports that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has setup > shop in Strait Street, Valletta. They are emailing all SMEs in Malta (batch > by batch) informing them about unauthorised software they are using. They are > also following up with a call. > > One particular client of mine got a call from Microsoft Malta. Guess we now > know what they're really doing here. > > Anyway, quite a few of my clients have been approaching me for alternatives, > and I have been driving them the Libre Office / Thunderbird + calc plugin > route. This will work well for most of my (relatively small) clients - though > I'm not sure how a large office would work. Most clients actually have > genuine Windows licenses (those come with the computers). It's Office that > they need to replace. > > Perhaps a few articles on The Times about this would be really topically > relevant whilst this is going on. > > K > > > > > _______________________________________________ > MLUG-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://linux.org.mt/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-list _______________________________________________ MLUG-list mailing list [email protected] http://linux.org.mt/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-list
