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To: Eric Wells who wrote (1110)	9/9/1999 1:23:00 PM
From: Pink Minion	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1794

Do you disagree that it might be possible for a well-informed educated person to have a different view of the capabilities and financial return of Linux than your own? I'm not saying it is ready for everyone to go out and switch. It has got a long ways of going, but things are changing fast. They go with the standards. They go with what everyone else goes with. And no they are not stupid when it comes to politics and business accounting. They are politicians. They are great at lying. That's the corporate world. That's politics. One of MS success reasons is they don't/didn't have the red tape politics of an IBM or F500 company. A Dictator government is only as strong as the Dictator. MH

To: Eric Wells who wrote (1110)	9/9/1999 1:44:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1794

Eric, regarding CIOs... How much of a factor do you estimate the "vendor-independance issue" is? For example, a large manuafacturing company will usually not develop a product unless they have several sources for each component needed to build the product. At the very least, they will demand complete specs so that a replacement could be manufactured internally or outsourced just in case the supplier should go out of business or otherwise discontinue the component. I think that a similar reasoning would/should/(does?) apply for software purchases that are "mission-critical". For example, I've worked for a company where the software-maker of the part-tracking and revision control software simply went out of business. Since the software in question was the property of the no-longer-existing company, and also kept secret (no source code), we were forced to switch manually to another product at great expense. One could argue that this is a good reason to use software only from a large, established company such as Microsoft. But the "roadmap" for the software is not always stable, as MSJava developers or AlphaNT users could attest to. With an open-source product, you are always able to maintain internally or outsource the maintenance/upgrade of a product should the need arise. In fact, as long as there is still an interest in the software, you can virtually be assured that the software will continue to be maintained and developed. With a traditional proprietary product, you are literally placing the fate of your company in the hands of some other software company who may or may not view your comapany's continued survival as a pressing issue. How much (if any) do you think these considerations are weighed in the decision-making process of CIOs? Do you think this will become more of a factor now that open source software is becoming increasingly viable? -Mitch PS - Thanks for providing some contrast to this board.