[FOSS] How does one respond to this line of questioning?

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>John, *you* provided the information that everyone should always be
>trying to inovate.

Pardon me, I said that a lot of IT managers are now looking at IT as a
non-strategic resource, and therefore do not look at it as something
where they should innovate.  I do not believe I *ever* said *everyone*
should *always* be trying to innovate.

As a "Free Software Evangelist" I have often advised people that if they
have a system that is working perfectly fine, paid up licenses, on
hardware that is cost effective, then they are typically foolish to try
and move that to FOSS, for that will be the "all pain and no gain port".

On the other hand, if it is a new project and they do NOT consider FOSS
(with the "consideration phase" based on reasonable costs) then they
probably have not done their homework.  The irritating thing to me is
that a lot of the companies represented in the "second question" do not
consider doing this.

Standards move on.  The standards of FORTRAN have advanced through the
years, as have the standards of operating systems.

>The point is, writing something in perl to parse some data as opposed
>to C# is *NOT INNOVATIVE*.

Depends.  If the C# run-time costs you 100 dollars each for 100,000
units, and using perl has zero per-unit cost, but 100,000 in NRE, then
perhaps it is innovative.

>The question is, do you want something which is straitforward
>implemented a billion different ways for no other reason then to have
>everyone have a different solution.

I want the ability of people to be able to tailor the software to their
needs instead of being locked into using what a vendor gives them.

md