Re: [Fsfe-uk] Cheats!

[David M]

On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 20:33 +0000, Alan Pope wrote:

> Whether you're sceptic or not I have direct experience of customers
> negotiating new contracts including reduced rates for licenses,
> discounts for maintenance contracts or otherwise reducing their system
> TCO. In my experience the larger companies don't see free/open
> software as the first or even second option. Top of the list is "see
> how much we can screw the proprietary software vendor down on price"
> before anything else.

There must be a point somewhere in the middle where the two ends start
to meet:

On the one hand, you have $BIG_GOV or $MEGA_CORP, who believe that any
problem can be solved by throwing (or withholding!) money at (from) it,
on the other hand, you have $CRAZY_INTERNET_STARTUP (Yahoo, Google, etc)
who started on shoestring budgets and so instinctively went the OSS
route, scaling up and scaling up and eventually becoming big enough to
start contributing things back to the pool..


-- 
David M,              |  [en, fr, (de)]
Edinburgh, Scotland.  |  replyto valid <365d but reply-to-list preferred
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