Hi all
Recently I found myself in a discussion with someone in charge of purchasing decisions in an IT department. Obviously I argued that the true cost of proprietary software is much higher than just e.g. licensing costs per year. Therefore free software solutions should be preferred even if their support contracts were to cost several times as much as proprietary competitors charge for the same time frame due to the inherent risk of using proprietary software.
Do we have any models on how to compute the real costs, including the cost of lock-in? In our section on public procurement [1], we do not really propose a way to do that. Do you have good models for this (can be from personal, corporate or public procurement)? I believe that if we can put some cost to the risk, we can argue much more successfully for free solutions.
Thanks Thomas
[1] https://fsfe.org/activities/procurement/procurement.en.html