Briefing notes on the benefits of Free Software?

[David Gerard]

2009/12/4 Karsten Gerloff <gerloff at fsfeurope.org>:

> One important point to go for is strategic independence. With Free
> Software, the organisation is independent from upgrade cycles, and
> can upgrade its software whenever it feels like doing so, rather
> than when the vendor phases out support.


+1

I'm a Unix sysadmin in a commercial organisation, and every time we
have to talk to our proprietary vendor we desperately wish we'd gone
with something open source and/or in-house bespoke. And they're a
*pretty nice* vendor, responsive and helpful and the product is good.
But they remain the only place we can get help for on this opaque
black box they've sold us.

My new saying: Software freedom is like backups, redundancy and
service contracts ... you don't realise how much you need them until
you don't have them.


- d.