Reply to post: Re: Do you want to be held hostage by Microsoft?

Re: Do you want to be held hostage by Microsoft?

Unless you write all your own software, you are hostage to someone else?

If you use an Open Source solution and the authors interests wander elsewhere, ...

There is an easy solution to that : pay the Open Source authors to provide solutions that meet your needs and then continue to pay them for maintenance.

Oh, you say "that will be very expensive", true but:

1) what is the cost of paying a closed source provider for decades ? Once OSS does what you want the development costs will drop to a lower maintenance level.

2) the costs will still be large, but we are talking about governments/similar here, they are paying huge amounts to Microsoft, etc, already.

3) the costs are still large - so why not notice that there is a large amount of overlap in the requirements of governments in different countries. How about working together ? This will really bring costs down - the hard bit will be getting this idea into the heads of politicians who will be being bribed by the proprietary system vendors who do not want the geese to die.

4) put some of your own staff onto the the projects that interest you. That keeps some of the cash that you pay in your country rather than send it to the USA, it also increases the number of skilled people in your country.

5) smaller businesses in your country will benefit from the filter down and not have to send so much of their income to the West coast of the USA.

Summary: it should be a complete no brainer to have governments support OSS; however it is unlikely to happen.