SteveJ-restore-test

A friend came back from a ITIL Practitioners course with an interesting story: The course was mostly about the complexities of handling Commercial Licenses, no two of which are the same. The course provider made the not unexpected statement about Open Source: "Don't use it because you have nobody to sue". And they went onto ask "Why use OSS?" His response was: "Because it's best of breed, especially rock-solid utilities & tools". And they continued to not listen... This note is NOT about that particular mindset [Risk Avoidance, not Risk Management]. I'd like to give him, and other technical people like him, a "slam dunk" one-liner response to each of these questions: Why OSS - because it's best of breed! Why use a bug-ridden, poor functioning piece of commercial software when the best there is is rock-solid, secure & Free and Open? Not only do you remove the need to sue *anybody*, you get the best tool for the job and k...

This started as a conversation on an Open Source list - on how to respond to people that assert: "We can't use Open Source because there's Nobody to Sue". This is a response I received: The "Who can we sue" issue should be questioned. (i) Can the 'propriatory' software company be successfully challenged? Ask them how many people have successfully won a court case against Microsoft for example? (ii) To sue someone you need to allocate resources to the 'sueing' budget. Ask them that if they plan to sue people then have they budgeted for the possibility? or do they expect their insurance premiums to cover that? Wouldn't the insurance companies be concerned about the 'who to sue' bit and not the company? (iii) You can have software companies who write non open source software who have no money. Sure you could sue them, but you end up losing money and if you send that company broke who is going to fix or maintain the non open code th...