2009/12/4 Karsten Gerloff gerloff@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.