Comment You won't get fired for it... (Score 3, Insightful) 418
I heard a saying some time ago "You won't get fired for choosing IBM. I think you can easily say the same about Microsoft. Many managers deal with consistant problems, missed deadlines, etc and would get questioned to no end if they were using (publicly) a cheap (inexpensive) or free solution. In my experience managers would rather not take the risk of a cheaper solution having issues, and not having a clear direction to point a finger if something was to go wrong. I often hear things from my management like "Microsoft is helping us work through this issue", in reality it's not a Microsoft problem at all but it gets the manager off the hook.
I have found the easiest way to get Linux into business is just do it, and do it quietly. It's very hard to say "Can't we do x with Linux?", but much easier to do it quietly then when the day comes up where a manager suggests a Microsoft solution to x you can say well we are already doing that with Linux and it's much cheaper (all costs considered) than the Microsoft solution. Try doing this the other way around and you will get shutdown 9 times out of 10.
I have found the easiest way to get Linux into business is just do it, and do it quietly. It's very hard to say "Can't we do x with Linux?", but much easier to do it quietly then when the day comes up where a manager suggests a Microsoft solution to x you can say well we are already doing that with Linux and it's much cheaper (all costs considered) than the Microsoft solution. Try doing this the other way around and you will get shutdown 9 times out of 10.