Comment Re:True (Score 1) 697
When the government doesn't want to pay licensing fees it is great to be able to run your computer infrastructure on the freebie software. Usually you get what you pay for too.
The original meaning of this comment holds no water. There have been many, many, OSS and freeware pieces of software the meet or exceed their commercial brethren.
The reality is that even though it might be OSS or distributed freely, no organization as large a government would have thousands of seats of a piece of software and no support. So, even though it's OSS it's highly likely that it will be OSS without a support contract or some purchased distros of OSS software.
There would be far too much risk involved, especially for that large of a conversation to not have some form of support for which they could fall back upon (Could you imagine telling your CIO/CEO that you have 500 servers running with software that has zero support?) So in reality it will be paid for OSS, in some form or another.
The original meaning of this comment holds no water. There have been many, many, OSS and freeware pieces of software the meet or exceed their commercial brethren.
The reality is that even though it might be OSS or distributed freely, no organization as large a government would have thousands of seats of a piece of software and no support. So, even though it's OSS it's highly likely that it will be OSS without a support contract or some purchased distros of OSS software.
There would be far too much risk involved, especially for that large of a conversation to not have some form of support for which they could fall back upon (Could you imagine telling your CIO/CEO that you have 500 servers running with software that has zero support?) So in reality it will be paid for OSS, in some form or another.
