jeudi 24 mars 2005

Hiring developers is a cheap alternative In this nice NewsForge article, Novell CIO Debra Andersen explained their move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org: Anderson set an ambitious goal for that first phase: She wanted to migrate 90 percent of MS Office users to OOo in three months. They almost made that goal, too, with 85 percent migrated during that time frame. There were lessons to be learned from those who couldn't migrate, and feedback to the OOo developers got work started on removing some of the tougher obstacles. (Note: I've heard unconfirmed reports that Novell has hired a number of OOo developers since then.) Since they got a 900k/year savings in license fees, funding a couple of core OO.o developers made good financial sense. Note, though, that this argument only works when open source is a replacement for an existing commercial solution. Thus, selling open source is easier when selling something that fits into an existing category where people are either paying or expecting to pay money. 12:15:49 PM   comment []