What drives Bill Gates 1808

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That would certainly be boring. I would prefer to see (as I was saying just a couple of years ago...) more focus on the real issues holding up free and open source software adoption in business. Most of the barriers which go up are essentially political, and the drive for those barriers comes in the main from incumbent proprietary vendors. Microsoft are obviously well known, but there are many other such vendors out there doing much the same kind of thing.

How do you handle a vendor offering your organisation a solution, running proprietary applications, but built on linux and COTS hardware, who wants to charge you the same price that he did for the completely proprietary solution?

How do you deal with your very senior managers who've just been taken to dinner by proprietary vendor X, say, last night, who have wind that you're looking at a COTS-open source solution? Your senior guy is now pumped up with every bit of FUD which you've ever seen. Are you ready?

This is a great place for looking at the fud which is spread over the internet, in the papers, etc., and disecting it. It's a great place for people to share their own personal experiences of why the fud is wrong, with real examples.

Otoh, I have absolutely no time whatsoever for the astroturfers, particularly the truly disingenuous types, like Erik F and billwg!!!!£ LOL££££*(*, because they are so, well, disingenuous. They add nothing of value to this space, and as they are basically advocating Microsoft, they should be in comwnt, not cola. They wouldn't be quite so bad if they were truthful in their advocacy, but that doesn't seem to be a concern for them.

The other trolls can be readily enough ignored, naturally, and of course, it does stop the kind of insulting, irritating, garbage that these guys have a want to produce from polluting the technical newsgroups. In the same way that we had a period of forgeries going around a couple

I would prefer it if the billwgs1!"£!£$ and Eriks and Snits and co were simply not responded to - they'd soon go away, or at least, they might mend their ways.

-- end Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk Reality does not exist -- yet.