On Wednesday 24 July 2002 12:54 pm, ben_b wrote: > As a person with no ideological tie to unix based operating systems or > open source software it appears that the majority of posts on this list > take some sort of shot, large or small, at Microsoft. I'm glad someone > else made this point, I was really considering making it myself after the > recent post regarding exchange alternatives but hesitated thinking maybe > I'm the odd-ball out here (mainly due to the volume of posts bashing > microsoft). The reason I mention the post asking about exchange and > outlook is that it seemed even more obnoxious than usual. It appeared > that this person wanted any alternative to Microsoft products irregardless > of whether or not they were "better", the fact that they would not be > Microsoft seemed sufficient to this person. Maybe it's part of an > ideology that anything open source *must* be better than anything > corporate (I would disagree, I can find you many examples in which that > assumption is false, in fact I would venture to say that the majority of > corporate software is "better" than the majority of open source software). > I think that person is doing their boss and company a disservice in > catagorically rejecting all things Microsoft rather than making an > objective cost-benifit analysis. The problem with most cost-benefit analyses is that there's often hidden costs. The cost of continuing with Microsoft products doesn't include only the new licensing charges, but the costs and risks of the difficult-to-quantify exposure to various Microsoft system vulnerabilities, present and future. These may be hard to quantify, but they're there, and some people have internalized an entirely noncrazy belief that, at least at present, these costs and risks are much lower in the open source world. (Anybody ever get a virus from an Open Office document? Or via a .txt file edited with emacs?)