On Jan 18, 2008 8:02 PM, Richard Smedley <<a href="mailto:smedley358@btinternet.com">smedley358@btinternet.com</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
However, things are changing. More and more businesses are keen<br>to stress their community and green credentials, buying locally,<br>reducing environmental inefficiencies, and supporting<br>community projects. Surprisingly in tune with the times the
<br>recent Companies Act [1] mandates directors of plcs to take<br>account of the community and environmental effects of decisions<br>that they make.<br><br>We can still sell Free Software to businesses on its benefits,<br>
but the social benefits could now be said to count for business<br>too :-)<br></blockquote></div><br>I agree with that bit.<br><br>The good news coming out of the Companies Act is that "social benefits" now counts as a "business conversation".
<br><br>Sadly, I have had conversations with people in the Linux community who use phrases like "Microsoft is Evil", and still don't understand why this isn't a very effective sales pitch to the average CIO :-)
<br><br><br>I am the IT Director of a medium-sized financial services company as well as being an IT consultant a few days a month [1]. We now have an all-Ubuntu policy [2] on the server side, but an "anything goes" policy on the desktop - this is because most of our staff are home based, and our "back office" is now entirely web-based, so we have staff on Macs, Windows PCs, and even Linux desktops. (To be fair, about the only one who uses a Linux Desktop is our chief programmer, and that's only on one of her PCs.)
<br><br>The most _effective_ conversation I have with my "peer group" is about how WEB APPS are saving us money across the board (not least because some of the team are quite happily running 8+ year old PCs and able to work perfectly well), and how Linux is a far more flexible, scalable and secure platform than Windows for said apps.
<br><br>Mark<br><br><br>[1] I like that firm, but not so much I'll give up my other, long-standing clients.<br><br>[2] Other Linux distributions are available. Please no-one make this about Ubuntu vs. ANO :-)<br><br><br>