Convincing a large company to use free software? [closed]

Question

I'm currently a developer at my first job right out of college. I work for a large company, and the trend I notice with them is that they tend to go with more expensive, closed source software about 99% of the time, while there are perfectly good open source alternatives that are available, most of which are vastly superior to their closed-source counterparts. For example, we use this absolutely awful source control software that cost a ton of money, while there are quite a few open source and/or free options that in my experience, albiet limited, are much better and offer basically the exact same functionality.

I guess my question is: How would an experienced developer approach management about using more free software?

It appears there is another question very similar to this that did not show up when I made this one: How can I convince IT that F/OSS software isn't evil?

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EDIT: Just come clarification. I'm not necessarily trying to change the company's procedure, I'm looking for advice on how to approach management about the subject.

Answer 1

1. Start using it in small utilities and things which are throwaway and don't need management buyin. This can prove the worth of an open source solution and put a crack in the door for using it in other projects.
2. Present articles from trade magazines showing that other people are using the open source solution.
3. Go with products which have commercial support options, such as MySQL, which enterprises seem to have an easier time swallowing.

Answer 2

Pick your battles carefully. Wait until they are suffering. If they are happy with what they have, they will not switch, no matter how much cheaper or superior the alternative is. You need to catch them while they're trying to think of ways to save money, or while they're disgusted with the problems of the current system.

Answer 3

Be very careful with what you refer to as free. There is a very large corpus of products that would be perfectly valid for a student to use without paying that an enterprise would have to pay for. Also never forget Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A lot of relatively expensive software is expensive because you get things like configuration and help support for them whereas that may not be the case for free software.

Answer 4

I think you are not asking the right question. To me, the challenge is to have my Big Corp to buy the BEST softwares for me, be it free softwares or not.

Paying for Windows or paying for Linux is not important (what is 100 $ for a Big Corp ?).

But having things done better is really important.

I think that your request to your boss should not be : "Hey, it's free and it's as good as XYZ, why are we using XYZ ?"

Why you boss would risk something trying the product you told when XYZ seems to be ok ?

It would be much more better to ask : "Hey, here is what I cannot do with XYZ : (your list). With my product, I would be able to do that and much more so fast than I would have a lot of spare time to test our own software !".

Small money is usually not a show stopper. Being able to work faster in order to do much more testing (or any other things that could help your boss have a better image) is definitely an excellent argument !

Best wishes, Sylvain.