15th August 2008, 02:16 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by ShadowJack
It is one of the advantages of a large organisation like OA - they/we can allocate R&D time to projects like this, but, like everything else - it has to fit into a business model, in this case, reducing software licence/maintanence costs in the longer term (when you're looking at £80K+ for your AutoCAD licences - you want alternatives!)
It certainly is an advantage, that before the licencing rules on software change the bigger (charitable) organisations have built up the resources to change to open source software. Meanwhile the smaller, non-charitable, ones haven't had the opportunity.
Be nice to think that once there's a whole load of open source software out there everyone will be able operate at a comparible level - but of course they won't because only organisations large enough to have an IT department (or individuals who are already experts in its use) will have the know-how to use it as you can't get support built-in like you can with the purchased stuff. So it will be even less fair than it was before.
Of course, I don't really know anything about open source software so feel free to correct me.