On Thursday 11 June 2009 22:27:11 Shadow wrote: > Thanks for the info, very helpful. > > You've convinced me, now I just need to convince the higher > authorities
I have had a fair amount of success in convincing non-profits to open source the code of their webapps. Among points you can make: 1. No vendor lock-in. Even if everyone associated with the project vanishes, the code is there and available for anyone to continue the development 2. A chance for volunteers to contribute to the project without too much commitment - a lot of contributions to open source are casual one-offs by passers by 3. A large potential group of testers. Normally testing is a very tedious job and costs a lot to hire people to do it. Open source projects often have hundreds of testers - and in popular projects it would run to lakhs. 4. Help other non-profits doing similar work - they can reuse the code, and also contribute back (this is a tricky point as very often non-profits have to compete for funds and other non-profits doing similar work are the main enemy) 5. Depending on the level of idealism in the organisation, you could also use arguments relating to the freedom of information, contributing to society etc. You can find such arguments in the FSF website. And to reassure them, promise to keep 'mission-critical-business-logic' a secret. (this is actually BS, but the effect is amazing). -- regards kg http://lawgon.livejournal.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
