Hi list,

Just came back from a meeting with Gadi Gilon. For those who don't remeber, he is the CIO of "Kupat Cholim Klalit". He stumbled upon the last time his name was mentioned on this list (thread starting at http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Linux/maillists/03/09/msg00296.html), and wanted to talk.

I'm BCCing him on this email, so he can choose to participate actively in this discussion (or just correct me).

The discussion stayed, almost exclusively, on the theoretical, ideological, front. If I understood correctly, his main point is this: "I can see ideological/social reasons for writing/using free software, and I see financial ones. If I try to adopt the ideological reasons within my organization, it will never work. I cannot let every user of a machine in every hospital change their own software. I cannot expect to have the social contract's benifits when aquiring the software, yet not pass the same benifits onwards. I must therefor reject the social reasons for adoping free software".

Please don't start flame wars saying "but there are also financial reasons for adopting open source". He is not rejecting this possibility. It has not come up due to lack of time.

Now, I tried to point the practical reasons behind the social contract, and his response rather suprised me. Basically, he has contracts with all of his software vendors that gives him full access to the source code in case the company goes under. His basic premesis was "I can get competition over support in proprietary software too - Clalit did it in the past already".

I tried to point out that this is actually means that he has forced the vendors to turn their model, when dealing with him, into a free software one. He acknoledged the possible truthfulness of this statement. I read that as "the free software model is so much suprior, that I am actually forcing closed source companies to adhere to it". I guess you may read that to mean that the free software advantages are not as important to him, representing a huge organization, as it is to SMBs. I guess had the quotes in the paper said "I don't see the advantages of free software to organizations of my caliber", things would have been understood differently by us too.

Like I said before - the financial aspects of free software were not raised at all.

One last point - he said he is willing to talk to us further. If he doesn't wish to join this discussion (and even if he does), I was thinking of dedicating a Telux meeting to that end. What do you think?

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Open Source integration consultant
Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/



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