If I had to take away one thought form LinuxWorld this time, a common theme which occurred in several talks I attended, it would be this: Open Source software gives you back control over your business decisions.
With proprietary software, it is often somebody else who tells you when you need to upgrade your hardware, when you need to switch operating systems, when you must re-train your staff. If you have a network now which runs very happily on Windows 3.1, or NT 3.51, or even NT 4, you will not be able to keep it that way for long. What about Office 95? Try buying extra new licenses for these systems. Try getting support for software that runs on them.
With Linux & Open Source, you have no need to upgrade until you want to. If you have a very old system and the original suppliers won’t support it for you, you can maintain it yourself or pay somebody else to do so. The point is that the choice is yours.
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