On 7/25/06, Karlie Robinson <<a href="mailto:karlie.robinson@fedoraproject.org">karlie.robinson@fedoraproject.org</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> If you really want to convince them - get them where they hurt - MONEY. Ask - How would you spend your money if you didn't need an IT budget? Simply, Everyone has stuff they'd rather spend their money on. If they could cut out all software expenses, could they get more/better hardware? Use the money for something other than IT? I'm sure the Afgan Gov't could think of a few things their software budget could be spent on. Present the idea of - why buy an office suite? when you can get one for free? then wow them by opening a .doc with OpenOffice or the like. "It writes, it calcs, it even saves as .pdf" and since you're going FOSS on the Office products, why are you paying for the OS base? Not to mention if you choose Fedora for the Operating system, you'll no longer need to pay for Anti-virus or Spyware protection software... Cutting out virus and spyware software alone should cover the costs of migration from Win to Fedora - even if they have to train their staff. because even if it does require a little money, the time to recover the investment is very short - Without running the numbers (cost of software vs cost of training staff) I'd guess the Return on investment would happen between 3 and 5 years. After that time, it's all money in the bank. If you really want to lay it on thick, you can hit them with the Vista hardware requirements and how Fedora Core 5 will save big money because they can skip the 1 gig memory upgrades. Shal I go on? ~Karlie</blockquote><div> Oh, Karlie - you're a great marketing person. Huh, if I didn't already use FOSS, I am sure I would migrate :) Cheers, Pawel </div></div>