I’m sure there are a lot of materials out there (I got lots of them) about the considerations and processes of giving up proprietary computing in favor of free and open source software (FOSS). But here’s promoting a great material, simple yet instructive.
Groklaw featured this migration guide on June 5, 2006. Cooked by Carlo Daffara, I’m serving the guide to you hot straight from the oven.
Intended for organizations seemingly trapped in ‘popular-ietary’ software system, the guide is titled “Guidelines on Migrating to Open Source/Open Data Standards Software.” Catch the full story on this site.
For the impatient, I’m giving below a preview of the guidelines.
Management | Technical | Social |
---|---|---|
|
|
|
The guidelines suggest that three sets of people are very important in the migration process: those deciding on which organizational resources may be used, those in charge of the technical stuff, and those using the computers for production purposes. Succeeding in two but one will render the migration process at best painful and at worst futile.
In my experience, convincing people (management and users) are not that difficult. The more daunting task is how to walk the talk, so to speak. So there may be a need to invest in few technical people to help management decide and the end-users enjoy the brave GNU world.