> I tell my customers that if they can find a free generic horizontal piece of software that provides them value without risk, then by all means, use it.
No software is risk-free, regardless of the licensing terms. One big risk is you'll find out, after weeks or months using the thing, that it doesn't do all that you want it to do, and getting it to do the rest is costly and time-consuming.
> Then the killer question: If the answer to any of the above is "no" because of our free software, "Who are you going to call?"
Literally millions of businesses do well using Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, etc without having problems. (My answer to that question is "do a Google search on the problem and find the solution thast way).
> The risk to your business and its stakeholders is simply not worth the couple of bucks saved on free software.
If you want personal support for your software, you're going to pay a good deal more than $2 for it. And paid-for technical support is available for open source software too, if that's what you want.
No software is risk-free, regardless of the licensing terms. One big risk is you'll find out, after weeks or months using the thing, that it doesn't do all that you want it to do, and getting it to do the rest is costly and time-consuming.
> Then the killer question: If the answer to any of the above is "no" because of our free software, "Who are you going to call?"
Literally millions of businesses do well using Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, etc without having problems. (My answer to that question is "do a Google search on the problem and find the solution thast way).
> The risk to your business and its stakeholders is simply not worth the couple of bucks saved on free software.
If you want personal support for your software, you're going to pay a good deal more than $2 for it. And paid-for technical support is available for open source software too, if that's what you want.