It sucks being in a position where all my peers in the MSP / IT Consulting industry use and sell products that I am morally opposed to. I'm still trying to find the balance where I can offer good products and services to my clients while offering them an alternative to the closed source proprietary ecosystem that most businesses rely on. I can certainly make more money reselling Microsoft 365 than setting up Mailcow and Nextcloud. And it takes less maintenance. But Microsoft is evil. Is anyone else in the position? Do y'all ever sit your clients down and explain the difference between industry standard tech and it's FOSS alternatives? Help a brother out! #asknostr
Discussion
It’s a crap shoot. Sometimes you win with client willing or able to “give it a try” and sometimes you don’t.
Popular acceptance of FOSS for the security of its users … may take another century or so. And even this won’t come as long as “i need the govt to protect my monopoly on ideas” is the zeitgeist.
So yea. Patience … and appreciation for small miracles.
It a process who require times. Closed source products live as long the corporation behind stay alive and want keep it alive.
Open source products can, in theory, be eternal and always upgraded.
What we can do is try to propose alternatives to clients when is possible and support the development of the open source solutions we want to use.
In the end, for clients what matters its the cost and if can call someone when a issue appear. Simplier solutions and easy to mantain, for dev and admin, might be the selling point
Yeah, nobody was fired for buying IBM…
I often argue from the security angle: closed source is security by obscurity. Well-chosen open source libraries are clearly better off.
I have the advantage that we develop custom software. Normally the problem we solve wasn‘t solved already or the licenses are very expensive. So the customer mostly doesn‘t care what tech we use.
I‘m more often challenged over the choice whether a standard software should be used or a custom solution is needed.