[Ubuntu Chicago] Open Source in the workplace

[Chad Sutton]

Just wanted to let you all know that my plans to infect the world with 
great free and open source software is continuing :).

I've just started gathering support from my team and management to 
replace and rollout PDF Creator to every Windows PC in the corporation I 
am a Desktop Architect for. If it goes through it will hit close to 
200,000 PC's.

As Ubuntu advocates, I think its important that we look at the "baby 
steps" we can take to show people the value of open source software on 
any platform. By rolling out PDF Creator to every PC in our firm, we can 
give basic PDF creation functionality to all users just for the cost of 
rolling it out to them. To do this with commercial software it would 
cost us close to $10-20 million. My other goal is to replace existing 
Acrobat installs. We have 1000's of users that use it for nothing else 
that "printing" a few documents a month to a PDF. We can relaim their 
licenses and use them for people that actually need more advanced PDF 
printing, or just let the licenses die and stop paying maintenance and 
support costs for them. That will probably save us real $$$ of $1-2 
million at least.

What is my rambling point? Any free and open source software usage is a 
step in the right direction. If I was Forrest Gump I'd say "Value is as 
value does"!

-- 
Later,
Chad Sutton
csutton at chadarius.com
http://chadarius.com
http://stephandchadsutton.com