How about Morgan Stanley?
Most of this shamelessly stolen from: [link|http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7730|We're Going to Be a 90% Linux Shop] at the Linux Journal.
Phil Moore of Morgan Stanley, the Executive Director of the Engineering Team, recently began a talk this way:
I work for the 38th-largest company in the world, Morgan Stanley. We have a billion-dollar IT budget. And we use a little of everything. Unfortunately. Excuse me, a LOT of everything. The trend I've seen in the last ten years...is the exponential growth in the variety and the depth and breadth of installation of open-source software in our infrastructure....What I'm seeing is that in the infrastructure, the core infrastructure, open source is going to take over, leaps and bounds....I'm predicting, right now, that by 2006 or 2007, we're going to be a 90% Linux shop.Further into his talk he made some comments about Microsoft (and other foreign companies) and what it will be like ten years from now:
Look overseas at what's happening [with Linux]. It doesn't matter what distribution. Because [Linux is] economical for people in foreign countries. It lets them invest in their own local software companies without putting money into these guys' pockets [indicates Microsoft] or some other foreign corporation that doesn't have a vested interest in your own economy and your own culture. That's going to be the number one reason why open source ends up taking over the planet.
Read that Article, it'll help you understand you own issue. Point your PHBs to the Link, to the HP stuff for Debian, for other HP sanctioned products.
Especially point out the part that says:
Juxtapose any-with-any on few-to-many, and you can see the cross-purposed result. It's easy to see how this presents a problem, not only for software giants such as Microsoft but for few-to-many empires including the entertainment industry and consumer electronics. Protecting few-to-many from any-with-any has become a cause for the whole entertainment industry. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, lobbied through Congress in 1998, is a landmark achievement in paranoia.
Yet now large customers such as Morgan Stanley show us we misconceive the market when we see only conflict between open-source and proprietary software business imperatives. They make this clear when they put any-with-any in a supportive position beneath few-to-many. By its relationship-agnostic nature, any-with-any can include and support peer-to-peer, many-to-many, business-to-business or any other pair of nouns flanking a preposition.
If Linux is infrastructure, where does infrastructure fit? This question matters, because it provides the context within which paranoid few-to-many forces attempt to control infrastructure and prevent any-with-any from working.
