Tautvydas wrote: > Hey List, > > Little off topic, but I need some help. For a week I'm working in a > small company. (~250 workstations). Till 2008 there will be 400-600 > workstations. So, they are planning to buy something for spam/mail > filtering (http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_overview.php). > I think the best would be to use openbsd+pf+spamd (with carp if > necessary). But - I have quite stupid CEO and I need many arguments, > why blackbox for many $$$ is bad (from corporate view).
It is not bad at all: a) You mention stupid people, thus give them something simple. As they won't know how to use OpenBSD nor maintain it. Thus unless you want them to need you for all the upcoming years, and thus pay you the money for maintaining the box, get them that barracuda box with a support contract; which in essence equals you maintaining a OpenBSD box. The difference between the two is who gets the money. As you are asking for arguments why you should do it instead of the others, I would actually suggest that Barracuda does it, as they have their arguments, you don't ;) Same reason why Windows Servers are a good thing to give to organizations that have stupid people, they won't be able to understand OpenBSD either, but clicking is something that almost everybody can do. Thing that would make any *BSD/Linux etc great: clickability & wizards. also known as the K.I.S.S. principle. b) It pays the people building that box which also returns funds into the developers pot. Otherwise the only thing the cashflows does is end up in your bank account. Which might not be a bad thing perse but still ;) (funny actually how money always returns in the picture and then it suddenly seems that 'open source' actually means that a company is really paying somebody to do the work and then open source it, it is really about the service isn't it?) Greets, Jeroen [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
