Kokopelli said:
There are considerations though, especially servers. I like Macs, I really do. But for support it is another OS and vendor we have to account for.
All the servers in my office have 7x24x4 support. You quite simply can not get that kind of service from Apple. That rules them out right there. (X-Servers may have better options than consumer models, but honestly not as good as Dell or IBM.)
So I would not be so hard on the IT guy, there may be reason there.
I wouldn't have been as bothered if I hadn't actually asked them for a Gateway PC (we have tons of them sitting around doing nothing) OR a Blade server (of which we have several spare) but he couldn't get past the fact that my demo was seemingly running on a Mac therefore it must be bad in some way.
That was around 4 weeks ago btw, since then I have found 2 more 'customers' for whom a customized Bugzilla set up would solve their problems but as yet there is still no way past the IT jobs-worths.
Their latest objection is that "As it is open-source it must be insecure", I tried three tacts with this one:
1) 70% of the internet servers in the world are Apache based including many international banks, Apache is open-source.
2) NASA use Bugzilla!
3) "See that product we make over there, you know the one that we sell to customers for safety critical Air Traffic Control systems? Well we install Linux on it, Linux is open-source!"
So far no joy, I even had the most senior IT guy try to use the "not a mainstream application argument" as a reason we couldn't use Apache or MySQL! These guys are real live neanderthals!
Oh another favourite argument they came out with is that "you can't use open-source software if you make money with it", to this I countered that maybe they should tell Amazon, Google and Ebay that!
Amen-Moses