UpFront

What we can buy today far exceeds what we need to keep up.

—Mike Prince, CIO at Burlington Coat Factory, in Fortune, explaining why he's asking for an IT budget cut after converting to Linux.

Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would proser under the new. Their support is indifferent partly from fear and partly because they are generally incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience.

—Nicolo Machiavelli

Microsoft has chosen to make the war against open source a religious one. In doing so it has just managed to highlight it further, meaning IT Directors who wouldn't have ever considered it are now thinking of moving over.

—Dan Kusnetsky, International Data Corp.

Typically people think about things such as BIND and Sendmail, which are very important; but there is a much more practical sense in which both free and open code helped spread the birth of the Internet. That's the decision made in architecting the browser that reveals source. The source is constantly available. People didn't learn HTML just by buying Tim (O'Reilly)'s books first. What they did was steal each other's web pages, made the tweaks they wanted and then bought Tim's books so they could figure out how to do it better the next time around.

—Lawrence Lessig

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

—Jack Valenti, before Congress, 1983

Basically, all the commercial people have their own agenda, and that's very healthy because you want to have these often-conflicting agendas to push the system into something that actually works for everybody.

—Linus Torvalds

If you know how the source code works, you are much more likely to be able to sort out your problems. You will be able to link the software with the OS better. You won't have to spend so much on maintenance; the costs will be lower. It would also cost a lot less to develop the software in-house and get it to work the way you want.

—Retail CIO