Please, before you reply, take note of the arguments put forward at http://www.alex.uklinux.net/Documents/
The author is willing to accept improvemnts and I think this may form the basis for a combined response.
Interesting... I had to read this in Moz rather than IE5.5. lol.
Back to the point though... I think that to a certain extent his points are somewhat academic. I work in the public sector so perhaps parts of the document have a little more meaning (QinetiQ implies certain things without explicitly mentioning- it is a public document after all).
Yes, they have somewhat missed the point of Free Software, but in all, it is an encouraging report. BELIEVE me. I've been trying to persuade these guys from the inside that licensing costs are going up and do not provide better software, that we need to think of different solutions, etc. To have a report, that although conservative is mostly favourable (and you're can't convince *me* that Linux is a suitable desktop solution YET-but let's not get into that one again) -it's a great advantage to us.
Certainly my take on the report is not to criticise it (lest we bore them with nitpicking over licensing etc), but to say "what it fails to mention is this;" and also selling it... let's not get too idealistic (I mean it's only a socialist <cough splutter> govt after all ;) ), but rather talk in their terms which is:
1) Money, and 2) Money (Oh, and if it works, it's a bonus) lol
The TCO would plummet amazingly; licensing costs are huge, support will stay the same. It's just not true that *nix people get more money than MCSE's etc (I'm currently 'surveying the job market' and typically people are asking for NT, M$ 2K AND UNIX/Linux experience for an equivalent wage to mine). Hardware, these days, is possibly the cheapest part of the TCO, so overall the TCO WILL go down.
Also, I can site an example where a major proprietary application caused one hell of a problem when the software company went belly up and didn't release source code... (eventually they did, for megabuck$!)
My two pence.... Ricardo
"There are several codes, and I know several of them." -Mr. Precise.