Part of my job involves managing our IT systems, which usually means tearing my hair out over Windows and proprietary licenses. I'd love to migrate the organisation over to Linux with KDE, Kolab and the full works. But just as circumstances can make it difficult for right-minded people to advocate public transport, so they can compel a huge free software advocate to advocate the status quo.

I was trying to explain this to some friends in the pub last night. You see, the time and money spent on the insanely complicated licensing surrounding proprietary software, the cost of upgrading machines to meet its performance demands, and the hassle of viruses & spyware in a small business environment add up. At a guess I'd say it would work out much cheaper in the long run to move over to free software. But there are two big problems standing in my way:

• So far as I can tell, no company exists to provide the kind of support we currently get. Basically I manage all things IT but an external company provides the day-to-day support for staff (by phone or on site), they look after the server (phone and on site), and they provide us with good quotations and lots of assistance for purchasing decisions. It's far more than any Linux company I can find seems to provide. Maybe I'm just missing them? I could run some free software systems myself - I have the expertise - but if I moved on or had to take time off being ill, I'd be leaving everyone high and dry. I've set-up an in-house wiki for government policy work and a little php-driven database to keep track of licensing (because Access is just so awful) only because I know I can quickly dump that data out into something they can maintain later on.
• There are a lot of very busy people in the organisation. Even a day or two spent learning a new system would be time misspent in their eyes, so I'd need a very compelling reason indeed to make them learn, even over time, new applications and then a whole new desktop environment. Most people use Firefox, and I recommend Inkscape, PDFCreator and other applications like that if they can make do, rather than shelling out on proprietary licenses. But training the whole staff, and then assisting them as they get used to the quirks of working with OpenOffice when everyone else has Microsoft Office, The GIMP when they're used to Photoshop, etc. would be a significant undertaking.

So I'm in a position where it would actually be irresponsible of me to advocate the most ethical and (potentially) cost effective course of action. Sigh.