Exmoron writes "I work at a small reading mash (5,500 students) and am in a site to potentially impress future system system software real wages decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary systems program groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, forum email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an debate that going open source would save the health center money and think through a gradual transition process to open source macos (starting small, with separate like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good skinny online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a culture mash like mine save? Additionally, what other reward are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the instruction mash on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"

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