Justification for mailscanner.

[David Parter]

> Anyway, the question was put to me today - how can you justify wanting
> to spend valuable man hours building and configuring our own system
> based on open source, when we've already budgeted enough money to cover
> a commercial solution?
>
> While the simple answers are the ones that make sense to us
> technological people
>
> 1> open source is good.
> 2> personal satisfaction of putting your own system together
> 3> It's just darn cool & techo-geeky.
>
> Unfortunatley, those answers arent going to satisfy the higher ups.
>
> Anyone seen any good articles, or have any comment that may help me put
> together a good answer to this?

how about:

    The amount of time we will have to spend learning and maintaining
    the "commercial" system is very close to the amount of time we would
    spend putting it together ourselves, with the added bonus that it
    will more closely meet our needs, and we can be more flexible and
    responsive to changing conditions and requirements.

    --david