Question

When trying to link some well established tools to my company’s active directory, I hit a roadblock. I was told that:

‘Sorry, I cannot trust our domain admin password to [F/OSS] software…’.

This question deals specifically with how to convince IT that F/OSS software isn’t (automatically) less trustworthy than any other software just because it’s free/oss.

I’m doing fine with adopting OSS software (I’m a linux ninja at heart) so to put it another way: How can I promote the acceptance of OSS at my company?

The technical issue of tying into AD without an admin account is for another post.

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EDIT:

I got some clarification on these issues. This really has little to do with the active directory and all to do with trust of F/OSS in general. So I think my original bolded questions are still valid, just ignore the part about the ‘admin password’.

Answer 1

Any IT person worth their salt will be well aware of the benefits of open source software.

The answer that has been given sounds to me like a palm off answer, some possibilities of why they don’t want to implement it could be:

• Possible lack of enterprise level support for that specific software open source software
• Not wanting non-IT department employees to be modifying the active directory (you)
• The software you have found doesn’t have the industry recognition that other similar products have
• There is no perceived benefit for the IT department for the work it would require them to do (both in the initial setup and ongoing maintenance)