Grandboss candidates

One of the questions I've been trying to ask is their views on two areas:

1: How do you balance in-house applications versus off-the-shelf applications?
2: How do see the third category, open-source?

Candidate 1: He spent too much time talking about managment methodologies. Plus, other people were leading the questioning so I didn't get a word in edgewise. Plus, he seemed to be more interested in the not-yet-open great-grand-boss position. Erm.

Candidate 2: He had a dim view of anything that looked to internal resources for support. Anything developed in-house had to have very solid reasons for being developed in-house, and a firm committment for long-term maintenance of the project. Open-Source was in the same boat, it MUST have very clear ways for long term support. This candidate would not look on pure open-source projects like OpenCMS with favor. Where I suspect something like RedHat and Novell, which provide an OSS solution but solid support behind it, could be more palatable. But sole-developed solutions, such as Microsoft, would still be preferrable over the community-developed solutions on principle.

Candidate 3: He had an open mind. To paraphrase, "I like to go best-of-breed wherever possible, but the budget doesn't always allow that." From this NetWare administrator's point of view, those are welcome words. Of the three, I think we could talk this one into going the Open Enterprise Server route for the next round of file-server upgrades. The other two I suspect would be more in the, "dump it, we're going to Microsoft," camp.

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