In the past i've been successful in evangalizing free software because i've been in small companies where a voice could be heard and reasoned argument pondered. Alas, i'm now in a big company and keep running into brick walls.
i've put together a set of scripts for watching HA systems (Veritas First Watch) for anomolies and reporting it's findings. Every time i bring up freeing it (to let other groups help improve/port it, to expose it to wider use (stress testing), or just to improve the ability to recruit people ('hey, look at us, we work on free software')) i run into blank stares and replies like 'Well, I really don't know who we'd even talk to about doing that.' . . . There has to be a way, I just can't find it.
i'm also working on a ticketing/to-do system. It's in production use here, but could really stand having other groups pick it up and tweak, abuse, and play with it.
If anyone has ideas about how to break through the
organizational stasis field, I'd love to hear them.
All of the above are done with MySQL and Perl and provide an HTML interface for the user, just in case anyone cares.