will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

A lot of places where Linux "is not used, not allowed" actually have a few
Linux boxen running somewhere, often in the Web lab, sometimes as firewall
servers or other special apps.  Look at the statistics reported in places
like Sysadmin magazine (www.sysadminmag.com) and you'll see a lot of web
servers running Apache.

As companies are forced to choose Windows 2000 and Windows XP for new
servers, more and more are going to be looking for alternatives, although I
don't see any chance that whole networks will be converted to Linux.  More
likely it will be a special project where the license fees for MS servers
are an issue.

Also, as Microsoft "cracks down" on license enforcement, the old practice of
"oops!" not reporting licenses in use on non-production servers will add
more pressure to this.

When the issue of MS kiting users off to some commercial site with "Smart
Tags" hits the fan there are going to be some companies that have had
enough, and realize that they can hire a decent IT department to maintain a
Linux network for what they're paying Microsoft in license fees.

More and more end users who owe their PC ownership to a acquaintance in the
industry, and most likely have a disk full of "shared" MS applications will
begin to use Linux instead.

As Simon Travaglia pointed out last month in The Register
 http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/19898.html ), this is not an
unmixed blessing, but it's happening.

I think Linux will probably always be a sort of fringe OS, mostly in the
hands of Power Users, Special Projects, and the fringe/hobby/family/friend
crowd, but I think it will make inroads on the Corporate scene eventually.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip, Anil" <aphili01 at sprintspectrum.com>
To: <kclug at kclug.org>
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 12:00 PM
Subject: will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

> Hi,
> Just a discussion ;), but have you been noticing (like I have) how
reluctant
> corporations are to use open source - even though they are willing to buy
> any crap software at any price as long as it is "owned" by a company so
that
> someone is liable.
> For example at my workplace, linux is not used, not allowed. In my earlier
> workplace, same story (we're talking the biggest phone companies in the
> country).
> Will this sideline open source to academia and maybe kill it off
eventually?
> thanks,