will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

[Allen, Gregory]

I am a Federal Employee and I I'm seeing more and more Linux servers and
even desktops popping up all over the Federal Government.  The Department of
Defense is converting 100,000 of their current desktops to Linux to save in
MS licensing.  NSA has created and actively fielding SeLinux.  Finally IBM
is investing $1 billion in Linux over the next year.  This is what Linux
needs a big corporate player, especially one that is still hostile of the
loss of the desktop themselves.  Finally, at the organization where I work,
we have Linux on mainframe and I personally run 4 Linux servers: SeLinux,
Mandrake 7.1, and 2 different versions of Linux.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Hutchins [mailto:hutchins at opus1.com]
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 12:28 PM
To: Philip, Anil; kclug at kclug.org
Subject: Re: will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

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,