will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

[Tony Hammitt]

One thing that companies should do if they are afraid of M$'s license police
is to repartition their hard drives and install Linux.  When the M$ weenies
come around, boot to Linux and tell them to f*ck off.  Then boot back if you
want to.  They have no right to examine your hard drive's contents, just
outward appearances of the system.

<soap box warning!!>

In a completely different case, we're actively promoting as much Free software
as we can here.  (Pardon me while I strain my shoulder patting myself on the
back).  We're converting from a proprietary pseudo-database to MySQL (or
possibly PostgreSQL in the future) for our clients.  We'll be porting our
code to Linux from SCO unixware soon.  We expect to make an extra $1000 per
sale just in license fee savings.

When given the simple business case of 'we save money' and 'we will have more
usable systems' quite a few businesses will start to switch to Open Source.
We're also using the traditional 'we can fix things ourselves' reason, too.

When I got here, they didn't do any Open source related things.  It's been
6 months and now we're actively rolling out Free software to our clients.
(and I got promoted to development team lead and software architect)

So, businesses can get a clue.  Sure, it helps that this is a small business
and we can move faster than most.  But all businesses can benefit from going
with OSS/FS.

Gotta go, off to recommend Samba over NT for file services...

Later,

	Tony

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> 
> 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,
>