Slashdot Mirror
A Case for Linux in the Corporation
_UnderTow_ writes: "Saw this over at Anandtech. It's a pretty descriptive account of a reasonably large corporation (7000+ employees) transitioning their network infrastructure over to Red Hat Linux. Has details of the company's initial move to NT, and their eventual move to Linux as the cost of licensing gets out of control."
These days, Linux is hardly "just an OS." By 1997, Free Software
Foundation was calling it the most widely distributed operating
system in the United States. And Linux's reach is global; the
foundation claims that it appears in 1,700 computers worldwide, in
seventeen languages and fifty-one countries. The publisher of The
Linux Future says that every day "Linux is currently run by more
than 150 million users."
Linuxization has just begun. With Linux hardcovers in the
million-seller range, plenty more are on the horizon; in early 1997,
Entertainment Weekly magazine reported that "HarperBusiness will
publish four more hardcover books in the next five years, and Andrews
& McMeel hopes to roll out calendars and softcover collections of
systems for the next seven." Meanwhile, across the planet, Linux
cartoons are appearing on calendars, coffee mugs, cards, clothes and
scads of other products.
Perhaps most significantly in the long run, Linux has become a
mass-marketed attitude a public way of coping. While we encounter
the tightening vise of corporatization. The Linux phenomenon is part
of a process making people more accustomed to a stance of ironic
passivity.
To say that the proliferation of Linux lacks social importance or
impact is to claim that mass culture doesn't matter much -- that it
doesn't affect how we perceive or act on our perceptions -- that it
doesn't influence how we talk and think and live. In fact, how we use
words is a marker and pointer for our outlooks. As George Orwell
observed, everyday language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our
thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
Certainly no advertising exec can afford to underrate the consequences
of words, images and marketed attitudes. The ad industry deals in hard
numbers and empirical results. Billions of dollars get spent every
season in the USA on the well-tested assumption that what keeps
flashing before our eyes and ears has major effects on what we
buy. And buy into.
Mega-marketing requires, more than ever, a capital-intensive blitz. To
saturate the grassroots, mass-mediated "popular culture" needs a nod
from a big-money suite somewhere. In the nationwide amphitheater,
would-be creators are to remain in their seats unless summoned to the
stage bysomeone with appreciable monetary clout. The audience does not
create. The audience consumes.
As Thomas Frank puts it: "No longer can any serious executive regard
TV, movies, magazines, and radio as simple 'entertainment,' as
frivolous leisure-time fun: writing, music, and art are no longer
conceivable as free expressions arising from the daily experience of a
people. These are the economic dynamos of the new age, the
economically crucial tools by which the public is informed of the
latest offerings, enchanted by packaged bliss, instructed in the
arcane pleasures of the new, taught to be good citizens, and brought
warmly into the consuming fold."
a rambling discourse with little or no point, the term WANNABE KARMA WHORE comes to mind
Unless the author steps up and provides proof of this mystical magical worse-case-scenario for NT/Best-case-scenerio for Linux company I doubt anyone except blind linvocates are going to believe this crap?
Seperate file and printer server? Yea right.
Seperate "internet mail" server? We about 24,000 accounts on a single PII-450 with 256 Mb RAM under NT4 running IMail. If it were Exchange you'd think he would have mentioned that.
In fact, you would think this guy would mention ANY solid named products and provide some real information instead of this fairy tale dream of how nothing MS works and everything crashes daily (unlike the experiences at our 20,000 seat corporation).
ANYONE believing this story will also believe in Santa Claus...
The terms "opensource" and "Linux" are nothing but buzzwords created by the jews to promote free-software, when in fact they are without a doubt profiting highly from this so-called "free" software.