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Open Source Software in a Windows Environment?
brennan73 asks: "Like many people, I work in a Windows NT/2000 shop that has absolutely resisted bringing *nixes into our environment. Everyone has their reasons - my boss has resisted because it would be more difficult and expensive to find a replacement admin if I leave, since said replacement would need to be able to administer both Windows and *nix boxes, which I can understand. But I'm still curious...has anyone out there replaced major pieces of Microsoft software with open source equivalents in a medium-to-large business environment, while still running on the Windows platform?"
"Like many people in such shops, I've just about had it with IIS's security problems. I'm also highly unimpressed with Microsoft's new licensing schemes. In other words, between security and money concerns, I can see good reasons for businesses to look for alternatives to Microsoft's standard offerings, for apps and utilities if OSes are ruled out by management.
So, I'm thinking of replacing IIS and Office with Apache and StarOffice for Windows, and I'm open to other examples on both servers and the desktop. Why did you switch? How painful was it for both you and the users? Any experiences that anyone could relate, even failed experiments, would be great."
Staroffice and open office (witch nearly is the same thing) works very badly in general. Works different on different machines, crashes, messes up the desktop and so on. The other open source packages are quite much in the same state really.
If you do manage to switch office you face all the interchangable problems. The open source office packages often says they can read office-documents but my experience is that they rarly read them correctly.
So, there are not any serious alternative I'm afraid.
Why does this issue keep coming up? There was an article not too long ago about this very topic. It spoke in general terms and was pretty much un-believeable.
Mod me down as flamebait/troll or whatever the crack smokers choose this morning, but please!!! This topic has been beat to death.
I predict that people will say that they have snuck in *Nix boxes to be Samba servers without official permission. DNS servers anyone? Probably some "secret" ones at some facilities... OpenBSD as firewalls in offices?
No big surprises, move along people, nothing to see here.
Don't bother - these fools will be out of business before they convert their progs. What is the business case that says the extra training, config, programming, support, etc.. make this effort worth it? I think if you had an accountant and not a sysadmin making business decisions, you wouldnt be wasting your money. I would have fired you months ago for lack of business sense.