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Wal-Mart, Moore's Law and Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the deep-thoughts dept.

J.E. Kazor writes: "In MIT's 'Technology Review' magazine, Michael Schrage writes about Wal-Mart, Moore's Law, and Open Source. Perhaps instead of spending all of our energy bashing bashing the 800-pound gorilla, Microsoft, we should align the support of a 900-pound gorilla, such as Wal-Mart. Such a symbol of cost conscious efficiency should embrace the benefits of Open Source."

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft the lesser of those two evils by the_radix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, instead of tackling what many people consider a monopoly, albeit a harmless (in the ecological sense) one, one should ally him- or herself with a company that the majority of liberals in this country believe is both an ecological destroyer and a monopoly on a much worse scale?

    Microsoft is software, with a dash of hardware, but they are still a high-tech company. Wal-Mart is a retailer that drives many other small local retailers out of business. Considering how easy it is to get high-tech things on the market through the use of the internet, versus the difficulty of being a local merchant, I would call Microsoft the lesser of two monopolies. If Microsoft suddenly used its power to lower all its prices so that other non-free (beer) software companies couldn't compete and went out of business, would you be happier?

    Yeah, I chose Microsoft over Wal-Mart. So mod me.

    --
    This .sig is either false or a paradox.
    1. Re:Microsoft the lesser of those two evils by Nelson · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I think it remains to be seen if Walmart is a monopoly or not. I'd be willing to bet that in a large number of areas where Walmart has a presence in the western US and the midwestern US they are the only source for a large number of products.



      They aren't a pure monopoly, but neither is MS, nor was US Steel, or most other monopolies. They are a defacto monopoly in many cases though, just like MS is. The typical Joe 6pack goes and buys a computer, he buys an MS product or a set of them, whether he knows it or not. If you live in rural Kansas or Nebraska or Texas and you need to go buy something, a large percentage of the time it's going to be from walmart, not becuase of cost but because it's the nearest store you know will have the item you wish to buy.


      I think the original message hit it on the head with Walmart. If you look at their managment, it's mostly white men, to a startling degree. There have been inqueries and lawsuits around racism and sexism at Walmart. They have a history of union busting, not that I think unions benefit the consumer a whole lot but it's disheartening the know that a corporation has chosen to close a store (a huge part of a local economy) because its employees' political views and associations they may have. And if you take the defacto monopoly business to heart and then realize that they are the only source for music, books, and even medications in some places and then look at what they have chosen to sell and not sell (I'm speaking directly about medication and contraception here, morning after pills, etc.) we're talking about a company that not only has a huge impact on the economy but on the lives of people and how they live them in a lot of places. This is not a company you wish to partner with, I think they make MS look like saints.


      Personally, I think the matter of opensource allies is kind of missing the point. We need to keep doing what we're doing. It's not a matter of IBM, Sun, Walmart or E-Trade agreeing to use free software that makes it better or takes it to the next level, those are signs that what's happening is the right thing. This is a community lead effort and if we want things to be better then become part of the community, help out, write code, use it. Looking for allies is passive. If walmart starts using linux, it won't affect or impact any of us any time soon (unless they employ Linus and bully him or something) It might give it more legitimacy but it already has legitimacy and you further legitimize it by using it and working on it. If we work on it and make it better then they will use it becuase it's the best thing to use, that's what's happening elsewhere and that's what undoes the MS monopoly.

  2. Given Walmart's current Point of Sale OS... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't see them converting any time soon. As a former employee of a very large company which provided Walmart all of its Point of Sale equipment, I can tell you that Walmart runs all of its Point of Sale devices on an OS called 4690, which has a shell and set of APIs that look a whole hell of a lot like DOS, while having some nicer things in the kernel like multithreading. This OS has been specifically tweaked and enhanced over the years particularly for these guys, and I can tell you that they aren't going to abandon this OS that has been essentially created for them and for a particular purpose; it is absolutely rock-solid for what it does, granted that that is slim. But I am agreed that Linux would be a great alternative for an emerging Walmart. Many large companies want to run cash registers on wimpy (486 or worse) boxes, which Windows doesn't do so well.

  3. Wal-Mart sells "Naked PC"'s by mikethegeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wal-Mart is selling PCs without OS's

    I submitted this as an article to ./ 2 weeks ago. Rejected. This is a major example of how Wal-Mart could hurt MS.

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    === The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
  4. Re:Wal-Mart and Open Source? Never... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You obviously do not work at corporate in arkansas. They already are experimenting with Linux at corporate. If tests go well (most likely they will), they will start rolling out Linux into stores in about 12-24 months.

    My understanding is that they are always seeking ways of lowering cost and have realized that staying with an M$ based system would not lower it anymore (high price on OS,sysad, virus protection, software cost, && development productivity ). This is a company that is ALWAYS trying to lower the overall cost / transaction. While they have spent BILLIONS of $ on hardware and software, they have already paid for it. By moving to Linux, they are able to re-use the same hardware. The companies who did not provide Linux based apps to Wal-Mart when they asked once (& only once) will simply not be part of the plan. Apparently, they have in extreme measures of security and most folks do not find out until they are rolling out the products into stores.

    As to training, I would think that creating a similar interface for the users would allieviate all that. However, the turn-over rate of employees means that wal-mart is always training employees anyways, so that make that argument simple FUD.

  5. The facts from a former corporate programmer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm posting this anonymously because, well the NDA's are pretty vague as to what I can really say and what I can't....

    1. Wal-Mart *DOES* use Opensource

    A: About 2 1/2 years ago they started looking at Redhat, about 6 mos later (and I quote the memo that went out, given that's been 2 years ago, but I still remember it) "We will be consolidating our existing Unix Platmforms on Linux", yup, the ISP (In store processors) were to move to Redhat on Quad Dell box (they are btw Dell's largest single customer). I have no idea what the current progress of this is, but given Kevin Turner's (the CIO) statment to "Make Open platforms really Open" I doubt they would turn back on that commitment.

    B: Perl. Perl is an offically approved Language to develop on inhouse although we had quite a bit of resistance from certain in-house teams at first.

    2. Wal-Mart "going opensource" (as one poster put it) would have little effect on Sun or Oracle. This is because neither are approved vendors. Sun pissed Wally World off years ago and Oracle is deemed to be just too damned expensive (as was MS SQL Server, Informix and DB2 where the only approved databases).

    You will likely NEVER see contributions back to the community from Wally World, they simply don't allow that kind of feedback. Remember your talking about the Worlds largest company, that despite the 1700+ Programmers they have in-house, don't even allow regular Internet access from Corporate (certain sites only and no download access regardless).

    The author of the article should have done a bit more research on the topic before writing the story. A quick email to president@wal-mart.com would probally get you a better response.

    BTW: also remember your talking about a company that does NOT patent it's internal software like many other companies, they view it entirely as trade secret instead (just ask Amazon.com :-) )