Wall Street Embraces Linux

Brian Stretch was among several who sent in this story about Merrill Lynch switching to Linux, this is interesting because it's actually companywide. Talks about Red Hat, Linux threatening Unix and so on.

Comments

Favorite quote

[johnlenin1]

But there are risks in putting so much behind Linux. For starters, there are legal implications. Does anybody own the intellectual property of the "open-source" software? How exposed are companies to patent violation?

Obviously Lisa DiCarlo really understands the comcepts in the story she just wrote. Yeah.

Two interesting side-effects...

[dpilot]

First, Merrill Lynch praised the portability of Linux applications and their ability to scale across the enterprise, with a swipe at proprietary applications. Maybe they'll wake up for a moment, and realize what their most locked-in platform is.

Second, this seems to be largely a matter of Linux moving into Unix turf. I expect to see some minor disasters happen with this type of migration, and that's a Good Thing. Why, because part of the savings is moving onto dirt cheap PCs from expensive hardware. Part of the expense of that old hardware is the label, but part is genuine quality, too. After someone starts to get a handle on money lost because PCs are too cheap, causing down-time and even some erroneous data, there will be a move to put some quality back in. We will all have a better quality spectrum to buy from, and it will be better labeled and reviewed.

Merrill Lynch was at the VS .Net Launch

[burnsy]

I guess they are playing both sides.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/fe b0 2/02-13revolutionpr.asp

"At Merrill Lynch we've found that .NET is allowing us to get products to market quicker than we have historically. And ultimately this drives the bottom line impact," said Byron Vielehr, chief technology officer, private client technology, at Merrill Lynch.

Large Corporation point-of-view

[neoevans]

I work for one of the largest banks in the world (Top 5) and we almost ditched our entire Windows Server infrastructure in favor of Linux. Why? Not because it wasn't working.

Unlike a lot of MS haters, we know how to use Windows. Strangely enough, when used the way MS intended it works pretty well.

Instead we considered Linux for similar reasons as Merril Lynch. When we asked MS for a deal on licencing our 300+ Windows 2000 Servers the way they did for Windows NT4.0, not only did they say "No" they auditted our current licences and told use we owe them money! They were the ones who sold us the licences in the first place!

So on top of each Windows 2000 Server licence, they want client access licences for EVERY computer (6000+) and a yearly subscription fee for god knows what!

I mean, what's the point of a server if no one can access it? Per-seat licencing for 6000+ workstations?

It wasn't until we weighed it against the cost of redeveloping 120 applications for Linux that we decided to cave. MS knows this. They waited for companies to become dependant on their OS before jacking up the price. What Merril Lynch is doing is not whoop-de-doo! another company went to Linux!, it's truly amazing. For such an enormous organization to revamp on such a huge scale takes cahones.