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Telstra Considers 45,000-Seat Linux Deployment
stressky writes: "Looks like major Aussie telco Telstra are looking at deploying Linux as the new Standard Operating Environment across their 45,000 desktop LAN workstations." An anonymous reader offers evidence that Telstra isn't alone; apparently, many other Australian businesses are considering a similar switch.
And once people start having to use Linux at work, and see that it's a perfectly usable system and a nice desktop, they might start switching over at home.
People are lazy, they know windows, they're not likely to change to something they don't know unless they're forced. But if they've already had some exposure to Linux, they'll be much more willing to try it out at home.
Telstra simply evaluate the alternatives. That's normal business procedure. OK, it's nice they consider Linux instead of just ignoring it, but that doesn't (yet) mean that they'll actually select it.
You can be sure that MS will throw in their full marketing weight on such a business...
Oh well, we can hope...
is like knowing where you've been.
/usr/share/doc/myapp) ....
The problem with the current Linux desktop is that it's almost very hard to 'know',
You never know exactly what cut and paste is.(crtl+insert, drag over , crtl+c{things are sure to break!} anything else).
Or how the printer options are going to come up. {KDE print dialoge, configure lpr dialoge}
What a right click will do.
Where the help is (man, info{ahhh the great info},kde help or
Things are far better than a few years ago..
Some things that might help would be:-
Put some UI, design (aesthetic and technical) principals into the LSB
and have a LSB certification for applications.
Resolve the GTK,QT issues (should hopefully happen over the next year or two)
Ask other people if they could kindly implement there GFX toolkits/widgets using QT or GTK.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The suggestion that Tel$tra might resent Micro$ofts monopolistic rent seeking price practices is so ironic that it is not even ironic (as Baldrick would say).
Tel$tra's business practices make Micro$oft seem a paragon of open access in comparison. Telstra is little more than a revival of the old (and justly reviled) Roman practice of tax farming, and it's massive profits come at the expense of decent information infrastructure and impose a disproportinate economic cost.
Of course there are many Telco's around the world who similarly abuse their monopoly control of the local loop. Governments should wake up and realise that Telecoms constitute startegic infrastucture and that the short term windfalls that might arise from the creation of private monopolies and cartels come at the expense of massive flow on costs to the economy as a whole through communication costs being much higher than they should be.
If we privatised all roads and allowed them to be run by gigantic vertically integrated transport conglomerates with no restrtictions on their prices the result would not be difficult to predict, a starving economy dominated by hugely profiatable transport congomerates. To see what this looks like one has only to go to modern day afghanistan, the ubiquotous "toll gates" are the sign posts of an economy there are no public goods exist and the result is a diminishing of private goods as well.
For deployment in the corporate environment, will the IT department not choose the packages to be installed? The user will be presented with the corporate standard desktop with a word processor, spreadsheet, email program etc. The difference with Linux is that the IT department has a greater choice of which packages to install. Also an open source Linux package is much easier for them to customise to the corporate requirements than a proprietary Windows one would be.
Sensible companies have methods to centralise document storage and management.
Terminals in business are commodities. Paying a premium for all the features in Windows is expensive.
Does every terminal need Digital camera capabilities when you've got 100 terminals in the room?
When every penny counts the case for sticking with windows for the clients grows harder. If you've invested in servers you can probably keep those going while you phase in alternatives.
A feature rich client is an expensive extravagance.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't think the majority of the Linux community are anti-corporate per se, they tend to be anti-corporate-abuse from what I can see. Obviously just about any useful tool can be used for evil as well as good.
The advantage of open source software (including BSD, etc) is that it is apt (or can be made apt) for your purposes as opposed to someone else's, while the advantage of libre software (GPL and other "strong" licenses) is that it's resistant to abuse in certain common ways, albeit sometimes at some cost in flexibility.
Those are the things which make Linux appeal to the rebels out there, and even if one Evil Empire or another adopts it as well, those advantages will still accrue to the Light Side also.
It is a sad fact that customers will often appear as though they will switch. This gives the individual company bargaining power in contract negotiations with the incumbent.
See Nutrasweet in the early 90's and Coke.
What matters in these scenarios is how credible the threat of switching is. Normally, the incumbent has a serious advantage of the rival, eg switching costs, brand reliance, compeititve reaction (between customers).
The real kicker here is that the 'rival' is not a corporation/supplier. As such, it is difficult for MS to work out how much the rival is tendering and hence, how credible the threat by the customer is. MS can estimate the cost of implementing and rolling out Linux at Telstra, but this is just an estimate by a third party and not certain.
Should MS price low? If it does that, other companies can threaten. Should MS price per normal? And risk losing _the_ big Australian client, therebye destroying MS' hard fought network effects.
Maybe these businesses are bringing up the L word so that MS will drop their prices.
Sounds like Telstra is going after some MS licencing discounts. End of story.
I see a plethora of distro's that do only a specific task. SuSE is good at this by providing separate packages for mail servers, database servers and what not. These packages al work just great, but what makes Windows so great on the corporate desktop?? Hardly anything Linux can't do today, or even yesterday. The typical corporate desktop contains the OS, Office and some online reference data like phone directories. Hardly anything more because if it gets more specialized, the IS department takes it out of the pool of standard desktops and treats it like a "workstation" or whatever because of the added complexity even if it's only a single app. What amazes me so much is that not a single distribution builder has come up with a plain vanilla corporate desktop. Openoffice, Evolution, most phone directories can be run using Wine since nothing fancy goes on under the hood, and you're done for 98% of office desktops! Provide a seamlessly integrating distribution for servers alongside with that, so that those hundreds of desktops can connect to it by default and as far as I know you'd be ready to kick some serious ass within your corp. It shouldn't be the corporate IS department's job to assemble a stable distro for this purpose. SuSE, Mandrake and Redhat have shown great skill at building special purpose Linux distributions, they just left this one gap open. Windows has done this for years.. Windows NT Workstation and Server were a great couple, need I mention the different breeds of Win2K? From your laptop all the way up to the biggest iron Intel has to offer. Linux does a great job at competing with the NT-based server products, and it'll be a long while before it gets dummy-proof enough for home users, but with an artificially limited set of applications and tech support staff only a phonecall away I'm sure Linux is already mature enough for the corporate desktop. From there on it's only a small step to the home PC, the same happened with MS-DOS way back then..
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Telstra actually has one of the largest MS Exchange deployments in the world - in fact I believe Microsoft has several case studies out there about the Telstra Exchange deployment. I find it interesting that they are considering Linux workstations when there isn't actually a Linux client for their messaging system.
On the flip side, many of their client applications use quite a thin client (at least according to some of the devs I know that work there) so in the general case it wouldn't be too big a shift to just rewrite the thin clients and leave the servers as they are.
Personally though I go with the "bit of smoke" theory. Telstra has far more corporate weight than Microsoft in Australia and MS would do almost anything to keep their golden egg.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
The article says that the company is considering Linux for the machines "supporting" their 45,000 or whatever desktops. As I read it, this is something very different that deploying Linux on each of them, and probably refers instead to the company's internal servers.
They *do* talk about the company evaluating StarOffice as a replacement suite for their desktops, though, which to me makes it even more clear that they plan to continue to run Windows.