Slashdot Mirror
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...
From the article from Australian IT:
OK, sounds reasonable. However, when asked about this, M$ came up with (also from the Australian IT article):
This doesn't seem to tally. Perhaps he meant the middle finger on each hand?
Telstra have been MS junkies a long way back, Bill G made a point of wowing the Australian Government with presentations to Cabinet in the early days of the commercial net (1996/7 - early for MS) and with that push went the Govt owned corporates, of which Telstra is one.
Telstra nearly lost their commercial ISP business due to faillings in Win NT's stability in those days.
They also got extremely upset with MS publishing criticism of their Broadband strategy earlier this year (they'd thought they were buddies)
At a guess though I'd say Telstra are using this bit of smoke to help their negotiations with MS, negotiations on a number of fronts.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
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.
Sounds like a bargaining chip deal to me, and yes, I am quite cynical. The company did recently choose a Sun Java solution over MS and IBM offerings recently though, so maybe they are trying to move away from MS. If they do go with linux, you can safely bet on the solution being provided by Sun as they appear to greatly admire Mr. McNealy.
Without starting a war, I think that in order for linux to be deployed successfully in a corporate envrironment, someone is going to have to build a highly functional, standardized desktop environment. Gnome and KDE are the obvious choices, but what kills linux (for the newcomer) is the overabundance of choice! Abiword, Kword, OpenOffice, StarOffice, Applix (if they are still around). Pick one! Now do that for the multitudes of packages that provide duplicate functionality. This is the only way that someone is going to get Linux in the front of the day to day workers in any corp. Choice is great for geeks, but not for the standard fare business environment. Someone will ship a distro with one shell, one office package, one browser, one mail client, and they will be the company that puts linux over in the workplace.
When linux is loading it says
...
Giving linux a good kick in the arse
Instead of seeing the word LILO it shows
XXXX
Instead of reporting your CPU type and speed in megahertz, you will see
AMD Athlon with 2000 pounds per square inch of biting pressure
The desktop randomly says "Crikey. Look at the size of that one!"
The distro will be released under the GPL, however you must pay heaps of money to a team of rugby league players every week.
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.
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.
Hypocrites. They still do not support linux for their cable - remember that Telstra is Aussie for Telecommunications monopoly. Not only is linux not supported - it is against the usage policy to use anything other than the bigpond login client to connect to the bigpond cable network. Since they only have a wintel client , linux is actually banned.
So they will have, what, 1 year of unprecidented employee productivity before all the popular games are ported to Linux.
AOL doesn't offer Linux service (much less support) to their customers, yet their internal network has thousands of Linux boxes and every day I get AOL job announcements looking for Linux, Perl, and MySQL workers. I don't really expect the "front end" to look like the "back end", though I certainly do not have an AOL account!
Everybody understands that this is the traditional accepted way of asking Microsoft for a discount, right?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
As a StarOffice 6.0 reseller..
:-
,Shwag)
We have
* No access to site licencing
* No OEM product
* No Marketing Tools (Posters, Leaflets, Handouts
We have lost heaps of tenders and quotes because we were just unable to provide site-licences!
Oh yeah, sure, lets just send our business over to Sun so they can take the business that we advertised and marketing for.
Basically, Sun think the product is SO good, it will sell itself.
When I try and get Staroffice into retailers, it pales in comparison to just have a box on the shelf, when their shop is plastered with A1 and A0 Office XP posters that MS gave them.
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.