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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...
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.
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.
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.