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Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1
geekinexile writes "Bloomberg is running this Microsoft vs. Linux article as a top story on the Bloomberg system. Not so notable for what it says about Linux, but rather for the fact that the financial community is starting to actually get open source."
this story is not only on Bloomberg's website. It is on the Bloomberg system as one of the top stories when you do news research on Microsoft.
From the quote, it sounds like when they say "Unix", they are talking about the proprietary Unixes. (Is that the correct plural?) That's probably a true enough statement; Windows really is cheaper, as is the commodity x86 hardware. (Of course, this is ignoring the elusive "TCO" argument, which is smoke and mirrors to the point that you can prove any price differential you want.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Let's see 2002 - 40 = 1962.
Wow, All this time I thought Multics was in the late 60's and the first Unix came in November of 71.
Guess journalism and math don't mix.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Like my company was. However that being said, what got me to finally breakdown and switch to Linux/Solaris wasn't the Nonexistent Security, Monopoly, the consistant Patches, the piss poor support or even the high cost. It was when trying to get my Exchange Server back up after it crashed for no apparent reason a book I was reading for help in running Exchange said:
"It is often preferable to simply backup you Exchange Server Data and reinstall, instead of trying to find the one hidden setting that is causing the error in your configuration."
That almost made me fall over in my chair.
From that day on I decided on a course for MS freedom. We now run Apache/Tomcat for our JSP server, MySQL for our DB Backend (until migration to Oracle is complete), and QMail/Horde/IMP for mail. It took a little time but saved around $6000 in software licensing costs and $5000 in new hardware that would have needed to be purchased.
So in the end I could deal with all the MS shit until the UI for managing Exchange got so bad it no longer became worth it to run MS on the server side. It was the best IT decision I've made (IMHO).
Check out http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Gandhi
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Microsoft makes about 60% of its revenue from sales outside the USA. So international markets are extremely important to them, especially when they need "new" markets because they already own 95% of the existing markets.
cpeterso
"China" doesn't have a long history of ignoring IP right, the citizen have a long history of ignoring IP rights. Piracy in China is still illegal, and the citizen know that very well, but there are simply too many people.
A few years ago, you could buy pirated software and CDs nearly everywhere. If you go to China now, you'll see that most of those dealers are gone (or at least hidden in dark, small places).
Well its seems that pepole in general are starting to open their eyes for the possibilities in opensource. Although, like some of you have already mentioned, its not necessarily the superiority of Open Source software as much aas it is prices for MS products that is turning the tide.
In Denmark there are trial runs for all the regional councils to change all their public services onto open source machines, completely dropping MS products. Although there are soem technicalities about reliability, the millions of $ that are to be saved has made almost every politican there a supporter of the open source environment.
-.sig sauer-