FT on Europe's Open Source Option

Anonymous Coward writes "The Financial Times offers a very interesting read about Linux, its possibilities for business, and its threat to Microsoft. Also a second article about "Europe's open-source option"."

Comments

Re:Problem with the article:

[frleong]

The general concern of large corporations is more or less like this: what if I am an employee of a large corporation and the IT staff used GPL libraries to develop in-house apps? Can I request the source code since I got the binaries? But wouldn't this cause havoc with the internal IT policies, as usually the source code can only be revealed on a need-to-know basis?

Re:Free beer!

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah. So much for Stallmans vision of free software being wanted because you could control it and share it with friends. That sort of stuff is important only to a small fraction of the worlds people clearly.

These things are interesting to read, and overall I thought the article was pretty accurate, but it makes it feel very dry doesn't it? All the graphs, figures, and relentlessly the focus on cost, the bottom line. Other benefits like increased flexibility and lack of lockin weren't mentioned. Neither was the fact that the vast majority of people who work on Linux the OS as a whole are not employed by big tech companies.

It's also rather depressing how much the involvement of IBM means to people. IBM has done a hell of a lot of good work, but the "we didn't pay any attention 'till IBM did" line indicates supreme daftness to me - Linux hasn't changed that much. I guess it's just a case of sheeple following whoever is biggest.

An interesting point that gets overlooked

[icantblvitsnotbutter]

Keeping the big companies in line this time round - other than an increased mutual respect for Microsoft - is a licensing system that gives them little incentive to try to commandeer Linux for their own purposes. Developed by Stallman, the so-called general public licence attached to Linux forces anyone who modifies the system to make the modification freely available to others. "The licence doesn't guarantee there won't be fragmentation but it makes it very difficult to support a business model" if a company wants to develop a proprietary Linux, says Mr Frye at IBM.

That's a part of the model that I don't often see pointed out. It's pretty apparent, when you think about it, but not obvious. Sure, companies can add distinguishing (and proprietary) applications, but the core stays relatively stable.

Not only do others benefit from what is added, they benefit from what isn't added.

Re:Free beer!

[christophersaul]

IBM's involvement means a great deal. If you're an IT manager following IT trends, you'll have read about Linux in the trade press and shrugged your shoulders with vague interest. When the IBM sales guy turns up to tell you his AIX box can run Linux, or the Sun guy is talking about Linux boxes running your webservers, then you start to take more notice.

Before, the evangelists were totally irrelevant and totally without credibility - in terms of who an IT Manager would take advice from.

Fall of the Corporate Empire?

[Modern Hamlet]

"Although Linux has been slower to catch on in Europe, the drive to end dependence on the US for technology is a common but seldom admitted justification in every country exploring the technology."

Perhaps I'm taking the comparison a little too far, but the similarities between the US and the Roman Empire at its height (before it imploded) have been jumping out at me even more lately. Bush's unilateralism, the RIAA's panic response to P2P, and yes, even Microsoft's attempts to hold off Linux strike me as desperate actions of a dominant power failing to keep up with the changing times and thus losing its grip on power.

If India, China, and the EU eventually embrace open source as the new paradigm, that will be just one more crack in the wall.

-mh

High cost of Unix

[kahei]

I still think that the most striking feature of this market is not so much the spread of Linux now -- after all, it offers obvious benefits -- as the fact that people are finally *stopping* spending huge amounts of money on Unix (read Sun) hardware.

I've occasionally had to do with projects where costs were reduced to 1/8 or so (yes, about what the article says) by replacing Sun with NT hardware. With hardware savings like that, it doesn't matter if you have a whole entire backup system with it's own set of staff.

What the popularity of Linux really means in money terms is that sites that kept spending millions a year on Sun, because of internal opposition to Microsoft, now have a politically correct way to buy cheap Intel hardware.

This is good. It's just a pity so many sites upgraded to ma$$ive Sun-hardware j2ee systems during the boom... it'll take forever to get rid of 'em all!

UK and Microsoft

[Mr_Silver]

The UK, one of the slowest countries to adopt open-source - partly because of close ties with Microsoft - last year published a paper offering guidance to government departments considering switching to open-source software.

Whilst this sounds very nice, I feel that I should bring everyone back into the cold harsh reality by pointing about that the UK has a long long way to go before it becomes more open source savvy.

For example, the NHS, possibly the most underfunded thing we have, just coughed up £60 million for Microsoft Licencing.

Money well spent? You decide.

Glossed over

[SgtChaireBourne]

The article also glossed over the introduction of Richard Stallman, skipping his contributions to computer science, culture and society. In addition to his contributions with Emacs and other software, his drafting the GNU General Public License (GPL), he is the recipient of the Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being and the recipient of a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (aka a "genius grant.") Calling him just an "American programmer" would be like calling Steve Jobs an "American interested in computers".

Stallman doesn't wear a tie. Get over it already.

However, more importantly, The Financial Times and many others seem to intentionally obfuscate or misinform their readers regarding the Freedom part of the GPL. Peddling misinformation does a heavy disservice to any that might be trying to make an informed decision regarding their IT strategies.