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: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.

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!