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Ernie Ball - Model For Open-Source Transition?
fr0z writes "
Ernie Ball is a company that makes guitar strings. After being raided by the BSA in 2000 without warning and fined $100,000 for a few unlicensed copies of software, CEO Sterling Ball vowed not to give another cent to Microsoft and within 6 months, according to CNET News, had the whole company switched to Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and other free software."
Did you actually read the whole article? His version of the facts is that the BSA complained (among other things, maybe) about unused software that had not been properly deleted from some hard drives when after moving a PC from a department to another. In total, he had something like 8 percent of non-licensed software. And anyway, he said that his main problem was not the about paying for the software, but in the way the BSA raided his company.
Well you could use Accpac for example. They've got full Linux support. In my last job I migrated a client's smallish business from a pure Windows shop to pure Linux (they ran Accpac on Win before moving to Accpac on Linux). Its honestly getting to the point where you can do it unless you have specific software requirements. With Evolution, StarOffice and the other drop in replacements for MS software retraining is relatively minimal. My boss was ultimately annoyed though because we lost a fair bit of revenue from the client which used to come from the Windows desktop support.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
"[...]I can chose between Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw for vector graphics. Combustion, Avid, Premiere, After Effects, etc. It's all good and fine that I can write a letter, do my taxes and the like on a *nix machine, but I need to actually work now and then and the applications *still* aren't there."
just from my perspective working in a viusalFX studio...all the real technical apps. are moving over to Linux. Check out CinePaint, it is a much better "paint" type program photoshop supporting high bit depths etc. Shake, Maya, XSI they all run on Linux (better on linux infact). While I do agree with you somewhat i think alot of the more common desktop design apps are going to be taken care of ala WINE. it seems that Linux is really starting to creep into the design/FX community pretty quickly.
God is real, unless declared integer.
Yeah, no kidding.
At my last job, I did corporate information security for several years for a large ISP.
We had specific policy regarding everything to do with software and just about everyone infringed at some point.
For example, Playing games at work == termination. At any given time, I could dump an interface on a firewall at any of our offices and see Quake3 or Counter-strike games being played. The people who 'could not be behind the proxy or nat due to their job function' would often try and set up game servers.
This sort of thing seems to be rampant in technical businesses. A large percentage of technical types feel that they are smart, the exception, or somehow immune to company policy. Combine this with a slacker attitude and you have some problems. What they don't understand, there is a whole world of people playing catchup to the American technical market. Soon enough, they'll have all our jobs. My last position was eliminated when they announced 3000 of our call center employees and three offices were shutting down due to their spiffy new contract with a support company in India.
Anyway, back to the software licence issues. For organizations like the BSA, any sizable office is an easy target, as unless the IT group comes across as 'network nazis', software policy will be ignored by most.
I once worked at a smaller firm who would make employees pay out of pocket for any licence infractions they caused. One guy got stuck with the option of finding a new job or pay for the company's costs surrounding an unlicenced suite of Adobe products. I think it cost him around $3k. He paid it, then got canned a few months later for going on a week-long coke binge. He forgot to schedule some vacation time for it.
RTFA. This is a new interview with Sterling Ball, published yesterday. It's nice to see a status report, including the fact that the company is ditching its SCO systems because of the lawsuit.
Yah, until you VPN into work and get nailed from some dumb salesperson's laptop who just got back into town...
RTFA. They didn't pirate software. They (apparently) didn't even use the violating software instances. It was older machines given to new people without properly wiping the harddrive. That's the problem with many software licensing systems, you can suddenly be in violation without knowing it. Perhaps these problems would go away if we all switched to a software ownership model, like just about all other products people buy, instead of a licensing model.
Sorry, but it's (Word or Excel 97/2000/XP incompatibilities) a daily event here, in a major consulting engineering company that works with your big-league manucturers and oil companies. PowerPoint isn't a big deal but Word and Excel (and Access and Project) are real problems. We receive and produce hundreds of documents a week using the Microsoft office suite and every day at least one produced by one version isn't readable in another version. Hell, I've used OpenOffice to get access to Word and Excel XP documents that Word or Excel 2000 couldn't open. I've done the same thing to cross-export Word97 docs to WordXP. And a lot of the time I use the open source PDFWriter to create a PDF from OOWrite so that everyone in the office can read it. As far as I'm concerned that's wasted time when I could be improving/expanding the IT infrastructure. Microsoft just doesn't play fair cricket and I'm tired of it. I just wish the IT chief (my boss) would get her head out of the sand.
Probably not as bad you think. This is a fairly large site with excellent penetration into the tech community. It's also read predominently by people who use Windows - despite the open source slant. I don't have access to the site logs, but I know I have heard CmdrTaco tell that a good majority of the page views here are on Windows boxes. Strange as it sounds, this is probably one of the best places Microsoft to advertise and reach a critical target market - the people that are the backbone of IT. Although I do have to admit the first time I saw a MS ad here I took a screen shot for posterity. Before you flame me, I'm not defending MS, I'm just saying that their ads here make sense.
"He could get the same benefits from a Windows-based thin-client network*."
Maybe citrix but not terminal server. I know lots of sysadmins that have tried terminal server and they all abandoned it eventually. One IT manager told me "I am in terminal server a good part of my day and when I get off I am so happy". Terminal servers can't really support more then ten or so clients at a time and the client software plays weird tricks with modal windows and dialog boxes.
"Side note: he'd still be dealing with MS, which I understand is his prime motivation."
It seems like it was his primary motivation.
"For example, if there is a server failure - hardware or software - everyone (or whoever is running terminal sessions from that box) is down."
These days almost everybody is on a LAN. If the fileserver or the database server is down then everybody grinds to a halt anyway. You don't incur any additional risk by putting them on thin clients. It's also easy enough to have load balancing and failover set for the servers.
"For example, a minor mistake in admining that server will reverberate throughout the entire office. "
See above. If the DBA has to bring down the database server then everybody has to stop unless of course there is failover.
"'For example, maintenance cannot easily be done incrementally throughout the day, but rather, must now be done off hours lest it affect the entire office."
Most people I know have a development server. They do all the development server and then roll out the changes to the production machine. Depending on your application you can usually do this live with Unix. In Unix there are no file lock problems and you also have some very powerfull tools like rsync/rdist that allow you to roll out changes with ease. Just to give you an example I once did a make world, make kernel on a freebsd machine while people were logged in and using it. That night I brought the machine down to single user and did an install world and install kernel and brought the machine back up. The make world took a long time but it did not stop the users, the install world took about five minutes so it was not a big deal.
"There are good and bad sides to thin-client computing. He gave only the good ones. Just an FYI."
Unix was designed from the ground up to be a thin client environment while thin client computing is a kludge on top of windows. You really can't compare the two because they are vastly different.
War is necrophilia.