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InfoWorld on Switching to Linux
brentlaminack writes "The latest Infoworld is running a lengthy piece about
The Real Cost of Switching to Linux, where it makes sense and where it doesn't. As one of their columnists points out, the debate has switched from "if" to "where". One of the big wins for Linux was in the area of remote administration. Specifically noted was ssh. Also of note is the shift in calculating cost from TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as has been calculated in the past, to ROI (Return on Investment) that focuses more on what you can do with the technology to get work done."
Thing that I've noticed is that if a large organization gets into Linux, even if they buy it, it's theirs for the duration and all of the upgrades that they can work into it, instead of requiring either yearly site license fees or massive payouts every so many years for new versions of software to do essentially the same thing. Even paying a consulting company or services company to deploy Debian would make sense in a way, as long as the apt server were the organization's, versus a public server, so that as long as someone is maintaining the package database on the local apt server, they can keep updating the workstations.
Large organizations usually have some form of IS department, so instead of paying them to run around and fix Windows Millennium or XP problems, pay them to keep the network deployed OS current, and fix the bulk of the problems from their desks.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I understand that Linux is the new darling of the tech industry, but why do reviews like this completely ignore operating systems likee FreeBSD (which out performs Linux in several serving tasks, and is in general more mature)? People who write these reviews on TCO and other stats think Linux is the only alternative to Windows servers. It gets annoying after a while.
even if MS's linux myths page was correct about linux having a greater TCO, business types don't care that much about the initial cost. That's why RH can get away with charging 10K for a multiprocessor licence. Businesses will buy it if it will earn them money in the long run. Of course it really helps if there is a low TCO because that will make your ROI go up.
the linux myths page focuses solely on TCO. Someone should set up a high profile windows myths page that focuses on ROI. It'd be funny if it were full of FUD about windows, but better if it were actually truthfull. Get the PHB's out there to tell the IT guy, "i want one of those lunix boxes on my computers"
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
"There were a lot of costs I didn't expect-- hidden migration costs," says Cedars-Sinai's Duncan. During the migration from NT to Linux, his staff insisted that because they had been running RAID disk mirroring and striping on NT they should buy SCSI RAID controllers for the Linux servers. "It was like $1,000 per box extra that I hadn't planned on."
That wasn't a hidden cost. Linux could have easily handled RAID disk mirroring and striping without the special controllers.
This was an example of the IT staff knowing they have a much larger than normal project budget and milking it for all it was worth.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If you're developing on it. If you're using it for regular users who need email and web and word processing, it doesn't matter what the licensing is. Your memo written in ABIWord doesn't have to contain the GPL.
And if you're developing, there are commercial libraries available to you. There are BSD-licensed libraries too. You don't have to use Stallman's libraries, you can get them elsewhere. Hell, IBM even builds compilers, as does Intel. The entire point of GPLed stuff is for it to remain for everyone. If you don't like that, build it yourself, buy it, or find another non-GPL one.
It's not impossible to do this. It just takes brains and research. I'd rather sink my money into that than into a mindless purchase of a product that goes "BOOM!" far too frequently and forces one into paid upgrades.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
IMHO, we should not worry about the managers who still don't "get it". They eat all the FUD MS/SCO/IDC is feeding them. All these managers will eventually realise their mistake when their competition adopting Linux/Open Source tools is able to offer better price for same product/service. When they start losing business, they will really "get it". Seriously, there is a change at hand here and the economics will play its part. only question is 'How soon ?'
getSexySig();
I haven't yet seen a TCO study that includes the risk of a BSA audit in a Windows shop. The TCO for running Windows should include the cost of insurance against the disruption of a BSA audit and the penalties paid for apparently unlicensed software.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Jackass.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Female Prison Rape in NY
After the MSBlaster worm and SoBig virus activity of the last few weeks, you'd think that there'd be a little more than a passing reference on page 3 of the article saying that Linux is "virtually virus-free".
I'll bet that none of these expensive studies ever include the cost of cleaning up after the virus/worm of the week that comes with running Microsoft NT/2000/XP. Having everyone in your company having 2 or 3 days a year when their desktop/laptop/server/whatever is unavailable because of cleanup activity should have a definite negative impact on TCO or ROI.
Yet one more reason to use Linux, *BSD or OS X.
The trick on custom stuff, like MS-Access applications and databases, is timing. If your Access solution is getting near no longer working due to age coupled with Microsoft's abandonment of older binaries, you have incentive to rewrite something. Now, are you going to spend $500 for OS and applications per year per computer, and $2000 porting it to a newer version of Access, to keep spending $500 per per year per computer, or are you going to spend $20,000, as an example, rewriting it entirely for a new platform that you'll spend -$0- for per computer per year?
Depending on the number of computers, in your case, 30, if you are a good little Microsoft customer and spending your $500/year, you are paying $15,000 per year, and still paying a developer to update your Access database. So, conversion, after a couple of years, could pay for itself if it's properly done. I'd guess that with 30 computers, you could probably outsource maintenance for when you need support, or on a regular schedule for updating, and not spend as much as you would with Windows. Viruses alone wouldn't be nearly so big a problem.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What rubbish! Complete fucking rubbish.
.NET development tools, to quickly code up anything you need that can't be covered by the above.
Microsoft crushes Linux in terms of remote administration:
- Remote Desktop/Terminal Services (you don't even need a RD client, just a browser, which nearly every modern machine has, unlike ssh [yes, i know putty is just a quick download away, assuming you have rights to do that on a machine])
- VBScript (horrid, but gets the job done most of the time)
- WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation, do damn near anything remotely, but be sure to properly secure your network)
- The MMC tools (ADUC, etc etc), which fully operate remotely, as well.
- The
yeah, I agree, but I wasn't talking about managers, I was talking about the journos that talk about OSS.
You are right. And this brings me a certain crazy idea. OSS advocates shound no longer preach to the IT guys. They are already convinced. To reach Mr Joe Average you have to capture the guy who writes a tech column in a newspaper Mr Average reads. He will write a column "Linux rocks", and Mr Average will agree. Now, it is quite easy to find die-hard Windows fans or die-hard Mac fans among the journalist crew, but in most newsrooms the only person likely to know that the Linux exists at all (not to mention actually use it and like it) is some poor helpdesk employee, once again called to replace the bloody toner.
So the crazy idea is: why not create a special Linux distro as a gift for the journalist community? It could be some slimmed-down Mandrake or RedHat, capable only of doing things journalists want to do on their desktops/laptops (MS Office compatibility, good suite of Internet applications, some games; everything extremely easy to install and use). Jettison or disable everything a journalist does not need and could confuse him (excessive choice of window managers, obscure Unix services, maybe the whole CLI at all). Just send it to major tech columnists with a kind note like "guys, here is a software package that gives you everything your Wintel or iBook does, but it's also rock-solid, guaranteed virus-proof and absolutely free". Wouldn't that be a good PR move?
"The price gap is slowly converging, on the hand because Linux is simply costing more then it did 2 years ago..."
Really? Where? I run Debian and Slackware at home and have absolutely no problems with costs whatsoever. At work, we have about 120 linux servers, all tweaked-out Slackware machines. We didn't pay a cent for the OS. We use them for print servers for a massive WAN, for site-based fileservers, and for routing.
In fact, it was cheaper for us to use a Linux box with a bunch of fiber ethernet cards to handle our main network switching than it would have been for us to have purchased a router.
There is no need to pay for Linux at all, if you have people competent enough to implement it on their own, or to find a free implementation and tweak it to make it even more suitable.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In order to make that FUD work, Microsoft has to convince IT managers that the only way to switch to Linux is to switch the whole company at once. It's an easy enough idea to sell, given that many Windows or MS Office upgrades have had to be done all at once, in order to avoid compatibility problems.
And we see that idea being promoted in at least one one of the linked articles. The author promotes the idea by making it a foregone conclusion throughout his article.
A requirement for a "massive migration" would be enough to scare most IT managers away from Linux, that is, if it was true.
But it's not true!
For many companies, the most painless approach to introducing to Linux on the desktop is . . . start small.
Unlike Windows XP, Linux will fit nicely into a Windows 95/98/NT environment. Using Samba, Linux can connect to the Microsoft network, and using OpenOffice, Linux users can share MS Office documents.
Therefore, for many businesses, the best procedure for migrating to Linux will be:
In other words, if you are considering Linux for your company, you don't have to plan a mass migration, and wait for TCO studies and the like.
Instead, start today! Find someone in your company who knows Linux, and try it out. This will give you some real world experience that is worth more than ten Gartner TCO studies. And from there, you can carry on -- without the confusion and disruption of a mass migration.
What makes Slashdot readers think Linux will take over the desktop and server markets when FreeBSD didn't?
Hate to say it, but it's the GPL which will enable Linux to gain in marketshare beyond what BSD has.
The BSD License allows companies to take the work of the BSD developers, make changes, and not share those changes back with the original developers.
You could say that BSD codebase has been adopted widely throughout the industry, but it has been through other companies adopting (read: "Embrace and Extend") BSD code into thier own propoietary products without compensating the developers or community that made that code possible.
In this sense the BSD License is "more Free" than the GPL, but the BSD license does not ensure that that changes to the code will be Free as well.
Read, L
There is no TCO with Windows. You don't own shit. It is licensed to you for your use. Don't forget that. You hand M$ your balls the minute you use their stuff.
Wouldn't that be a good PR move?
... Knoppix does most of this for you. And, it does one thing you can never get off microsoft - an OS that doesn't depend on a hard drive. I have used knoppix to save data from a capable but not technically skilled friends laptop, before reinstalling windows.
Not if the journalist hasn't tried it, and certainly not if they have to install it themselves, and write an article bitching about how hard it is to partition disks.
Which is where the idea of a specialized distribution comes in. You've identified one feature that any such distribution would have to have- easy installation.
Ok, a moment of zealotry here, but
He may not have switched over to linux yet, but he now knows what it is, and that it saved his work.
He kept a copy of the distro "just in case" his windows boot up went down in flames again. And I was astounded to watch him take over and continue the salvage procedure - A non-destructive repartition and copying of files from the old primary partition before the inevitable destructive microsoft reinstall.
In summary, we don't need a special distro to sway people over, just continued evolution of the current trends. Knoppix has spawned several other distro's and I expect that its level of hardware detection will become a part of the standard distro of the future.
My 2c of speculation and comment,
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
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They were running hardware RAID on NT, then this is a wash, and not planning on it just indicates that Duncan didn't budget correctly.
- They were doing it in software on NT but insisted on hardware for Linux. That would indicate they didn't understand how to to software RAID on Linux.
Either way, there are no 'hidden' costs here, except in the sense that things are 'hidden' from an ostritch when its head is in the sand.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Look: Suppose you manage an infrastructure of 1000 hosts scattered across a WAN separated by several regional warehouses and a corporate epicenter. I've actually worked (in a previous job) in a situation like this, though I was by no means the CIO. When you evaluate an OS like Linux you're not concerned with what it may do tomorrow. You're concerned with what it can do today and with what deploying that solution costs under Linux compared with any other alternative. Period. You have a list of services you must provide to the organization and a budget of recurring and fixed upfront costs to provide those services. IT is a cost center for a reason - we don't generate revenue in most organizations, we're here to reduce overhead costs across the organization, and justify our existence only in our ability to reduce organizational overhead at least an order of magnitude more than we charge.
From this perspective, these guys are completely right. They're asking "what do I get today?", "How much will it cost across the life of the platform?", and "How does this compare with any other competitive solution?".
Now, I'm of the opinion that Linux is a great value in large corporate deployments. I don't think we'll see home adoption of Linux for many years to come, but I do think we'll see large scale adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. The reason I think this is because Linux gets progressively cheaper the larger your deployment. The more hosts the fewer admins compared with Windows. The security headaches are easier with Linux because the security model was thought through years ago and still works. Also, the per seat licensing costs will always beat any commercial OS. Linux wins, but only if you have an infrastructure capable of supporting the OS, and then only if you're large enough to leverage these skills into a significant cost savings. Otherwise, if you're a small department or a home user you might as well run Windows. Or buy a Mac - my preferred solution.
Cheers,
--Maynard
When you ask about the cost of converting from Windows to Linux, there's a companion question: what's the cost of converting from Windows to the next version of Windows? Look at the licensing terms MS has now, and notice that they pretty much either force you to upgrade every 2 years or so or pay huge licensing fees when you do upgrade from an "obsolete" version. Also look at the history of cascading upgrades on Windows, where you need a new version of Word which forces an upgrade of Windows itself (the new Word won't run on older versions of the OS) which in turn forces upgrades of other software because your current versions won't run right (or at all!) on the new version of the OS. This is the dirty little secret cost the MS sales reps will never mention.