Ford To Move To Linux

KingDaveRa writes "The Register is reporting that motor giant Ford is switching to Linux for its sales systems, human resources, customer relations and infrastructure, referencing a report in yesterday's Scotland on Sunday. According to The Register, the biggest battle was over which Linux vendor to use - RedHat or SuSE." Update: 09/16 01:51 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points to this NewsForge report, according to which Ford is not moving to Linux.

Comments

What about Burlington in 1999?

[garcia]

Whoever won, the contract is a serious step forward for Linux in the corporporate market...

Are you meaning to tell me that Burlington Coat Factory's 1300 Linux boxes back in 1999 wasn't a major win for corporate Linux? ;-)

At the time I remembering thinking that it was a pretty important step in showing that Linux was a viable alternative. Apparently no one listened. Is anyone going to listen to Ford?

Re:What about Burlington in 1999?

[jeffkjo1]

Ford is everywhere... this will be used by their dealerships, salespeople, and everything in between. Ford employs nearly 370,000 people... that's a lot of people coming in contact with linux everyday.

I don't know about you, but the Burlington Coat Factory near me doesn't ever seem to have many customers, or employees.
The exact opposite can be said about the local Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda, Volvo, Land Rover (ok I'll stop) dealerships.

Re:What about Burlington in 1999?

[Lawbeefaroni]

Burlington Coat Factory (NYSE: BCF) FY 2002 revenue: $2.72 Billion.

Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) 6 month revenue to 6/2003: $81.56 Billion.

Source: finance.yahoo.com

Re:What about Burlington in 1999?

[Anonymous Coward]

excuse me? amazon has still never turned a profit, and walmart uses traditional accounting methods to measure they're profits: they lay people off and close stores.

Re:What about Burlington in 1999?

[shellbeach]

my wife, she wigged on me when I went linux. she could not use microsoft money. I need to find another alternative to everything she uses then she cannot object to it.

The alternative is called dual-booting :) That's how my partner and I use the same computer. From the perspective of someone who uses a computer as simply a tool, not a whole philosophy, the problem is that if you already use and are familiar with MS software then linux/OOo/whatever will always be second best - you're happier with what you're most comfortable with.

Most people switch to linux because of two reasons - either they hate MS so much they want to take the plunge into a completely new environment, or they believe in open-source software so much that they're willing to make sacrifices. Personally, I think linux is wonderful, but then I believe in the philosophy and I love programming - which I find much, much easier to do in linux than in Windows. But that's not what's important to most people, such as my partner and probably your wife ...

Re:What about Burlington in 1999?

[goon america]

uh, Amazon?

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 23:05:43 GMT
Server: Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 ( Unix ) mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
Set-Cookie: skin=; domain=.amazon.com; path=/; expires=Wed, 01-Aug-01 12:00:00 GMT
Location: http://www.amazon.com:80/exec/obidos/subst/home/ho me.html
nnCoection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Then again, look at that "nnCoection" (AKA "Connection") bit....

Have you driven a Ford Lately?

[Honest Man]

"the biggest battle was over which Linux vendor to use - RedHat or SuSE"

Its been years, but I'm impressed with Ford for this move. Something tells me MS wont bee too pleased though.

Now I want to see new car prices drop, as this should save them tons of money on upgrades, etc.

Now if they would just fix the computers in their cars, so they would run better.. lol

Re:Fraid not

[WindBourne]

Funny that you mention VW. They are busy also moving a lot of their software over to Linux. It is currently in late beta, but should be available soon for dealers.

Servers not Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

Ford IS NOT replacing any of their Windows workstations with Unix at present in fact they are in the middle of upgrading all W2K workstations with XP.

This is a server consolidation project moving all exisisting servers onto large (multi processor etc etc) Unix machines.

Ford and SAP

[I8TheWorm]

Since Ford is an SAP shop the transition shouldn't be a painful one at all, other than the possibility of end users filling up the help desk cue with mundane requests.

Re:Heh...

[rolux]

Finland has lakes. The fjords is Norway.

Re:Application programming is a dying paradigm

[klocwerk]

but web apps are a freakin headache for support, BECAUSE of their ability to run on anything.
jack of all trades, master of none.

Can you tell I work at a helpdesk? heh.

You don't seem to understand how big this win is.

[Sphere1952]

Every Ford supplier will now be switching to Linux.

What about engineering

[kippy]

I work for an automotive software vendor. Ford is one of our biggest customers and they require that our development and releases be done on HPUX. We all hate HPUX around here but if the customer wants it, they get it.

I'm anxious to know if this Linux adoption will switch their engineering requirements. I guess only time will tell.

Re:one question

[Khomar]

According to the article:

Our understanding is that the battle boiled down to one between Red Hat and SuSE, with the signs earlier this year being that Red Hat might just have got the deal. Ford seemed to want a Red Hat systems admin in Detroit back in January, anyway, but it'd maybe make some sense to use the local player in Germany, and our sources claim SuSE and Red Hat both pitched in the States, so you could maybe view the job as being more about bringing Linux servers into the infrastructure than specifically running Red Hat.

While that doesn't answer your question, just in case you didn't actually read the article, there is a little more information for you. ;-)

Does anyone know any more details?

Re:Huge, Huge, Huge Problem for Microsoft

[HungWeiLo]

I was interviewing with them last year (got the job, but had to decline it), and believe me - they were really gung-ho on Linux. Even the top enchilada PHB CIO at Ford who gave the welcoming speech talked about it.

Re:Not calvin

[LMCBoy]

Those stickers you see all over...are not Calvin and should not be thought of that way.

Well, Bill Watterson certainly thought of them that way; he stopped writing C&H because of the massive infringement of Calvin's likeness. Not because of any lost profits to him (he refused to license their likeness to *any* product), but because his beloved characters were being so crudely misrepresented.

Every time I see Calvin on the back of some moron's pickup truck, I can't help but think that that guy helped kill C&H. WTG, buddy. :(

Ford move to Linux untrue!

[bigbadwlf]

According to this article at NewsForge, the Ford move to Linux is untrue.

-- snip --
Joan Witte, Communications Manager for Ford Motor Information Technology, had this statement to make late this afternoon when I called her at her Detroit office about a story being reported that Ford was moving to Linux.

Witte said "Like any other company, Ford Motor is looking at Linux, primarily in the application space. We presently have an enterprise-wide agreement with Microsoft to handle our collaborative solutions. We aren't contemplating using Linux in this area, and don't contemplate doing that in the foreseeable future."
-- snip --

STORY IS UNTRUE - LINK

[FreeLinux]

Newsforge reports is reporting that this story is untrue. Sad but, as I suspected.

Re:Recent conversation at M$

[mi]

Gates: Volvo's then.

A minor nit -- Volvo now belongs to Ford. Most probably, Gates knows this -- the "suits" around him certainly do.