Linux Advocacy From the Trenches

An anonymous reader writes "Tom Adelstein, longtime Linux advocate and consultant has spent the last year working closely with state, local, and federal government open source software initiatives. Tom launched Government Forge,spearheaded the Open Source bill in Texas and other programs. Tom shares the grass roots efforts that have offered him an insider's view of what is propelling Linux toward critical mass and the desktop. He shares his view of Linux "from the trenches" in this interview."

Comments

OOo to MS Office data interop no longer a concern

[yerricde]

Our customers and support at other banks will not be happy if we start mailing them open office documents.

Then mail them RTF, which is a textual encoding of a Word document. OpenOffice.org Writer for Windows does a good job of exporting RTF. If they demand to receive .doc, send them RTF renamed as .doc; Microsoft Word will know how to handle it. Likewise, OOo Calc can export spreadsheets that Microsoft Excel can read just fine. The OOo filters are often even more reliable than Microsoft's own filters at reading Microsoft Office documents, especially damaged ones.

Re:Open Source Procurement

[Aadain2001]

The problem is that OSS isn't even concidered during the bidding phase of procurement. It is not even given a chance to provide a TCO or ROI against companies, most notibly MS. If OSS was not being selected because there were specific requirements that it could not meet, then yes your post would be correct and we wouldn't have to do all this campaigning. We would just make a better product. But what is happening is all the middle management people, the ones who OK or sink a project/proposal, just flat out refuse to look at OSS. Their thinking is "No one was ever fired for buying MS", much like the old IBM saying back in the day. The only way to fight this is to hit them over the head with a clue-by-four, OR legally require them to look at ALL bidders, not just the proprietary ones like MS.

My wife once worked for Tom Adelstein....

[Emrys]

Shortly after he started Bynari, she got a job working for them with their then business model of acting as a US support center for Mandrake. It looked like a good opportunity at the time, but it went sour pretty fast.

I spent some time talking to Tom and was shocked to find out he didn't apparently care all that much about OSS. He mostly cared about finding ways to make money off it. He was positively giddy when describing to me various turnkey vendors he was talking to who were building net appliances (consumer firewalls, etc.) which ran GNU/Linux but were themselves closed systems. They were pretty upfront when talking to investors that they were able to do this legally by making sure all of their mods were routed through kernel modules which were written in such a way they could stay proprietary. A lot of big vendors do this without trouble, it was more these guys' attitude that they were so clever for getting a free ride on Linux this way. It disgusted me.

Anyway, Adelstein continually was trying to change Bynari's business model to find something that would make the big money. He reminds me of nothing so much as the Loki top brass fiasco stories or the Caldera/SCO stuff. He loves to talk himself up and position himself as a big name Linux consultant, but in my experience cares very little about software freedom for it's own sake or has any kind of deep technical understanding of what's even going on.

But then maybe I'm just bitter because he fired my wife less than a week after finding out she was pregnant (draw your own conclusions), based on (foundless and unsupported) claims that she had been actively working to impair and destroy their systems. Then he refused to pay us the moving expenses he owed us until we got lawyers involved and reached a settlement. A few months after that was over we got contacted by the former Bynari CIO who had been fired after Tom reportedly claimed he was selling company secrets to the Japanese. I really tried to lose track of him after that.

Re:My wife once worked for Tom Adelstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not tag the parent as a troll or offtopic! I can tell you that much, just not everything (because I don't know all of it first hand), of the parent story, is true. While I could certainly add much more detail and insights to the above story, I will not. I'm not actively looking to gun for Tom. Just the same, people should get a complete picture when they work with him.

If you see a story about Tom or Bynari, chances are it was not only written by Tom, but submitted by Tom as well. He is well known for using pen names and keeping many email accounts to forward his own agenda. The Consulting Times (if it's still running) is one such place where it's purely a commercial for Tom's agendas. In fact, my first reaction to seeing the interview, is that it was written by Tom. I have no idea if that's the case or not.

Tom is a brillant guy, however, you can never take him 100% at face value, as there is always a hidden angle.

Re:My wife once worked for Tom Adelstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth, consider your self lucky. Tom had the FBI crawl all over the "former CIO". To say that was a nasty scene, is an understatement. ...ahh...all water under the bridge I guess...

OSS needs to be represented

[BigGerman]

I am sitting in the middle of large information-centric US agency right now and I concur: OSS is adopted here very slowly.
I have been plugging in OSS solutions for long time but most of the time they look at me like I am an idiot. It appears that problem is there is not a single recognizable vendor behind OSS products. Apache, Tomcat even JBoss have no chance at the moment. There are big bucks involved and large "traditional" vendors are like sharks circling around government contracts.
I think OSS and government are a natural fit but I am not sure how glass ceiling can be broken. If anyone has experience pushing OSS to US government, please share.

Re:Linux is only lacking in the apps.

[Anonymous Coward]

a newbie want to click on an install icon... like UT, quake3, or all the loki games has.. and Open Office and Mozilla .. they have them too...

Linux Game Publishing also uses the Loki installer for their ports.

Re:Big Bully

[Penguinshit]

That's all well and fine if you want to discount the fact that Microsoft forbid PC distributors from releasing an alternative OS on their systems. Microsoft isn't supposed to do that anymore, but still plays games with "Preferred Partnership" programs and the like.

So, the PC distributors who had customers requesting a Linux desktop system were not allowed to even investigate opening up that market because Microsoft would have jacked up their costs of bundling Windoze on the rest of their systems. Truly take Microsoft out of monopoly status and watch the landscape change.

Microsoft has been having lots of trouble breaking into the server market (a relatively recent market for them) because Enterprise-class people know (from supporting the mess that is the MS desktop) that Microsoft is a back-end infrastructure nightmare. It is universally regarded as better to go with a robust adult OS (UNIX) and/or its young upstart cousin (Linux) for your server needs and keep the MS nonsense contained in Desktop Userland.