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Open Source Making Inroads in Small Businesses
prostoalex writes "In a story mainly about new OpenOffice release, NewsFactor Network quotes an interesting finding of Jupiter Research analyst: "Open-source productivity suites did "surprisingly well" in the mid-size business market, with the OpenOffice suite alone claiming a share of about 6%. Furthermore, [Joe Wilcox] found that some 19% of small businesses ran Linux on their desktop, and a whopping 26% ran Linux on their servers.""
I agree that there should be more clarification as to where these figures were obtained from but, if these include European businesses, then please remember that many governmental organisations in Europe (especially Germany) are moving to Linux on the desktop in a big way.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's more like 70% for big companies.8 ,17096,00.html
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/0,133
It's not saying they're *exclusively* using linux, and it's unclear whether this is server or desktop.
Well at the mom and pop 1 terminal for sales and reporting level I'd assume your correct. My company produces Point of Sale software and we rarely sell systems of that size. However when you get 3 or more terminals for sales or any kind of complex inventory you quickly realize that quick books just isn't upto the task, this is the market we've recently entered into.
You average 3 terminal system will cost you about $18,000 just in software costs from us and we're priced lower then much of our competition. A recent sale of a 75 terminal system come in at approx. $105,000
Unfortunately that $18,000 contains close to $5000 in OS costs for a very dated OS that is starting to hurt us. The 75 terminal system cost $16,000 in OS fees. So we're moving to linux over the next year or so with a complete rewrite of the codebase. We're not the only one in the industry moving to Linux either, some of our competition has already made the move and is doing well.
The plan is to have a large linux server offering up virtual desktops to PC's or actual dumb terminals. This would be a trivial task except for the requirement that the new software must have a GUI and not be text based. So now the question is just how much hardware is required to offer 100 unique qui connections over the network.
Anyways the point is that you can expect to see more linux in the small business sector in the near future. In the end money talks with most of these customers.
Well, as the previous poster says, you must be a Linux consultant. I have spent the past five years doing some consulting jobs around all Spain, about twenty medium companies, and all I can say I have seen is about half a dozen Linux servers, mainly in file and web server tasks. Most of the remaining servers run Windows 2000, and there even were a couple of ancient HP 9000 running HP-UX.
I think that ClarkConnect (free as in beer for the home edition) is exactly what the community needs to make inroads in the SOHO: take an old computer, put in two nic cards, pop the CD in the drive, answer about ten questions (mostly everything autodetects), and you've got a small business server.
Web based administration (you don't have to touch the cli), samba, firewire, vpn, antispam/anitvirus filters, apache, email/DNS backup. Best of all, there's a solid community behind it.
Such a price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing - Pythagoras
I run Debian, and your suggestion chills my spine. Most people should install a distro without too many options. Red Hat, Mandrake -- anything which has been commercialized. Not Debian, and probably not Slakware.
No wonder you think that non-techie users should run windoze.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
I work as a technology consultant, independant mainly to very small mom and pop shops and small offices. Many have upgraded PC's in the last few months and just now have Office XP/2002 and here 2003 is comming out at the end of the month.
These people express a disgust that every 18 months, what the buy today won't be powerful enough to run that in the future and its been cheaper to buy $700 boxes every 2 years and chuck 'em than to go through, upgrade hardware and software.
Many more use FreeBSD and Linux daily. I have helped 4 businesses set up ecommerce sites through Yahoo, they have no idea what the hell FreeBSD is, but that is what powers their site.
Also, I have a portable FreeBSD box called my Apple iBook that many take a look at and two mom & pop stores have switched to using Macs for Point of sale and other uses and love them because they are easy to use and don't crash.
I started out in the graphics/video production field with wedding businesses and most switched around 2000 - 2001 to Dell's and PC's. Many are now switching back to mac because of their lost time and work with system crashes.
Now to the kicker: I set-up a Linux or FreeBSD box with KDE set up and most people can pick up how to launch Mozilla and Netscape w/o any proablems. In fact over the next two weeks, I am converting one office over to Linux on all of their PIII 700 boxes they have. Total cost: About $2540. ($2500 to hire me to do it, $40 for a copy of RH). Most couldn't tell a difference between OpenOffice's Spreadsheet and Excell and since it can read/write MS office formats (at least for now) they have interoperatblity.
Their office file/print server has been Linux for "at least two years" one employee remarked, but I don't know I didn't set up their LAN. Well I know its RH 6.2 on IBM hardware, how long its been there...
Why did they switch? They had spent over $6000 US in the last two years just on support calls to wipe off viruses on these machines not to mention the cost in lost time due to data being lost and computer downtime. The hardest issue was to find a replacement for their accounting/payroll/inventroy software. So I recommended buying one new Dell just to run the software package as it would proably take longer and be a hell of a lot more to reset up 4 years of data on a new system and the PR person wanted an iMac, so I recommended getting her one so she can run QuarkXpress and Photoshop.
People and businesses are sick and tired the MS upgrade game every 18 months and I think Linux is poised to make some grounds in the business world. Red Hat and SuSE has done a wonderful job of taking Linux from Geekdom to so easy grandma could use it. Still the lack of commerical software is hurting the platform. OpenOffice has made some tremendous gains in terms of functionality to the point where it now can be used.
Special software is getting there too, like the NOLA Enterprise Resource Planning software, phpprojekt group ware, are good resources for medium sized businesses. What is lacking is some good small business software like Quickbooks that is extremely easy to use and designed for small business. Maybe there is something out there, I just havn't found it yet.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'll admit to still using MS Office for Mac, but I only have one license (and when you open the same license of Office on two machines on a network, the second to open quits by itself! %&%#&!). So I use X11 Open Office on the Mac when me and my office manager need Word at the same time. The fonts don't necessarily show up the same, but the documents (at least Word docs) hardly ever need fixing, and I just save as a Word 97/XP doc and it works just fine.
I still and probably will continue to use Macs as my desktop OS so I don't have problems sending people docs they can't open. If all else fails, I can "Save as PDF".
I can say that when an "aqua" version of OpenOffice is available in 2005 or so, I will not upgrade MS Office anymore and convert exclusively to OpenOffice. For me, it has not been an issue in terms of compatibility.
There is no question that the Linux server took some setting up, but frankly, I could've just as easily used the Red Hat GUI set-up assistants for NFS, SMB, Print Sharing, etc. So the posts I've seen that say Linux is too hard to set-up for somebody who wants to make money is a bunch of cr@p! Frankly, if you are a small business, you need to have enough computer skills to figure stuff out on your own and a distro like RH is practically idiot-proof for setting up network services.
Setting up a Linux server takes 10 minutes. Its more secure and it costs nothing. If they isn't the definition of making money, then I don't know what is!
-A