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.""

Comments

Good.

[grub]

Small to mid-size business move faster than big business. When the smaller ones are more competitive and saving cash the larger businesses will have to follow suit to remain competitive.

OpenOffice in schools...

[Anonymous Coward]

If only schools could switch to OpenOffice to, and we could probably get rid of the MS Office dominance for ever in a few years...

Re:OpenOffice in schools...

[godders]

Personally, I find it sickening that schools (here in the UK at least) are teaching lessons as what amount to "Microsoft Office Classes"... My housemate is a teacher, she has little knowledge past the standard MSOffice skills an average office worker would pick up, yet she's planning lessons and teaching these kids.
IMHO there needs to be a definite line between teaching kids how a word processor works, and teaching kids "MS Word 2000" or whatever...

What happens to all these kids when they finally get jobs? their employer has to either spend more money training them, or shell out for the latest microsoft product that they are vaguely familar with...

Excellent to see...

[Kandel]

As we may remember from a recent interview with James Gosling, he made the statement,
"There's no way that I could pay nearly $4,000 for a freaking word processor at home. It just isn't going to happen."
If the home user cannot justify purchasing an expensive office suite, it is no surprise that the small business will try to avoid it as well. Initiatives such as OpenOffice really help to push these boundaries, making Open Source software appealing to business, and to the end user.
I personally use Abiword and OpenOffice in my day to day word processing, and I prefer it much to the expensive Microsoft Office suite.

You bet

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

We're a small business, and we run open source on our server and a few desktops. We'll be moving to more in the future.

You can just imagine the look on my boss's face when he asked how much he had to pay for my software and upgrades.

Basically, we use open source because this company lives month to month. We make plenty of money, but there's not enough to throw around on wild expenses. Also, the only excuse for not using open source is not having any employees smart enough to handle it. The MS philosophy is to make computers dumbed down to the level of the dumbest user. And that's why a lot of businesses use windows. But in a sense, if you have open source knowledge and background, then the sum of all open source software is like a benefit you bring to the company once they hire you. Because you have free or cheap access to a program to do just about everything on just about any hardware. What could be better for a small business? This had a large role in my employment.

Re:where's the beef?

[Eponymous Coward]

Want to know some more detail? Then buy the report. That's the whole reason they bait you with these findings. In the end, they are just trying to sell some research.

I'm in that 26%

[cenonce]

I'm a solo practicing lawyer with one employee. I use two Macs for desktop stuff, but keep all my firm files on a Linux x86 Server I built and set-up myself. The Macs mount the shares via NFS. It also acts as a print server. I've never had a problem with it and would never be able to afford to have a dedicated server if I had to pay Microsoft licensing fees. I also figure I saved myself about a thousand bucks by using Linux instead of buying OS X server and another Mac capable of acting as a server.

-A

Re:where's the beef?

[arendjr]

19% on the desktop? Uh, no way, that's just too unbelievable for me. Please note they claim 19% of small businesses use Linux on the desktop. That's something totally different than 19% market share. Those 19% may have just 1 desktop with Linux. So actually, it still says nothing, but it's a start.

Makes perfect sense

[_underSCORE]

About five years ago, I set up a linux server at my godfather's business, and it's been running like a tank since then. It replaced an NT machine that required constant fixing and administration on his end. Since he's not the most savvy user, this was a constant source of complaint for him.

The linux machine grew with his business, and was only recently replaced (due to a motherboard failure). When I asked him what kind of OS he wanted on the new server, the choice was clear: Linux. Since it requires so little maintenance (none from him and only remote administration from me) he's been one of the most vocal Linux advocates in the small business community, and had several business in our area come in to see how well Linux works with their existing technologies.

Did we have trouble? Yeah... ACT didn't like to be on a SAMBA share (until I found out it needed oplock tweaking), and getting tech support from his ISP was troublesome, but once everything was set up, there was nothing more to do.

Small businesses often can't afford to have a full time IT person, so this kind of set it and forget it proposition makes great business sense.