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Lockheed Replaces 10,000 Solaris Seats with Linux
bl8n8r writes "Citing hardware and software TCO, a source close to Lockheed Martin says the aeronautics giant will be replacing 10,000 of its Solaris seats with Linux. The article mentions AutoZone, IBM, SCO and Daimler Chrysler and what may be in store for Lockheed Martin.
'Every engineer has a Microsoft PC sitting next to their Sun Blade,' said their source. 'That's for business applications, and Linux is no threat there. It's Sun who has to worry.' Wait till they find out how much they can save running OpenOffice."
Does anyone know what flavor of Linux these guys will be installing? I saw some reference to Dell - I'm not sure if they're the supplier or they use a particular brand. I know Red Hat is on NASDAQ; are any of the other major Linux distributors public companies?
...that the real threat from Linux is to the proprietary unices and NO openoffice is not a replacement for the MS office suite. This MS-workstation-next-to-the-unix-box phenomenon is only a couple decades old.
They just have to convine Lockheed to use Sun Java Desktop, aka SuSE.
I know an attorney (like everyone else) and if you threaten her with legal action she'll just laugh. Yes, it's expensive for us regular people, but it is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. After all, I would coutner-sue for something and settle out of court. Yes, yes, I know, it's sad that it has to come down to this, but that's the system - sue to bury he other guy ----and if he has the resources to fight you --- settle out of court.
That's America!
Instead of 2 computers on each desk (a unix workstation and a pc running office bugware) they could save money by replacing both machines with 1 G5 running their unix apps and M$ office at the same time.
For that matter, they could run M$ office via codeweavers crossover on their linux box and get rid of the extra box that way.
Either way, you could sell the windows box to subsidize the replacement plan and save a buttload of money.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a defense contractor made the expensive choice.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
"'Every engineer has a Microsoft PC sitting next to their Sun Blade,' said their source."
Why arent they using these?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I was just about to post the same thing.
I've tried using OpenOffice as a substitute for MS Word in two real-life projects (joint grant applications) with disasterous results. Any embedded images were floating all around the two-column document and equations were not imported/exported at all.
With Word, I've never had such problems before or as of today.
The owls are not what they seem
"In order for the Linux community to accept the level of success that we have achieved already, it's time to realise that we don't need to bash out these stories all the time."
Why shouldn't we get to see these stories? You say that come out all the time, I don't agree. A private non-government US company as big as Lockheed is possibly going to Linux for 10,000+ desktops and that doesn't qualify as news because it happens so often? Since when? Last similar stories I recall are from the Autozone and Burlington coat factory articles from a while back. Sice then we've seen mostly talk from foreign governments but rarely huge US companies.
I don't care if it is replacing Solaris and not Windows its still interesting to me and many other users. Let me guess. You'd rather read yet another article on Ipods?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
> Business Apps don't necessarily mean "MS Office."
True. However, I did interview with an engineering group at Lockheed in Ft. Worth. While this is hardly a representative cross section of ALL of Lockheed, they did seem to have an awful lot of information in excel tables with a visual basic "GUI" veneer on top of it all to do data lookups. I suppose it works, but I had always thought lockheed harked back far enough to have tons of data pre-dating MS Excel. [shrug]
So forget it. It's not good enough, they have to interoperate with too many subcontracters, government agencies, etc, etc
Sure, let's just ignore all the problems and incompatibilities that plague those using different versions of ms office...
At any rate, I hate to break it to you, but we are finding that we like open office better than ms office - and have been using OO 1.1 to share ms docs with coworkers and vendors, as well as reports to management, for some months now without a single problem.
This silly ms-office elitism really needs to stop. standards, not vendor lock-ins, are the key to interoperability.
I've recently had the joy of trying to open a number of MS Office documents in Office 2003. Guess what, according to Word 2003 those Word 97 documents were corrupted. Loaded fine in Open Office though. Go figure.
So much for ubiquitous office formats.... not to mention, of course, that Word is such a pleasure with large documents to begin with. It's so much fun dropping a picture on a word page-- talk about having to bloody reformat my document all the time...
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Sorry if I sound like a troll, but I am troubled by our military's use of Linux. Are there any movements in the free software community that advocate licensing that would prevent military and/or other unethical use of free software? This is deeply troubling (at least to me) to see our hard-earned creation being used in such a fashion.
IBM (the big Cadence user) just went to Cadence a couple years ago and insisted that cds5.00 should be released for Solaris and Linux *simultaneously*.
They did.
Paul B.
P.S. Cadence is a huge Electronic Design Automation (EDA) CAD system.
but you won't actually be using it. Every time I open a .doc file with the thing, I wonder in what new and exciting ways it's going to look goofy, or even be unreadable.
Offer a bounty and let it be known inside your industry peer group there is a bounty available for an open source autocad-like app, and perhaps others will chip in as well. 6500$ a seat is tempting, could the design industry in all it's flavors get up a seriously significant bounty to offer developers? Put it on a webpage someplace, or even source forge. Maybe you will interest some developers if your cash is green.
"Every engineer has a Microsoft PC sitting next to their Sun Blade"
Huh??? If they need both Unix and desktop applications why not replace these two boxes with a single Mac running OS X? A mac is one single computer which satisfies the requirements of two. Its both a Unix workstation and a personal PC which runs common desktop apps. And it does both of these jobs better than the competion. Is a dual G5 vs Sparc even a contest? Maintaining one single machine per user is easier and cheaper than maintaining two machines per user. Purchase price for one fast G5 is probably the same or less as for a Win PC + Sun Blade. Macs are durable, quality hardware. Kickass OpenGL video cards also, that' got to help with CAD.
So with a Mac, you get equal or lower initial cost, lower TCO because you only have to maintain one machine, not two, and one architecture, not two. Much, much faster hardware. Half the power consumption because you are only running one computer. Great user interface.
I'd think going with Mac would be a no-brainer in this particular situation. What's the deal?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It is trivial to look at the SCO claims against IBM, Daimler and AutoZone and conclude that their claims are entirely based on pre existing contracts with those entities. In fact SCO hasn't brought a genuine copyright case against anyone in their long FUD campaign, their strategy is to sue their business partners over any baseless breach of contract claim they can dream up then vaguely assert copyright infringement in press releases. It really takes a spectacularly lazy and inept journalist to miss this. The article restating SCO's blatant lie that the law suit was brought to make Daimler respond to SCO's letter when the truth is that SCO was trounced in court on everything but the letter response time just illustrates how biased the journalist was and how dishonest Blake Stowell is.
I will believe it when I see it. It is possible on the Sun machines but the source hit the nail on the head with the Windows machines.
We use far to much software designed for specifically for Windows to even make Linux a remote possibility for our desktops. Combine that with the aversion to open-source in the military world and I'm willing to bet I'll be using Windows for years to come.