An Open Source Tipping Point?

jg21 writes "Over at LinuxWorld there's an article arguing that open source will be propelled to market predominance by the same disruptive mechanism that brought Sony, Microsoft, and others to be market leaders at the moment. 'The improbable is possible - leaders have been dethroned in the past,' writes the author, who is also apparently the producer of an upcoming documentary entitled, 'The Digital Tipping Point' to be released in September 2005. The story refers to a corroborating article from South Africa and to Clayton Christensen's Seeing What's Next which backs up this general idea."

Comments

Will take some time

[einhverfr]

I am a consultant with many small business customers. A few are pondering the use of Linux (I charge more for monthly maintenance of Windows systems because they take more of my time). But there are a few obstacles which completely prevent a few of them from using Linux (these are sufficiently small businesses not to have any dedicated servers).

The largest obstacle is that many of these businesses depend on vertically targetted web sites and programs which may not work on Linux. Yes, we could get many of these to work probable with Win4Lin or Crossover. However, the uncertainty and supportability is an issue.

But other clients of mine are already committing to Linux. In one case, we saved $20,000 for a customer in license fees alone, not to mention the support costs in network simplification by using Linux-based VPN appliances rather than an equivalent on Windows. In another case, we have a very successful Linux desktop deployment. In another case, we have a customer thinking about switching so he doesn't have to pay me to swing by every month to run a spyware/virus scan.

It will happen, but slowly.