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Ret. World Bank CTO on Desktop Linux TCO Facts
comforteagle writes "W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, believes we need to take a more honest and frank look at the Cost Analyses it will take to put Linux on the corporate desktop. In Part I of Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth he begins with one of the most common misconceptions... that a business can buy a computer without Windows and save money in the transaction."
He is right that if you wish to purchase a PC from a major distributor you will likely get no break for not having windows. But for a moment lets say that one where to simply buy Windows boxes and then reinstall them when they arrive.
I know that to some, this might sound silly, but it is common practice in many medium to large business anyway. They will simply overwrite the OS that comes on the box with the version that they want configured in the manner that they want it for their IT department.
Now lets look MS office that is installed on the image that is deployed on almost every corporate system across the country. Now if you are a company of any size you will likely get a very nice discount of the retail price, although if you are talking 1,000 PC or more, unless you wish to risk ripping of MS, the price will still add up to a pretty penny.
Then we have things such as Exchange, which at first everyone will swear that they need because it has integrated scheduling functions, despite the fact that most corporations hardly ever use the functionality, except for one or two very annoying people who are quickly ignored by everyone else (if you are one of those people, think of that statement as humor). Here is where the price starts getting steep.
But he does make a fair point, that when we discuss this matters it is only fair that we make an effort to be fair with ourselves and others on the subject.
I think you are ignoring who the article author is.
For techies, building your own or going with not so mainstream manufacturers isn't a problem.
But for W. McDonald Buck, retired CTO of World Bank, he wants a big name, 1st tier manufacturer to supply his PC, not Joe Bobs PC Hardware Shack.
The point Buck makes is:
The boxes with Windows are less expensive than the boxes without.
Or to be more accurate:
It looks to me, however, like the Microsoft monopoly has such a stranglehold on the tier 1 manufacturers that it is now not possible for a corporate shopper to save money by avoiding Windows unless they are prepared to go outside the first tier...... Small businesses may buy computers this way if they have or hire somebody tech savvy to help them, but I don't think this is how your average homeowner buys, and I know it isn't how large companies buy.
Which is the main point he makes. The big players, including IBM, are still shills for the Microsoft tax.
If only 'twere true.
The problem with Linux is that over the years things have changed and broken binray compatability. This isn't a show-stopper usually, but if you do have some closed-source software from 5 years ago that you still want to run today, you are going to find all kinds of library dependency problems.
The thing about Linux is that most of your applications are Open Source or Free, so they get updated and recompiled incrementally as time goes on.
I bought some Loki games for Linux a long time ago. Some of them haven't worked in years because they depend on obsolete and deprocated libraries. If I had lots of time on my hands (which I don't have nowadays) I could probably spend several days looking out old source tarballs and doing a bit of porting, but life's too short.
Most people or businesses who buy software or computers to do a job need specific version of specific kernels with specific libraries and utilities and specific versions of applications that have been integrated, tested and certified to work together.
Windows is very poor at this. Linux is a bit better, but if you're using Linux commercially, you're probably using RedHat Enterprise Linux (or maybe SuSE), you've payed hundreds or thousands of dollars for the software license (for the OS), you've probalby spent tens of thousands on the hardware, you have a support contract, you'll have spent thousands on the applications and you'll have trained clued-up staff to deal with it all.
Does Red Hat garantee backwards compatability?
Can I get Red Hat ES today and Oracle and be garanteed that in 5 years time, my Oracle that I bought will still run, unchanged (same binary), still supported etc.?
Linux is much, much better than Windows, but no Linux company has solved this problem yet.
Stick Men
W. McDonald Buck sounded like a made up name to me. How about G. Penny Cash, or Exxon Starbucks? W. McDonald Buck as a CTO of World Bank? If you google for that name, you don't find a mention of that name anywhere except at a university. If you search on worldbank.org, that name doesn't come up there either.
I think you all have been hacked, because the article tells you what you wanted to talk about.
Looking at worldbank.org and searching for CTO, I haven't found a reference to a CTO for themselves, only references to CTO's elsewhere. I don't beleive they even have a CTO, honestly.
Just sayin'.
Well, you are very lucky. I can go and install games that are released and available today from places like Garage Games and they will crash or hang because of things like NPTL which did break software on a seriously large scale. There are other examples as well: currently the X compositing extension is known to break some programs, for instance. Likewise the Linux kernel sometimes has regressions, lately in the ptrace handling.
In any case, I second the note. No large-compamny CEO in his right mind is going to pay the stock prices at dell.com or ibm.com. They're going to call up their personal sales rep and say "I'm buying 4000 machines next month. What's the price without Windows?".
The people who have little choice but to pay stock price at the tier-1 manufacturers are also the same ones who have half a dozen friends who can point them to a local grey-box manufacturer who can give them a much better price with better local support. (i.e. they won't go: "Your CD died?? Well, first you have to load Windows on your box, then you have to reinstall it.").
For me, it's literally the computer store next door (OK: 2 doors down). He'll sell me a cheap box for $285CDN (about $230US) without windows, and another $100 ($80USD) for XP home.
The reason why Microsoft makes it so hard to get boxes without Windows at places like DEL and IBM is that they know that if home users can get easy access to Linux, they'll talk about how well it works when they get to work, and that'll infiltrate to the CEO who'll start a pilot project on the corporate desktop.
They also don't want corporate CEOs to just buy their $3000 home box with Linux installed on it 'on a lark' and (once again) find out just how much functionality and security they get (see previous paragraph).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.