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Linux Growth In The Workplace Slowing
BrainSurgeon writes "According to a Business Week article Linux growth numbers have slowed for the first time since SG Cowen & Co. began tracking it on their survey. The biggest reason for the slow down according is due to the hidden cost of consultants." From the article: "That doesn't mean overall Linux use is slowing. The survey only shows that a smaller number of companies not using Linux plan to try the software than in previous surveys. Most analysts expect Linux use to grow at the companies that have already rolled it out -- and do so at a healthy rate. And analysts say Linux is picking up steam outside North America, which the Cowen survey doesn't cover."
BACK TO MICROSOFT. Take Independence Air, a low-cost Washington (D.C.) carrier that had been running the reservation system on its Web site with Linux. The company, which uses Microsoft's Windows operating systems in most other pieces of its business, needed to hire consultants who could write code for Linux, since its Windows developers couldn't.
What can 'Windows developers' do? Use a mouse?
And if this statement is to do with the code running on a web server (Apache, I presume), then even more so I feel they hired the wrong 'developers' to begin with.
Just more FUD - move along.
I suspect the company quoted in the article had a lot of developers who knew what they liked and liked what they knew. The idea of learning a new OS and new APIs didn't really appeal to them, so they just said "we can't do it!" and went off to hire new people.
I dunno. The other theory sounds more likely - Linux is competing very well with older UNIX based installations but isn't attacking the low end server market as well as it could (ASP compatibility?). And desktop is still at the "we're starting to take this seriously" stage rather than "mass deployment every week" stage.
I read somewhere that this study was itself funded indirectly by Microsoft, but who knows. The survey data seems credible. That said a reduction in the number of groups who said they were planning to evaluate it dropping a bit doesn't necessarily mean growth is slowing. Maybe it just means a lot of them got around to it? ;)
These statements are skewed to show that Independence Air's Linux deployment cost too much in consultant fees, and therefore Linux is "expensive" to deploy in comparison to Windows. But they really say no such thing. Independence Air's problem was not its Linux deployment, but the fact that it chose to deploy a small part of their infrastructure without in house knowledge. They already had hired a Windows skill base, and therefore the comparison in utility between their Windows skillset for the entire Windows deployment against a small Linux deployment was bound to come out poorly for Linux. One sees savings with Linux in scale, not individually. Deploy hundreds of hosts and you'll save huge. Deploy a few hosts to drive a small piece of corporate infrastructure and not only will the savings be marginal, but you may have to hire external help to support the deployment.
So. Don't deploy Linux for small tasks if you're already heavily invested in an alternate technology. Duh. But to claim poor savings across the board as a result of this anecdote is simply stupid. With in house Linux (or UNIX) personnel and a large deployment - of course you'll save big. Which is why the UNIX houses have dumped commercial UNIX desktops for Linux. And why so many have dumped all their small UNIX servers for Linux (and BSD) on Intel. Because it's cheap. Very cheap (and cost effective). --M
The point is: Many companies say they're not switching or thinking about switching, and many of these same companies have no idea that they use this stuff. The people being asked are not necessarily the ones who know. And as I've shown, not only at my employer's company, but also at some other places I've moonlighted for as a poor-man's IT consultant of sorts, many functions can be switched over to Linux to gain higher robustness. The servers running this stuff can be in a closet somewhere. I install everything, back it up, turn it on, and then they forget that it exists, because it Just Works (tm).
So I'm not too sure that these survey results are meaningful.
And now, we see that it has come to pass mere hours after that appeared on Slashdot!
I guess the Second Coming is happening tomorrow.
Java servlets? Java is Java is Java. Perl is, well, Perl.
What does that leave? Well, ASP. asp2php and other conversion tools help, but that would need new skills. MySQL and PostgreSQL are different from Access and SQL Server, but the GUI managers out there are plenty good.
There's the business of configuring Apache, but there are GUI tools for that, too. In fact, between the excellent stand-along GUI tools you can get off Freshmeat, that come with Fedora, or are provided with Webmin, I can't think of much you can't do with Linux in a purely graphical context.
This means that when people complain that Linux isn't "friendly enough", what they really mean is that they're determined not to like it, that when they complain they can't use it, what they really mean is that they don't want to.
There's nothing wrong with choosing not to like something, but it is better to be honest about the fact that it often IS a choice and not something intrinsic about the target.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
yeah I am gonna call bull to most of that, That's really not true, you know. If Sun stopped supporting Star/OpenOffice, or the guys at MySQL gave up and went home, I'd give you great odds that it would pretty much kill future development of the corresponding product as well, open source or not. You might get the occasional bug fix or minor patch, but that's probably it. ok lets take examples from history where the company stopped making the software: Netscape, AOL stopped netscape dev and handed it off to mofo now what has happend there? a robust and full growth. Basically you are arguing against the strenght of OSS, forking; even if Sun stops making OOo tommorow guess what you are gonna have the community come forward and take over. Now your comments about docs, the docs are created in a OSS project if the user needs'em for example take a look at great enduser OSS: ubuntu, firefox, etc. they all have greate docs.
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.