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OSS in One-Fifth of Japanese Businesses
WillAffleck writes "According to a recent Infoworld article, one-fifth of all Japanese businesses now use Open Source operating systems. From the article: 'By contrast, 33 percent of U.S. companies have adopted open-source operating systems in at least some of their servers, MIC said. Among the companies polled by the MIC, 66 percent said open-source operating systems have low initial costs, while 47.8 percent said the software has low operating costs '"
someone slap the editors with a cluestick please...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Maybe both sides should stop throwing around generalizations and anecdotal evidence and find an impartial, quantitative comparison of support costs for the two operating systems when performing similar tasks.
I'm sick and tired of "My os is cheaper than your os because yadda yadda yadda"
It's all about opportunity cost: What do you give up by running this OS?
The business might save $120M a year by switching to Linux from IBM, but if that translates into $1B loss of profits in three years, then Linux was not the right choice.
Likewise if a business spends $10M/year on windows systems and nets $100M/year in profits, and they could spend $12M/year on Linux (better admins, yadda^3) but generate $400M in net earnings, Linux would be the better solution, even though it would cost 2 million dollars more per year than windows.
How I sell management on linux: The business will make more money, and have a higher profit margin. Once the numbers make sense, they'll go borrow the cash to transition if they have to, but it will happen, guaranteed.
And Japanese businessmen didn't build the second largest economy in the world by forgetting the bottom line.
"Piter, too, is dead."
It probably has something to do with Linux distros still not providing a very smooth Japanese localization.
Open Source Software is more than Operating Systems. What about companies (in the US and Japan) using MySql, Apache, Ethereal, etc...) Linux, BSD et al.. are great for companies to adopt, but the reality is the greatest infiltration of OSS will come from applications which can run on Windows.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.