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Novell Expects Vista to Spur Linux Adoption
It doesn't come easy writes "According to the Register, Novell expects the cost of upgrading to Vista will encourage many companies to turn to Linux instead. From the article: 'Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. According to Messman the catalyst will be the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading. Obviously, if they're right Novell hopes that turn will be toward SUSE Linux.'" We touched on this issue late last month, as well.
This is the thing Open Source advocates often miss (not flaimbait, I advocate OSS and use Linux). When you are a large company delpoying Windows, the price of licenses for 50 000 machines isn't the problem. The problem is how much it costs to support it. These are companies with budgets of millions, billions, of dollars. An administrator doesn't have time to tinker with distributions, and create a system from scratch, there need to be packaged, reliable system from big name vendors which do this with ease. Try being a sysadmin for a week and you'll know what I mean. I want to deploy Linux, but doing requires more time than I, or anyone else, has.
The amount large companies spend on support contracts dwarf what they spend on actual licenses. When your running Windows you can get a contract which will guarantee a support time of under two hours.
The other part is how to manage it and deploy it. Things like ActiveDirectory, which are a pain in the ass, but they provide one complete, integrated location to go to for managing everything. I know you can setup the same thing in Linux but it takes ALOT longer, because you have to do everything manually.
Those two points are what keep companies from adopting Linux. Linux needs reliable support from big names, Novell is stepping up here, but they still aren't IBM. As for the management system, I have no idea, I have yet to find a system that will handle users, desktop lockdown, applications management/deployment/permissions, etc. from one, central, automated location. Even Apple has managed to create a system to do this (I manage an OS 9/OS X/Windows mixed environment).
(NOTE: By automated I mean, I change the desktop lockdown settings and every computer changes instantly. And adding more desktops is as simple as choosing a setting like "Managed by Server: lmanage.internal.company.org")