Windows Drives Company To OpenBSD

Barry Lyndon writes "Computerworld reports that the nightmare of windows is driving PriceWaterhouseCoopers, one of the world's largest accountancy and business consulting companies, to OpenBSD and open source in general." From the article: "'My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money.' When asked what argument he used to convince management to use an open source solution, Uemura said: 'They didn't have an argument because they said don't spend any money.' 'They trusted me,' he said. 'The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.' Uemura said a lot of work was done 'behind the scenes'. 'My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said."

Comments

It'd be nice to get the truth about this

[Darius Jedburgh]

I work for a Linux based company that gets a lot of publicity on Slashdot for its use as Linux. In fact, it's seen as a kind of flagship Linux company. But for people inside the company it can be a real headache. The desktop (we're using SUSE 9.1 with 32 bit Intel and 9.3 with 64 bit AMD) is horrendous. Basic things like cut-and-paste between windows is broken. (If I want to copy this text to a console, say, it usually (but weirdly, not always) fails). Any time I want to change my display configuration or mouse I need to call the systems department so they can hack my xorg.conf or whatever it's called these days. The network is truly horrible but what's worse is that network stalls seem to cause countless local problems - like everyone's machines will frequently freeze for a few seconds and then wake up again.

I won't even mention that vast numbers of developers that have to write proprietary software because we've cut ourselves off from off-the-shelf software (which, incidentally, is already as good as most of the stuff we write, and far better supported).

I really don't like Windows. The dumbest command line window on the planet. The whole patronising way the OS treats you. The lack of easy personalization. Prior to that I'd been using FreeBSD and it really felt like a step back. But though I don't like it, I grudgingly have to accept that when I worked for a Windows based company things went much smoother. Network downtime was minimal. Plug-and-play really did seem to work, at least for ordinary devices like mice and displays. And we still had access to many good OSS tools such as Python and Perl. Going back to an open source OS has turned out to be a much more painful transition than the transition to Windows.

Whenever I read news stories about our company I cringe. I find it annoying when we're briefed before a conference (say) on what we are and aren't allowed to say to other people - in particular we're asked to lie about what software we use. It's clear that many decisions are made in this company based on the fact that nobody wants to pay for licenses for software but they don't mind paying to recruit extra people to write the software they could have gotten off-the-shelf because it increases their department size and hence power within the company. (And other decisions are made based on which vendors the CTO plays golf with: I think that's why we have such an awful network.) In fact, I once went to an industry conference on OSes for our industry. We had a company having success using Windows. It was clear that the rest of the conference didn't want to hear anything we wanted to say - they were basically a lynch mob to try to force everyone to switch to OSS so we could provide a unified front to our vendors to get them to switch to OSS operating systems.

So whenever you read that a company is switching OS bear in mind that it's just as likely to be part of political maneuvering within the company as it is likely to be a rational decision.