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10 Years of Pushing For Linux — and Giving Up
boyko.at.netqos writes "Jim Sampson at Network Performance Daily writes about his attempts over a decade to get Linux working in a business/enterprise environment, but each time, he says, something critical just didn't work, and eventually, he just gave up. The article caps with his attempts to use Ubuntu Edgy Eft — only to find a bug that still prevented him from doing work." Quoting: "For the next ten years, I would go off and on back to this thought: I wanted to support the Open Source community, and to use Linux, but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready... Over the last six years, I've tried periodically to get Linux working in the enterprise, thinking, logically, that things must have improved. But every time, something — sometimes something very basic — prevented me from doing what I needed to do in Linux."
They don't want to migrate of Microsoft...Hell, that's the root of the whole problem. They want to not have to use Windows, and Microsoft has a huge amount of money riding on people not being able to use Office or Exchange in a Linux environment.
Being a veteran of many different Linux migrations, some successful, others dismal failures, it always comes down to a few applications:
Office: StarOffice/OpenOffice is not as good.
Exchange: Goddamn managers and their shared calendars.
Unsupported Widget: Every goddamn company has an Unsupported Widget written by a savant who was killed by a bolt of lightning. The Widget is always absolutely critical to their business, and ALWAYS runs on some piece of hardware that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, and only talks to certain versions of Windows.
Every one of these things will come up, and even if you're successful in talking them into going over to OpenOffice and Lotus, and you manage to slay or replace the widget, it's going to take longer and cost more than you would have thought.
In the end, it's always about the damn tool. Use the right tool for the job. Don't try to force Linux in where you know there are going to be problems. The jackass in the article was subcontracting for DELL, the king of the Windows shops, and he thinks he's going to be able to get by on a pure Linux environment? He's a fool.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What ignorance: As for Linux groupware packages lets start with the best known: Lotus Domino and Novell Groupwise - Both run on Linux Then there is the open source crowd including Zimbra, Hula, OpenGroupware.org, egroupware, phpgroupware and a host of others. As for push email, funambol, aka sync4j, will sync and push to a wider variety of devices than any proprietary variant out there. As a matter of fact one of the largest wireless carriers is using it for their 22 million handsets, Fortune 100 companies are using it, and even phone oems are including the client software. L
I don't think this guy is a professional. I really don't. His writing sounds like he's more interested in trolling Linux users than actually imparting wisdom.
So I'll bite.
A professor of mine once said, "I use operating systems for what they're good at, not what they're bad at..." This guy could use that advice. At the time, the college was a mixture of Windows NT and Linux machines - the Linux boxes were used for file and print sharing, and the NT boxes for Exchange.
Complaining that Linux doesn't support Exchange is like complaining that Windows can't read your ext3 formatted floppy, or that it can't see your NFS shares. Windows wasn't built to use UNIX filesystems; Linux wasn't built to use Exchange.
So why don't we turn the argument around: Microsoft failed to build software that interoperated with UNIX. After, their web site says it does. I think the real failure here is Microsoft's: Office doesn't support OO.org file formats. And they don't support using the UNIX mail command, either. I mean, clearly, this is all Microsoft's fault because their software doesn't do what it wasn't designed to do, right?
I don't have problems using Linux and Windows, mostly because I've come to know the strengths and shortcomings of each. I'm not going to bang my head against a wall because Windows doesn't support OO.org file formats, or because Linux doesn't support Exchange.
Instead, I'm going to use the right tool for the job.
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