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Some European Moves Towards Linux
Readers VE3OGG and FFFFHALTFFFF write in with three pieces of a global picture that is emerging of governments and corporations moving away from Microsoft and towards open source. First, France: the French automaker Peugot Citroen has announced that over the next several years they will be integrating up to 20,000 Novell SUSE desktops as well as 2,500 SUSE servers into their facilities. (Let's hope that, in Novell, Peugeot Citroen hasn't bought a lemon.) Next, Sweden: the Swedish Armed Forces has made a decision to migrate its Windows NT servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Finally, Russia. VE3OGG writes: "It would seem that after the recent Russian piracy debacle that could see a school headmaster jailed in a Siberian work camp for purchasing pirated copies of Windows for his school, the Ministry of Education in Russia has decided that the school boards will no longer be purchasing any commercial software."
Although it sounds very grand when whole countries or states or cities make a lot of noise about switching to open source software, if you follow them to the conclusion it always seems to work out the same: they end up sticking with Microsoft. I suspect that Microsoft comes in a makes them a sweet deal (maybe they'll open the source code a little, maybe they'll drop the price) and in the end they stick with Microsoft. As more and more groups do this, I think it's just part of the negotiation.
"We've already established what you are, ma'am. Now we're just haggling over the price."
...just like Steve Ballmer flew in to "help" the city of Munich decide against Linux desktops. To quote a famous Princess; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Most of the stuff on
Well I am not to suprised or shocked. If I was running IT Services For a University or any company of consequential size. I would always keep Linux on the table as an option. Keep that Option rather public and go to Microsoft "can we make a deal". That way you can Get MS Products for Cheap and you will not need the expense to migrate over. But the work before that is not that easy you need to make sure you can switch to Linux in case the deal goes bad (never threat unless you are willing to act).
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It would seem that the RIAA's campaign against the poor, American grandmother backfired miserably. or
It would seem that Apple's campaign against the poor, blogger backfired miserably. or
It would seem that MPAA's campaign against the poor, (fill in the blank) backfired miserably. What are we teaching in our MBA programs these days? Really, I'm serious? When did treating your customers, fans, educators, innocent by-standers like the enemy somehow become mainstream thought among U.S. executives?
I like this. Good advertising should be surreptitious, sneaking up in the reader's conscience and adjusting their behaviour without requiring much thought.
"No one ever had to pay thousands of dollars in license penalties for using Linux"
"No one had to re-activate their software when using Linux"
etc.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Rumours of this kind are usually based on decisions regarding systems used for administration, and they consitute a minority of all workstations.
The same is even true for most larger companies. I'm currently with a big well-known Swedish firm that has previously taken strategic decisions to be "all MS", and sure I have a Windows laptop which I usually read email on. Only, I haven't bothered to start it since the harddrive broke down and the support staff replaced it. All real work is done on a Sparc Solaris and an AMD SuSE Linux workstation. In fact, our unit does not even use Word, but Framemaker for technical documentation, but that is not popular at all with our IT management.
The world is not black or white.