Novell Assents To "Windows Is Cheaper Than Linux"

dyous87 points out a ZDNet article reporting that Novell has endorsed a customer's comment claiming that the total cost of ownership of Linux is higher then that of Windows. Novell and Microsoft jointly issued a press release quoting an IT guy for a UK-based bank, HSBC: "Some will be surprised to learn that our Windows environment has a lower total cost of ownership than our current Linux environment." The context of the comment makes it clear that HSBC's Linux environment has a mix of distros, and that a move to centralize around one distro — Novell's — will save money. Nevertheless, Novell's connection to this assertion is not likely to improve their reputation in the open source community.

Comments

And not just any bank

[Anonymous Coward]

HSBC's long term TCO decision making strategies of late may be deemed... well... questionable.

Re:And not just any bank

[awol]

Not quite. http://www.hsbc.com/hsbc/about_hsbc/group-history
The history shows that the bank is anything but the basically the Chinese National Bank. It is currently listed in London IIRC

TCO is Meaningless

[Chemicalscum]

TCO is Meaningless. There is no accepted measure of TCO. It is not a normal accounting procedure and it appears to have been developed in the computing industry probably by Microsoft.

There is a real accounting procedure used by corporate accounts that could provide a comparison and that is Return on Investment (ROI).

Re:It's probably true.. who cares

[Feyr]

using debian i patched all of my servers in 15 minute, using a cute little script called apt-get

what's your point again?

Second Impression

[MrCopilot]

When I First heard about the "Partnership", I was heard loudly exclaiming "Let the Whoring Begin!"

Which caused quite a few turned heads at the office. Took a little longer than I expected, but its good to know I wasn't far off base.

Here's a back of the envelope calculation from the electronics company I work at.

TCO:
New Windows Machine Hardware 650
OS 279
Software 5,000-10,000
HOURS of installing and patching clicking OK, Next, Finish, Reboot, rinse, Repeat. Oh and Don't forget drivers.

New Linux Machine Hardware 650
Debian OS 0
Software 0
20 Minute install, unattended apt-get Updates.

Software includes Electronics Layout, Office, FlowCharter, Development tools( IDE, Compilers, Programmer, UML, Documentation), Solid Modeling, Project Management, Image editing, I could go on all day.

In my office there is a Windows 2000 Server, A WinXP Pro Right beside a Debian Development machine and another as Lamp Server.

Administration of the two windows boxes (Not to mention the 15 others) justifies my position as MIS. Administration of the two Debian boxes can be done remotely once a year in minutes.

I'm no big city, fancy accountant but I can say unequivocally (can you?) that OUR TCO is lower on our windows boxes than our windows boxes.

This is in just my office. All machines in the company are now running OpenOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Inkscape, GhostScript, PDF Printer. and any other needed GPL tool that is cross-platform.

This method of transitioning to opensource is very effective. At first I got a few complaints and lots of skepticism. But quickly the bottom line starts to reflect positively and the people who matter, stop the complaining. I never again have to clean up IE related cruft and viri. We now have money in the budget to purchase Hardware instead of throwing it down the Proprietary Software Hole. When my phome intercom beeps I know it is a windows box calling for help.

I now spend most of my time developing Embedded Linux software instead of patching and reinstalling Windows and apps and I couldn't be happier.

Today the chief engineer asked me, "Why can't you just change it so it ignores that error?"
My answer was "You'd think I could, I mean, It makes sense that since the error is inconsequential to the operation of the application I could just change a few lines of code and we'd be golden. If we were talking about my machine I could do exactly that, But its Windows so I cannot. It's not just hard, its illegal. Just Restart the app when it happens."
"But, That's like 4 times a day."
"Oh well you could just call MS and ask them to check in to it. I'm sure they would be interested in fixing it for a big customer like us with our 25 licenses. Snicker..."