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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.
This is coming from a bank. They probably spent ridiculous amounts of money verifying linux is secure. They probably take microsofts word for it.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
If all you want is a machine to look at spreadsheets on, there's nothing wrong with windows. Hell, for a lot of people it's fine - if you're behind a firewall, who cares? The computer is just a tool to get the job done.
When you're looking at managing systems en masse, it's different, and it gets really different with servers - that's where microsoft's liscencing comes back to hurt them.
..don't panic
... it must be true!!
In the release, Matthew O'Neill, group head of distributed systems for HSBC Global IT operations, states that the bank's existing Linux environment is more expensive to maintain than its Windows environment. "Some will be surprised to learn that our Windows environment has a lower total cost of ownership than our current Linux environment." - they forgot to mention that the GNU/Linux environment consisted of 10,000 boxes and the Windows environment was only 3 boxes and 2 of them were down most of the time.
Ok, I just came up with this, but it's not different than what the 'article' is saying, there are no details at all, it's all just hand-waving and no facts.
You can't handle the truth.
In the article he is comparing the cost of a varied and diverse *nix mashup with a comparatively homogeneous Windows world. Sure, support a couple of versions of Windows versus 12 variants of Linux? Yep, cheaper. Fine. But the POINT is that standardizing on one Linux Will Save Money, compared to many versions, OR compared to Windows.
On the one hand, we OSS advocates can't afford to live in a dream world. If Windows is cheaper than Linux, we need to know about it, know why, and fix it. So from that angle I'm glad MicroNovell assented to it.
But we also know that statements like this are typically used out of context, especially by the professional liars who do advertisting for a living. Somehow, when MS runs ads talking about TCO, they'll forget to mention all of the qualifications that accompany this case study, such as the fact that it had a mixed Linux environment. So from this angle, I almost wish that MicroNovell hadn't assented at all, since it's likely to be used to mislead the general public rather than make them wiser.
The only reasons I can think of are that
in some environments, windows makes more sense than linux
in other environments, linux makes more sense than windows
the truth is bland and unexciting
linux zealots and microsoft ad execs may have more exciting things to say on the subject, but they're just deluded or lying
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How the open source community views Novell is reminiscent of the madonna-whore complex.
1. We can only love a perfect(technically) and chaste(doesn't screw msft behind our backs) woman
2. However we want her to be sexy(successful) and do the nasty(make money).
In essence we can never be satisfied with a company's performance and also love them at the same time. We are doomed to hate Novell and yet we desperately want her.
HSBC's long term TCO decision making strategies of late may be deemed... well... questionable.
It's not hard to find specific cases where Windows is cheaper. The problem is when people use specific instances of cheaper TCO using linux or Windows to generalize which one is cheaper for other cases. It is easy to find specific cases where linux is the better option and others where Windows makes more sense. Finding examples however does not answer the question of which is more cost effective in general. I'm not sure there is a good way to answer that other than to assume that companies are rational enterprises and that they will gravitate over time towards to most cost effective solution. Installed base size might be the best available (albeit highly imperfect) measure if you accept the above premise. If linux is growing in market share, that might be rationally construed as evidence that companies are finding the TCO of linux to be lower. It's not the only factor of course but I think it is a reasonable inference.
For the desktop machines in my company which was cheaper depended entirely upon how we used the machines. We ran our servers on SuSE linux but for the desktop machines we needed specific applications where the linux alternatives were sufficiently inferior as to make them not cost effective. For our server needs there was no comparison, linux was vastly more cost effective. TCO is specific to the needs of the organization and/or individuals using the product. Its going to differ on a case by case basis and we would be foolish to generalize our needs to that of the IT community at large.
Exactly. Any decent linux SA will also have a higher pay as well, because it's not as common a skill as windows SA. Again, stereotyping here, but windows SAs hate the command line in general and keep their skills at "point and tick the right box, restart". .conf files that you can edit by hand and get exactly the configuration you want in just the same amount of time, and with Linux, you don't need to reboot, just restart the service. More efficient and faster! Not user-friendly for a granny's desktop, but for a SA, whose very job it is to make sure everything's configured right, it is. .ini files and registry keys to be activated using a GUI?
If you count the cost of your SA's pay, then yes, I would expect the TCO of linux to be a tad higher, if you omit the cost of windows licenses on the other side. Linux/*nix SAs in general know more of the underlying OS than their windows counterparts do, it's just a fact because of how the system works. Where windows provides GUIs for all aspects of configuration, *nix provides
I haven't seen Vista, but XP and the little bit I've seen of Server 2003 all seemed very GUI based to me. There was an article about Windows finally receiving a decent command-line utility. Is Vista Pro going to get it so that SAs can actually do linux-style administration? Or is everything still going to be a mix of
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
a statement.
/.ers, it's not Windows).
TCO of Linux being higher than Windows wouldn't completely surprise me given my own personal experience with the OS, though hearing other people's experiences, I would not bet on either outcome. It, in several of it's incarnations, has given me more grief than almost any other OS I've used/administrated (there's only one worse I can think of, sorry
That being said, I'd still like to know -
is this weighted per machine on comparison, or per desktop in one set, per server in another, or is it just overall -
- If it's the latter, than TCO will be best on whatever system is used least.
- If it's the per server/per desktop, then it's a good measure
- If it's per machine, whichever has the highest desktop:server would probably win, so it's again unfair/biased.
Also, as it's stated, there are multiple distros; with how differently things are done, I wouldn't except a low TCO for multiple distros. My experience stems from 4 major distributions, totalling maybe 10-12 versions, the administration of different distros seems to be quite high, making multi-distro administration also a challange. That right there tells me this is biased against Linux.
Finally, learning cost: Learning is a sunk cost, and not an over-time cost. Was this TCO over the first year, or was it over a longer time? Did it involve a time-related cost projection? This is relevant because most of the users would have come in knowing how things were done in Windows, but not Linux, some of the admins may have even come in that way. The initial training cost would have been comparatively high compared to the new employee training cost - another VERY important factor that most likely biased this report against Linux. Anyone know if they actually put up facts about this?
A lot of words said and conclusions made in TFA, but at the end of the day, I don't feel any more educated than before - they just gave no useful or novel (/new/ not book or corporation) data.
34486853790
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As with many things, when you save money it doesn't necessarily mean you've got more "money in the bank" it just means you have more to spend on other things. Where I work we're a mixed windows/linux shop, and moving more towards the linux/FOSS route all the time.
Does that mean money saved overall, no. What it does mean is that money that would have been spent on X (software licenses, etc), is now spend on other stuff (aging infrastructure, upgraded network, etc and lots of other things that would have otherwise stay or been delayed in upgrading). There will always be places to dump cash, and what most of these studies don't seem to incorporate into the "studies" is that dollar for dollar, the spending might be the same or more for FOSS, but the results might not be the same nor what the money was spend on.
HSBC is the very same bank that is most heavily exposed to the subprime market right now, which is under a lot of stress, needless to say. When I read the summary, I was thinking, "Yeah, HSBC sure knows how to save money..."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Great, now we know that the TCO for a mixed Linux environment is higher than for Windows. And what does it mean?
3 0215)?
Did they calculated the costs by taking the productivity of their personal into account, the increased security risks and possible costs for disaster recovery ( like an employee responsible for account creation, who had a keylogger installed, yesterday news http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/13
What does it really mean, if you don't get the details of the entire installation and their calculation? Training people on new software is certainly the biggest costs, training people on a closed source system just means that security is controlled somewhere else and that users will not understand, can not understand and will make errors, which put your business at risk.
Sure, Linux can be attacked as well, but once there is a critical bug known, you can react by getting a patch, disable that part or write your patch yourself (not that I could do it, but a programmer employed by a bank...)
Much better than a "patch/nopatch tuesday".
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
> Not that long ago, there was an article about the cost of 0wnership (that first letter is a zero, not an o).
The easiest way to disambiguate that spelling is spell it: "Total Cost of Pwnership"
(TCP might not be the best way to abbreviate it though)
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Those are two more valid possibilities.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
I wouldn't put much faith in the ability of HSBC to manage anything IT related. I work for a company selling trading software to top tier banks, many of them based in the UK. Overall, their IT staff are useless. Their seems to be two type of bank IT staffer - the permanent staff hired straight out of college, with no real world experience and no chance of acquiring any because the second kind of staffer, the contractors, do as little as possible but ensure their own job security by keeping the permies as ill-informed as possible.
This may sound cynical, but it is all too true. As an example, we had an IT person from one bank try to apply an update to their system by first untarring it on Windows and FTP'ing each file in turn to the Unix box. In the process they managed to change the case of all the files. This was despite the release notes (complete with cut 'n' paste, step by step instructions) telling them to apply the patch by untarring it on the Unix box.
Another example is a client who has switched from HP-UX to Solaris and now to Linux within the space of a year. With that kind of regular platform jumping it's no wonder this clients Windows TCO is lower than the one for Unix.
IT services for open-source software represent 1.2% or $2.3 billion of the addressable 2006 North American IT services market. - Report Highlight for Dataquest Insight: Open-Source Software IT Services, North America, 2005-2010
Across all organizations, one-fifth say they use OSS. As few as 17 percent of midsize and large respondent organizations say they use OSS, and 28 percent of organizations of 500 to 2,499 employees claim they use OSS. - User Survey Report: Open-Source and Linux Software Support Services, North America, 2006
OSS services account for 1.2% of the IT budget, yet 20% of larger companies use OSS? So worst case, if less than 6% of the average company's software is OSS, then MS/NV are correct. If greater than 6% is OSS, then they are obviously wrong - due to OSS's relatively small market share.
Whore Yourself... @ http://whorapedia.com/
There is a real accounting procedure used by corporate accounts that could provide a comparison and that is Return on Investment (ROI).
There are 3 degrees of the severity of lies:
Lies,
Damned Lies,
and TCO reports
-- Greywolf's Law of TCO
My blog
How are they using windows? Did they not purchase the $4k DST 'patch' (yes, a patch) to fix Exchange's DST issue? Are they managing 1000s of workstations across an enterprise with something like ScriptLogic's Desktop Authority, which makes the hell of the broken Active Directory workable? There are un-foreseen costs attached. You pay one time for Windows, and then many times over for antivirus, directory services management, patch management, on and on. I honestly cannot believe Novell said this, especially when NDS was twice the directory service AD is today.
The costs to buy everything needed to actually make a Windows network, 'work' are exponential when factoring in all of the third party pieces that are ABSOLUTELY necessary to make an distributed network function well.
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Ever look at a piece of modern art and think, "my kid could do that in five minutes?" Ever think why theater is too out in left field for you? Well there is a strong connection between modern art and Open Source.
Open source works and is great, but lets face the facts people in the open source community are not willing to pay money for software, or even software support. They expect it for free. Look at the bottom line of Redhat vs any closed source company. Their bottom lines are massively different.
So Novell, like the modern art community is saying and doing the things that PAYING CUSTOMERS or PAYING PATRONS expect. Modern art is not for the benefit of the general community because the general community does not buy art. Hence artists when they hear, "oh my kid can do this in five minutes" will laugh in your face because you critique as a non-paying person is completely irrelevant. Your opinion does not matter in the least. Likewise I think with Novell and Open Source growing apart, I think Novell is saying, "hey you folks are not paying the bills thus we are going to do what is best for our clients."
I can't blame them...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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..."
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games