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IBM Pushing Microsoft-Free Desktops
walterbyrd and other readers are sending along the news that IBM is partnering worldwide with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, and Red Hat to offer Windows-free desktop PCs pre-loaded with Lotus software and ready for customizing by local ISVs for particular markets. The head of IBM's Lotus division is quoted: "The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux." One example of the cooperation: "Canonical, which sells subscription support for Ubuntu, a Linux operating system that scores high marks on usability and 'the cool factor,' will re-distribute Lotus Symphony via their repositories. Symphony 1.1 will be available through the Ubuntu repositories by the end of August."
This is a perfect example on why IBM stays ahead. They adapt. They went from proprietary to open, from DOS to Linux. From punch cards to computers. Despite how "old" IBM seems, they always seem to adapt, something that some tech companies refuse to do.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Either the url is borked or the story no longer exists, so guessing from what we can read:
"The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux."
So, how I'm reading this is "The slow adoption of Vista provides an opening for Symphony to increase market share" which is a perfectly reasonable strategy for the manager of a product line. (Besides, if you don't like it, you can always download OpenOffice.)
It could also mean "The slow adoption of Vista is cutting into our hardware sales, so we are looking at alternatives to get units out the door" and shipping more copies of Symphony is a happy byproduct.
Either way, it's more new systems that are not running Winders. I don't see a downside.
This could also be read as IBM stating publicly that Vista jumped the shark. ...which is waaaay different from a bunch of geeks in Slashdot saying it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What you're buying is support -- i.e. a voice on the telephone and expertise to get your system running, repaired, upgraded, etc. You're not buying software, and you're certainly not buying licenses.
Canonical support, much like similar arrangements from Red Hat et al, is not on a per seat or per processor basis.
Yes, paying $293 per year for support of a single desktop may seem as exorbitant as the cost of Vista. But what if you roll out 20 machines? If you go the Vista route that's thousands just for the OS, and additional thousands or tens of thousands for the software you actually need.
But with 20 machines, your Canonical support costs are now less than $15 per machine-year. And the support contract comes with an SLA. How much does MS support cost? How much is a seat license for MS Exchange-related products?
How do these costs compare when you move from 20 systems to 100? Or 1,000?
Do you still think you can compare support costs to license costs?
Interesting that Ubuntu will make Symphony available. It is not Free Software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Symphony
Currently the Ubuntu Philosophy allows non-free software only for drivers.
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/philosophy
Penny - plain text accounting
Even my family is just now accepting OpenOffice, ~9 months after switching. They want(ed) MS, but I wouldn't help/let them pirate it.
My brother's laptop's internet dies every 10 minutes, requiring a reboot (some, uh, 'blunt force trama' inflicted with a wall after an he had an argument with my sister), and it drives him nuts (Ethernet and wifi are both aflicted, and an external USB wifi adaptor doesn't help, either). Kubuntu's LiveCD booted and stayed connected to the internet for hours, so it's not a hardware problem, but he won't let me install it. He doesn't want to give up XP (a reinstall of that may help, but again, I won't help him pirate).
So yes, people are brainwashed.
And yes, I probably am, too. But a fanboi has a diffrent mindset from someone who resists anything diffrent for no other reason than it is different.
The advertisers of the eee pc or the new Atom netbooks don't make a big deal of the fact that there's no Windows in the box. "Like a PVR - switch it on - and it works." You are right that most people don't care to know and that is perhaps more insightful than I would have expected from your post. I would say you're very perceptive. I would expect that the lack of spyware and viruses on the PCs after six months will only be considered a pleasant bonus.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I used Linux as my primary OS for the majority of the 7 years I worked at IBM. The internal distribution is of course, based on Red Hat, though I used SUSE, Debian (and Ubuntu) as well. It sucked in the early days of the project because Notes ran under wine, rather than a native client. Now with the Eclipse platform, Notes is a "native" client and works much better. Disparaging remarks about Notes aside, the latest release was quite nice to use. I'm sure development has improved even more in the last year since I left, and it was a complete Windows replacement then.
Easy clear licensing that lets you do as you please was a major innovation for software.
I feel bad for people (myself included, so maybe more of a self pitty) that need to waste time and effort on managing licenses. And then when something breaks, the re-install is a huge pain in the ass.
FOSS took all of that away.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
One day, both the developers quit at the same time due to the manager being the biggest unlikeable bastard that any of us had ever met. This left the "database" completely unmaintained.
The manager ended up contracting a Lotus Notes expert from IBM themselves to do some emergency bug fixing. The following Monday morning, the expert turned up at 9 AM sharp, in an equally sharp suit, and carrying a trademark Thinkpad.
He sat down at a computer, looked at the code, and cried with laughter for a good, solid ten minutes, then got up and left.
See a really good contractor would have found either or both of those developers and have them work for 10x of their normal price and just be the front man. Today it's even easier. Your contractor can say, I'll need today to gather notes and talk to people "so I can give our folks in India the specs" where the folks in India are instead your former now happily highly paid employees.