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IBM Launches Microsoft-Free Linux Virtual Desktop
VorlonFog writes "According to Information Week, IBM has introduced a line of business computers that avoid Microsoft's desktop environment in favor of open source software. IBM worked with Canonical and Virtual Bridges to create the platform, which IBM claims saves businesses $500 to $800 per user on software licenses and an additional $258 per user 'since there is no need to upgrade hardware to support Vista and Office.'"
one small step for OSS...
because for some strange reason, we're not allowed to use the word "Windows" anymore due to the DMCA...
And this is better than virtualizing $LINUXDISTRO + OpenOffice.org how?
To me, the most interesting part of this short article is this:
Revenue from Microsoft's Client division, which derives mostly from Vista... edged up just 2% year over year... despite the fact that the overall PC market grew 10% to 12% during the same period.
Developers: We can use your help.
On linking to the "Printable Article" rather than 6 pages of 3 sentences each (I'm assuming since I didn't bother to look) that is the standard format for Information Week!
My Babylon
IBM claims the system can save businesses $500 to $800 per user on Microsoft software licenses and an additional $258 per user "since there is no need to upgrade hardware to support Windows Vista and Office."
This seems like a good idea. The relationship of 'cheap' is directly proportional to 'easy maintenance' in this case. (Expressing this relationship very loosely anyhow.) The necessities are covered with a list of typical applications, but is there anything missing here?
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
I'm posting anonymously because I don't want to have people at my company know who I am. But it seems to me that Linux while cheap to buy is not cheap to keep patched and secure, particularly in a fleet of inhomogeneous platforms and users and network,printer, or disk sharing conditions in different buildings and subnets.
The nice thing about Linux however is that a very skillful and thoughtful person can plan out a very robust network and can mange the patches. But it takes effort, dicsipline and an above avegage IT guy. And if you lose that person, you are screwed. Even a new equally skilled guy probably can't get all the scripts and stuff the last guy used to manage to work.
With windows, you can take a balow average imbecile, get them through a certification course, and they become almost interchangable monkeys. you need a lot of them since you will constantly be fighting fires or hunting down the right driver for the given brand of computer, but they can do it and it will work.
Moreover, and this is the critical part, a manager who is not an expert can tell if his monkies are keeping up with patches. MS tells him what he need to do. With Linux you can't really tell if the IT guy is doing it all, or if your pants are around your ankles.
So it's not enough to use Linux to reduce TCO. you need to have a company like IBM telling you how to manage your configuration. Not because a skillful IT can't. But because a manager will know that IBM has his back.
saddly a mediocre virus prone Windows network is, to a manager, much easier to sleep at night, than a well run Linux system that's tight as a ducks Ass, simply because he knows it's reasonably safe from an industry standard point of view.
people will trade, extremes (linux) for mediocre, if they can limit thier risks.
I note this is one reason people think macs have low TCO. They are more secure than windows, and a manager can also know if they are getting patched right. So it's win win.
Wow, this sounds fantastic! Instead of using Ubuntu with OpenOffice from the repos, and paying Canonical for support, or, say, being able to pay *ANYONE* for support, since I have the full source...
I can be locked into paying IBM for support for all the proprietary binaries! What a great idea!
...except not.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What do we do about Powerpoint, Xcel, Visio, and the other MS utilities? Please don't act like OO is a feasible alternative for these programs. Other than that I would be a huge fan of this.
Install the alternative application of your choice. I work with and collaborate with a Microsoft world 100% from linux and/or BSD. The only thing that's ever hung me up was creating Visio diagrams. Reading them is no problem. I read/create Powerpoint presentations, read/create/share Excel spreadsheets, Word, you name it. Oops, I forgot Access... I just never have to deal with it (I make it clear that I won't have anything to do with Access).
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
One of the things that truly sucks about Windows is the registry. Each windows box is its own unique little snowflake, thus impossible to replace easily.
If this is done right, all the configuration is in the user's home ditrectory, probably shared on the network, and the rest of the system is a standard image. That means any user can use any computer and have their system where they want it.
This is no surprise to us UNIX folk, but POWs "Prisoners Of Windows," will love it. Imagine being able to replace/upgrade your computer simply by dropping a new box in front of you. Your settings completely unchanged!!!
I have been doing this with Linux for so long (separate /home disk that persists), I can't believe people still put up with Windows nonsense.
I noticed that these computers make use of Lotus Symphony rather than Open Office, so I did a little reading. Lotus Symphony is based on an Open Office back end with a custom front end. This front end has gotten mixed reviews for having a better interface than Open Office, but less features.
Symphony is not open source. Open Office is open source, but has loose licensing rules which allow Symphony to build off of it without contributing back. Symphony is free, which is nice, but IBM retains control of it.
Control is the key here. The point of Lotus Symphony, and the point of this line of computers, is the same: to sell other Lotus software which will tie in with Symphony, and to sell support for Lotus products.
This isn't such a bad thing, really. Having an IBM-backed line of Linux business machines will give Linux a better reputation in the business world. However, I am wary of the closed source Symphony becoming a standard for Linux business machines. Also, if IBM is going to benefit from Open Office, I hope that they would also contribute back to it.
I haven't found Visio to be highly useful, personally.
Umm. So what. Other people do. If it is not on there then it is a problem. Heck I would be happy for a mac port of Microsoft Project.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Has anyone used the Symphony Applications that come with them? We have Notes here at our shop, and it's worthless. Well, there are always things that one can fudge, but try putting VBscripts even in Mac Office. It just isn't the same.
No, there's so much more. There's no CD drive, no USB drive, no external drive of any sort. There's no custom software or anything requiring its own license. We have a thin client terminal within the intelligence community called the DTW (Domain Trusted Workstation) that is pretty much universally despised by its users. DIA et al think it's a great idea though. Tom Freidman in his new book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded seems to think that it is the wave of the future though, even for home users. Let's just say I'll remain skeptical.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Please don't act like OO is a feasible alternative for these programs.
Why not? And please, be very specific.
Some stuff doesn't work exactly right, but they offer pretty robust file compatibility. If you have coded yourself into a corner and are dependent on their VBA platform, now is a good time to start getting off the junk.
The only program for most businesses that's missing is a full featured and multi-user accounting package like Quickbooks. There are certain programs which have zero alternatives, like Final Cut, Photoshop (for serious CMYK), Autodesk products, etc. But the beauty of OOo is that those windows and mac users can be on the free office platform, and as soon as the vendor offers a Linux release or a viable alternative arises, you have one less thing to migrate.
Migration is painful, but if you choose the right platform to move to, it can be worth it. I recently moved a small office from SBS 2003 to an Ubuntu box. It was time consuming, and there were a lot of unforeseen problems the first few days, but now they have stopped obsessively checking the server to make sure it's still working, they receive far less spam, and when a free alternative to Quickbooks arrives, they will use all of the same programs - OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird - and only their OS will change.
Building the bridges to dumping Windows is key. In my opinion, the open source community should focus on releasing cross platform applications and frameworks. Once you make the choice of Windows or Linux trivial for application support, people will undoubtedly choose the cheaper operating system, especially during the next few years while the economy is suffering worldwide.
Well, the Open Software programmers have done a great job of providing a very capable platform. But it is not the technical excellence that is keeping MSFT well entrenched. From barely legal tactics forcing the vendors to do things, playing with device drivers, many many marketing and business practices help MSFT maintain its hold. No matter how good the OS codes are, it is going to take significant investment to pry the users from proprietary MSFT format. Let IBM match MSFT in these tactics. The fall out would be good for the general community.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Heck I would be happy for a mac port of Microsoft Project.
Have you tried Omni Plan? I've been impressed with their products in general and supposedly it imports and exports to MS Project. Obviously it's not MS project and I have no idea how good the import/export work.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
and an additional $258 per user 'since there is no need to upgrade hardware to support Vista and Office.'"
Since when have people been upgrading to vista?
Wow, this sounds fantastic! Instead of using Ubuntu with OpenOffice from the repos, and paying Canonical for support, or, say, being able to pay *ANYONE* for support, since I have the full source...
I can be locked into paying IBM for support for all the proprietary binaries! What a great idea!
...except not.
Free clue: People are moving away from Microsoft for a whole bunch of reasons.
"It's expensive" is a common one.
"We're being pressured into upgrades we don't want to make" is another.
"It's proprietary and only Micosoft can support it" is very rare indeed. Go look in the Yellow Pages and you'll find hundreds of companies prepared to support Windows. Obviously they're a bit stuck if you hit a problem that's caused by a bug which cannot easily be worked around, but these are seldom enough that it's not really a big problem.
No, there's so much more. There's no CD drive, no USB drive, no external drive of any sort.
Might work in a call centre but in many other parts of business, one size doesn't fit all.
If you are a Fortune 1000 company, you send documents OpenOffice can't deal with back to the suppliers who submitted them and tell them to get it right next time or lose the contract, same as you did back when you were using Microsoft Office.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
While a hassle- and flash-free version of the article seems nice the linked page also does not seem to contain any adverstising. How does InformationWeek pay their authors and bandwidth bills (Slashdot seems to add a lot to the latter)?
Right: They pay the same way Slashdot does. With ads. It's a one page article:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212202109
EWeek also has an interesting write up with more technical details.
And for the terminally lazy, here's the link.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
For Project I use OpenProj from Projity. I use Thunderbird for all of my mail - calendar working with Exchange via WebDAV.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Can you be sure of that? Maybe he has a valid account that never replies to the same topics and posts insightful comments then uses that account to mod himself up...
You'd never know it. For all you know, twitter and those other accounts are burning up your mod points on his posts so you can't use them on truly deserving posts.
You'd have to spend an extreme amount of time on the meta-moderate page hoping to get a twitter story to "unmod" it. That is, if you even see a twitter post that gets modded up. You'd have to open each one and look for the author.
There are so many different scenarios that could be playing out and you'd have no clue without being able to see the IP trail.
Obviously Slashdot doesn't care about it as much as you do because they haven't started filtering the number of accounts permitted by IP. They wouldn't do that because of firewall banning concerns. Even if they did, there are anonymous relays all over the web that they could use if they REALLY wanted to.
So really, is it worth burning mod points/posts/time on something you aren't sure about and has such a little impact to your life?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The Year of the Linux (Virtual) Desktop!
If it helps to destroy Apple and their fanboys, I will just support that. Apple fanboys are the evil enemies of humankind.
And those that are mere reactionaries to the fanboys, such as yourself, are even more pathetic. Wait, what of those who are reactionary to the reactionaries to the fanboys? Oh shi...
Retraining costs and new IT infrastructure costs. Infrastructure includes human support training (i.e. IT Guys that have to support new software). In the long run it's supposed to be a win; however, in the short term and long term, there are very real costs, many more in the short run.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Chances are good that IBM isn't really targeting your desktop with this plan. IBM knows that every large business (and most smaller businesses) have tons of desktops where Windows and MS Office are overkill. In these situations thin-client or virtualized Linux desktops make perfectly good sense, and there really is a great deal of money that can be saved by going this route.
Some employees, on the other hand, really do need their Windows machines, and that's fine, as IBM's Lotus Software also runs on Windows.
You see, this may appear to be an attack on Windows, but that's not really the case at all. The real attack is on MS Office as the default business document format for the business. IBM is happy to let some power users still use Excel, Visio, and PowerPoint, as long as Lotus software is installed as well (to work with the non-power users). Heck, it wasn't that long ago that Microsoft used the same tactic to supplant Lotus 1-2-3.
If you drink Microsoft's Kool-Aid then you have little choice but to deploy PCs running Windows and MS Office everywhere. Licensing fees quickly add up, as does the cost of maintaining that many PCs. IBM is simply offering a lower-cost alternative for the least demanding of your users. The catch is that if you want your power users to be able to communicate with your non-power users you are going to have to adopt Lotus software across the board.
For some of IBM's customers this arrangement is likely to be compelling. For others, not so much.
I accidentally chopped out some fairly important information there while editing ... let me clarify:
I'd also like to point out that I haven't used the latest version of Notes, so my comments are limited to versions 7 and previous. I've heard that the latest versions are much improved from a UI standpoint, particularly for users who don't do anything with the "Notes platform" besides use it for email and calendaring, and is actually based of all things on Eclipse (yes, the IDE), but I've not gotten an opportunity to play with it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A lot of development is moving away from the waterfall model that helped MS project become so entrenched in the first place.
We've moved to using scrum (a form of agile development), which has no use for MS Project. We do use ScrumWorks Pro, but that's mostly because we have developers and QA spread around the word. It's a java app that works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, so there's no platform lock-in.
It has a lot of and graphs for the manager types to look at, and does seem to help developers spend more time developing and less time deciding what they should do next. It's not perfect, but it's better than a bunch of Gantt charts.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Then there are the years of mindless "advocacy" that bring everyone on Slashdot down by association and hurt FOSS more than anything Microsoft could do
Hmmm....that's an interesting idea. Twitter could actually be the ultimate Microsoft astroturfer, keeping the people on the brink of switching from seeing the *good* side of the Linux-using community.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The only program for most businesses that's missing is a full featured and multi-user accounting package like Quickbooks.
Really?
Have you seen MyBooks/MyBooksPro from Appgen?
Server runs on Linux, and they have Linux, Windows and OSX clients.
Been using it here for years.
It will even IMPORT your Quickbooks data!
PLUS, unlike the ubiquitous Quickbooks, MyBooks is a double-entry, fully audited accounting system that conforms to the standards of GAAP.
Windows is not the answer.
Windows is the question.
The answer is "NO."
Something which is 10 pages in OO as a .doc will only show up as 8.5 on Windows
Something which is 10 pages in MS Office can be 8.5 pages in MS Office on a different machine with different printer drivers and fonts installed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Except that this includes IBM Lotus Symphony, which is not OSS. And maybe some other non-free things as well.
Actually yes, MS had released specs for a lot of their proprietary formats in the last two years under their "Open Specification Promise" (e.g. full docs for Office binary file formats and CIFS). Exchange is not on the list yet, but that list grows pretty fast, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it there eventually.
I've seen where one option is to have Ubuntu installed on the desktop and IBM apps fed from a server but wondered where the backward compatibility was. In one article, it was said that the Win4Lin people were involved but still nothing about legacy Windows. I figure it is in there somewhere. The world can't live on Ubuntu, Notes, and Lotus Symphony/OOo alone. Yet. 8-}
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Rather than a plethora of computers to choose, from manufacturers as varied as Apple to Zenith, there was a "safe" choice.
One of the big questions about microcomputers was "what can it do?" As far as business went, there wasn't much a microcomputer could do for them (word processing was already very well handled by specific systems built for that use). That changed with Visicalc - the first spreadsheet. And Visicalc ran on the Apple II. Apple II was a part of the package that defined business use of microcomputers. That helped drive sales of Apple computers and turn microcomputers in to a multimillion dollar industry (of which Apple was a major part). And it was what caught IBM's attention who then introduced their PC.
Yeah, sure... there was always the "you'll never be fired for buying IBM" thing going on. But it was also IBM entering the market that got people wondering what was useful about microcomputers and even noticing that a revolution was going on around them. Picking IBM over Apple would become a factor later (to Apple's detriment).
But again - the point is that nailing down a particular "year of the microcomputer" isn't so easy. It was already happening before IBM took notice. It was already happening before TIME took notice. It wasn't yet happening until Compaq shipped their first product. It hadn't happened until the Internet gave home computers killer apps; email and the World Wide Web. The "year" of the microcomputer spans over a decade.
Likewise, Linux is intermixed in history. It's fun to poke at those who so badly want Linux to be a run-away success story of disruptive technology (akin to the microcomputer). But the meme is nonsense. Our tech history has never worked that way. It just seems like it does to those who one day wake up to a whole new world that appears to spring up around them like technical mushrooms.
How can you be "terminally lazy"? Too apathetic to dial 911 while you're bleeding on the kitchen floor? Don't want to go to the hospital to get your chemo?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Ummm, you mean the "promise" ... er, requirement ... that they fought against the EU over for four years until they were fined over a billion dollars?
I don't give them much credit for that. It's all the EU's doing.
Put identity in the browser.
I do apologise, I wasn't aware that my perception of my own companies desktop environment was so wrong - obviously you know more about it than I do!
In an ideal world, LoB applications will closely follow the current 'best practices' or ideas - in this case, web applications. We are not in an ideal world, we are in a world where I work for a 25 year old company who have had internal software development done from day one. Any company of age will have lots of 'hidden' LoB applications that sit quietly on someone or others desktop doing their job, never needing to be rewritten because they do it so well - and they certainly wont get rewritten just because the current best practice has changed.
That is the reality. That is the reality most companies of age live in. That is the reality most of Slashdot seems to gloss over.
Your statement may be true if you include the word 'new' in there, but in a company that has legacy systems it most certainly is not true.
Also, you seem fixated on Microsoft software - there are other vendors out there, and the lack of an alternative on a different platform is just as limiting as any MS software we 'need'. To put it bluntly - I would say that for a large proportion of businesses, MS software is not the issue with migrating to different platforms, while legacy systems most certainly are.
Thats the reality.