Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU

RealityThreek sends this excerpt from an article at IT Management:"Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and actually benefiting from the hard times expected next year. ... [Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation] sees Linux and the FOSS ecosystem surrounding it as having insurmountable advantages in any market over its main competitor Windows — advantages that an economic downturn only intensifies. At a time when a search for the lowest possible price point is happening in such areas as notebooks, FOSS is available at no cost. It is easy to rebrand and customize in a way that Windows Isn't, and is also technically more efficient."

Comments

FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[alain94040]

In a recent study of the top 140 corporations in America, 12 were using OpenOffice. That's not exactly much. With the coming recession, I can see quite a few companies deciding to cut their costs and switch to OpenOffice. It beats upgrading to Office 2007, that's for sure.

We only need another 4 companies in that sample to get a 50% market share increase!

Linux also will strenghten its dominant position in servers. Sun is going out of business, just like SGI a few years back. Sun is the only one that doesn't know it yet.

Wait, but if Sun is going out business, who will pay all these engineers who contribute to Open Source projects today? "Houston, we have a problem."

So this pending recession has some good for FOSS, and some not so good. By the way, don't listen to the pundits that tell you the recession will last years. Those same pundits four months ago were saying life is great. They don't have a clue, they just echo the popular opinion of the time.

--
Software Bill Of Rights: transparency, open management, equal rights and revenue sharing

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[larry bagina]

The savings from switching to OpenOffice are no better than the savings from keeping Office 2003.

PS: 4/12 is not 50%.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[AlphaZeta]

The main reason people sticked to proprietary software during economic boom time is that that is something that they have gotten used to and there was no reason to look anywhere else. Now it is a totally different story. May be people will start looking at open source software. Sure, while certain functions people got used to in MS office are not present in OpenOffice, but all this is just superficial and when dollars matter, I think the decision is clear and people will get used to working with open source applications. It might be a slow process, but once people start to realize that open source software can do what proprietary software offered them they will not look back...

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Antique Geekmeister]

OpenOffice will not take much more corporate share until two things happen:

1: A workable replacement for Outlook, Exchange, and its calendar service is released. Too many office personnel use it, and it's not a bad calendar service.

2: Word document compatibility improves quite a lot. Swapping back and forth between OpenOffice and Word still causes nasty layout and compatibility problems, especially for graphics intensive documents and templates made by Microsoft Office users.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Shados]

but all this is just superficial

Far from it. In many companies, MS Office is used as a client, data consumer, for the company's server side processes and databases. MS Word or Excel as part of workflows, Excel as a client for datawarehouses, Outlook integrated with customer's systems, ----SHAREPOINT---- development (thats a big one), etc.

When you're at home using Office to type out a quick document, you may as well be using anything else, doesn't matter much. When Office is an integral part of your processes, you tend to use features that are more..."unique" to it. Its then harder to replace (usually companies that go that route, do so with the idea that the license price of Office is minimal compared to the time saving of using it as a RAD client...). Added to the fact that Office's volume licensing makes it much cheaper than what you'll see if you poke Amazon.com, and in time of recession, its the LAST suite of apps that will be switched over...

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[drsmithy]

And who knows what Windows 7 will bring, it may be that in the final release they remove all compatibility with Office below 2007 in which case showing people that they might not have to be retrained with the (IMO) horrid "ribbon" interface of Office 2007 but a more familiar one of OOo might be enough to convince your boss to go with the free app even if it might take more admin work to make it work.

It's always hilarious to hear the various paranoid rants about how Microsoft is going to deliberately break $OLDPROGRAM so everyone has to upgrade, despite them having one of the best records for legacy support in the industry.

A better example of FUD, it is difficult to think of.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Darinbob]

In a recent study of the top 140 corporations in America, 12 were using OpenOffice. That's not exactly much.

No, that's a lot. You're seeing the cup as half empty, but it wasn't long ago that the cup was completely empty. 12 companies out of the "top" 140 corporations is a big deal. Every single one of those 12 corporations is a big respected company envied by the lesser N-140 corporations. They're the trendsetters, the ones that others watch closely.

If they're successful with OpenOffice (or other non-Microsoft software) then this will encourage other companies to do the same. Since these are large corporations, that means a large number of users are being exposed to Microsoft alternatives

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Antique Geekmeister]

How many Solaris file servers have you run? I've had noticeable issues with them, most often fixed by buying twice as many Linux servers for the same price and gaining reedundancy.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Percy_Blakeney]

Added to the fact that Office's volume licensing makes it much cheaper than what you'll see if you poke Amazon.com, and in time of recession, its the LAST suite of apps that will be switched over...

You're mostly right, but OpenOffice can be used in two different ways: as an office suite and as a weapon in negotiations. Most large companies will do exactly what you say they will -- they'll stick with Office no matter what -- but there will be some that tell Microsoft to lower their price or else, even if they have no real intention of switching.

It's that gradual erosion of Office prices that truly threatens Microsoft over the next 5-7 years, not sudden large defections to OpenOffice. The huge margin that Microsoft has on Office is one of the two financial pillars of the company, and anything that jeopardizes that is a major threat to the company.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Rakishi]

No you simply need to live within your means and consider savings to be the most important thing there is. Most people don't care about savings and spend money as soon as they get it. I lived for the first couple of years out of college absurdly below my means because I wanted to have money in the bank first. In life shit happens and if you don't save money for those occasions then you're an idiot.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[MBGMorden]

The savings from switching to OpenOffice are no better than the savings from keeping Office 2003.

For existing installs, it is indeed probably better to keep an older version of Office. For new purchases however, it might be worth looking into OO.o. We've entertained the idea in the past, but so far have continued to stick with MS Office. It just wasn't worth the extra effort of supporting two platforms. Still though, we're facing some definate budget issues. The state recently cut our budget back 3% across the board, and we're looking at further cuts next budget cycle. Just to get us through the current cycle we've already implemented a hiring freeze and have scheduled 3 unpaid holidays over the next 6 months.

The call has basically come from the higher ups that if we can find a way to save a little here and there, to by all means bring those ideas to them. I'm thinking that I might bring up the OpenOffice option again soon. I'd love to push Linux as a desktop option to really save on the OS licenses, but we just have too many existing proprietary applications to look at it at the moment.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of bullshit "arguments".

If your employees aren't total retards, there is no reason to train them, because there is no relevant difference between MSO and OOo. OOo tried so hard to imitate that crap from MS, that it became crap itself.
Convert all those documents. I think you never ever touched OOo. You can use MSO documents like if they were native formats. No need for any conversion. (Except if you want to keep them for a very long time. But then you would have to convert them to something proper anyway.)

This is actually a problem I see with FOSS on the desktop: The FOSS community does not really fight the companies behind such people like you, spreading bullshit to protect their outdated business model. Remember that those companies fight vor their very existance. So they fight as hard as they can. No remorse.
As long as we don't fight even harder (meaning more intelligently), they are going to win.

And: There is no economic recession. The money just got redestributed to a small group, who tells you that it is "gone".

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[David Gerard]

No-one ever gets training on new versions of Office.

I have worked for large corporations, I'm working for one now. The last time I got such training was 1997, when I was working for a computer training company.

FUDsters keep claiming "but what about the training costs" - there are no such training costs because there is no training. I would like evidence that such training is widespread and expected. I would like evidence that it's anything more than negligible. Statistics, please, not anecdotes.

FOSS is not free...

[Computershack]

The one thing these articles miss out is the massive costs involved in switching over and training staff. The old adage of "Linux is free only if your time is worthless" is especially relevent to the corporate world.

And as they've already got fully working and paid for Windows setups, why would they incur costs they don't need to to switch?

Re:FOSS is not free...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! And air is not free because you still have to expend energy to breathe it!!! So anyone who says you don't have to pay for air is lying to you.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[thetoadwarrior]

To be fair a lot of companies train people on upgraded software whether or not it's FOSS.

We had Lotus Notes 8 training recently and that's an hour out of my life where I struggled to stay away and could have used to code something useful but no, we have to pretend people are stupid and train them on anything where the UI changes a little.

So really you can't count training costs because companies will likely pay that whether or not they move from Office 2k3 to Office 2k7 or OOo.

In regards to going from Windows to Linux. I think the time to get people up to speed is relatively low because

A) In a corporate environment they shouldn't be allowed to install whatever they want so the finer details of Linux aren't needed.

B) Menu layouts are fairly standard thanks to Linux copying Windows who copies Apple.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[Darkness404]

Most CIOs don't like the idea of having their engineers digging through mountains of C/C++ source code, plus Perl, Bourne, GNU make, autoconf, and m4 scripts, to find the source of a bug that they might have to build and maintain independently of the vendor's patch releases. And deploy on potentially dozens of production systems.

That is much, much, much, better than the Windows way. With FOSS you can at least fix a bug, with Windows you basically can report a bug, the MS engineers deny that it is a bug, you insist that it should not be default behavior, 2 weeks + you get a patch that may or may not work.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[Narcocide]

Those "training costs" arguments are at least 99% bullshit though. You ever had an office job? How many of those people really know their way around MS Office? I've got news for you - when forced to actually perform anything more than basic tasks most of those trained employees would find themselves hard pressed to even recognize the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office much less find a bit of advanced functionality from the latter that they are familiar with that isn't in the former.

The same goes for most of the rest of the so-called productivity software - "training costs" really consist of the company now being accountable for addressing incompetence where previously the existing incompetence was just ignored because everyone lies and says they know how to use Office and nobody really knows it well enough to call anyone else out on it.

So in short my point is this: everyone just fakes it anyway. They should sack up and fake it with cheaper software they'll find its not functionally different for basic features and they can't even make use of advanced features so they don't have the right to be whining in the first place.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[mcrbids]

Those "training costs" arguments are at least 99% bullshit though. You ever had an office job? How many of those people really know their way around MS Office? I've got news for you - when forced to actually perform anything more than basic tasks most of those trained employees would find themselves hard pressed to even recognize the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office much less find a bit of advanced functionality from the latter that they are familiar with that isn't in the former.

I frequently see this argument as an indicator that the costs of switching will be low, but my experience tends to lead me to conclude the other way; people who don't know how their Word Processor works will have only memorized the exact keystrokes to get their job done. It can take hours to days for each of these barely conscious cubicle monkeys to identify train, and support the switch to a new set of rote keystrokes and/or mouse clicks.

In review, while they can't necessarily identify or articulate the difference between Office, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and Wordpad, they can sure tell that their Macro installed by $TECHGURU back in 1998 no longer works on the Excel sheet they've been copying and saving for the last 10 years.

Don't believe me? Take a look at some of the user comments from this very recent slashdot article. I once drove 9 hours round trip for a baffling support issue when it turned out that the site administrator needed to SCROLL DOWN to find the icon that we kept insisting HAD to be there!

You don't know until you've spent 2.5 hours discussing the difference between "Save" and "Save As" to a roomful of fearful, distraught staff members of all ages... people who've been using computers every day for 10 years and still don't know the difference...

The cost of switching is much higher than you think.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[Bert64]

Only if you are a large important client with high level expensive support contracts.... If you are paying that much, you could get a better level of support from IBM, Sun or any one of a number of vendors... Or you could just hire some contract programmers to make changes for you. When your willing to throw enough money at the problem that MS would take notice, you would be able to get pretty much anything you wanted from OSS. Do you think MS would port any of their apps to linux if a large affluent customer demanded it? With OSS you have no such limitations, you could get pretty much anything done.

Because of the open nature of OSS it's possible for multiple vendors to provide high levels of support, including developer time, meaning the support becomes a competitive market in it's own right giving you more options, better service and lower prices.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[Bert64]

FOSS only means you're on your own because you haven't paid for support... You're on your own if you get free proprietary software (pirated) too, only the free OSS is actually legal.

You want support for OSS? Buy support from one of the many vendors who provide it. No, it's not free as in beer, free beer software is for technically competent people who don't require support from anyone else.

Support for OSS is actually a lot better than proprietary for a number of reasons...

Support is optional, you can have legal software for free without having to pay for anything, this is great for people who don't need support.
Proprietary software can only really be supported by it's original vendor, leaving a captive market where customers can be gouged... Anyone with a few competent staff can support OSS, there are plenty of vendors out there providing different levels of support for different prices... Shop around and take advantage of the market competition.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[David Gerard]

No-one ever gets training on new versions of Office.

FUDsters keep claiming "but what about the training costs" - there are no such training costs because there is no training. I would like evidence that such training is widespread and expected. I would like evidence that it's anything more than negligible. Statistics, please, not anecdotes.

Alternatives to Outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

The main thing that has kept the last couple of companies I've worked at from switching from Windows to FOSS is the lack of an integrated mail/contacts/calendar/tasks app that runs on our own servers. For us, this was a show-stopper.

I haven't been keeping tabs on the latest FOSS offerings, so nowadays are there any replacements for Outlook and Exchange?

Re:false economy

[timmarhy]

windows 2003 is a perfectly stable OS and easily holds it's own against linux, look at the top uptimes on netcraft for crying out loud.

and the fact that you think $5k is a lot of money to even a medium sized business shows lack of perspective. whats more important is the ability to get trained staff and software that's compatible with your platform. the typical backyard linux guy you discribe comes in with promises of free software, and leaves with fat consulting fee's and a string of boxes running software that's on the knife edge.

FOSS has no cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, there's no cost to download the software. What about the cost to train people how to use it (both in training sessions and in hours of productivity lost by learning it), the cost to hire someone who knows how to administer it, the cost to hire someone who knows how to fix it if it breaks, etc? Yeah, surely the solution to all problems is to switch to a brand new OS / office suite / etc that most people in the company don't know how to use. Let me tell you what is more likely to happen: Some businesses will try FOSS, most that already have Windows/Office will realize there is no pressing need to upgrade their OS / office suite / whatever and stick with their current version.

If you're not convinced, think of the following. A Windows or Office license is maybe 100-200 dollars. Now if you think about the salaries of people who work on a computer for their day job, at many companies they could easily be costing $50-$100 per hour, especially if you include benefits. Do you think that an average person will spend less than 1-4 hours in total learning how to use something like Linux? (Including looking up how to do things once in a while, etc.) I've surely spent more than that looking up how to do random things in Microsoft Office, and I spend way more than that troubleshooting things every time I upgrade Ubuntu. For most companies it's just well worth the $200 to install an OS and productivity suite that everyone already knows how to use.

Stop looking for the "Linux year".

[koolfy]

Here is how I see it :

Those companies are full of windows-users, and installing Linux on their computers at work will NOT make them become linux-users.

Of course, Linux is 'free', of course, it's more flexible, powerful, etc
Of course, people knowing about Linux will probably be more effective in any ways.

However, I must insist : it costs MONEY to get someone using Linux at work, as a tool. Are you people forgeting that those employees only used windows for their entire lives ?? It's not something that can be learned in two hours (not at work, not as an essential tool.)

Please, stop behaving like kids, asking every two months if the time when windows gets down has come or not.
2009 is NOT going to be Linux on anything year. Just like 2008 wasn't and 2007 wasn't.
2009 is going to be another year of increasing overal market share of Linux, like other years. There will be no revolution.

Please, understand that the kind of adoption of Linux you are hoping for will not be a "one-year" revolution. Maybe much people will begin using Linux on their desktop, and it's good. But before Linux becomes proeminent or even common in large companies Linux has to stop being "that cool system that everybody heard about but nobody in the company really masters". If there is recession, those moving-to-linux costs will be too important.
The only way Linux gets enough market share in large companies is that those people working with computers, already made contact with Linux at HOME, and thus don't need any formation.

Just wait.. wait for Linux to be known, used and mastered by the lambda user, and then our society will have the choice to move to Linux without prohibitive costs.

Re:Arguements against moving to FOSS are weak.

[timmarhy]

I think most of those arguments are weak, but that's not why foss isn't being adopted by business. lack of support (real or perceived) , lack of speciality apps used by industry and secret knowledge are the main reason.

Re:time wasted in pointless tasks....

[Bert64]

Most of those people who couldn't install ubuntu, couldn't install windows either (which is actually more difficult to install than ubuntu)... They will get computer repair shops to perform the install for them etc, or remain with the default install the machine came with.

So what's really needed, are more machines with linux preinstalled, priced considerably lower than windows ones...

And pc repair shops that know about linux and try to push it to their customers.... But this is unlikely to happen, because these shops make their money repairing broken windows installs, and linux would significantly decrease their revenue stream.

Demand alone isn't going to cut it ...

[Lazy Jones]

FOSS is not demand-driven unfortunately, so higher demand due to a recession does not mean the projects will flourish. On the contrary, the FOSS contributors might no longer be able to provide their time and money due to economic difficulties.

IMHO, FOSS just needs a lot more guidance, direction, focus, leadership. Experimentation and ad hoc development are good, but the net output is still subpar. We could have fewer, but much better apps with all the manpower spent on FOSS.