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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."
Fear. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. If you complain enough, they'll cut you a deal. If you bet the farm on some hippy software from Finland, at the first sign of trouble, the blame arrow points to you and you get the axe.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
My company is doing a mix between keeping Office 2k3 and very slowly attempting to get people using Lotus Symphony which isn't OOo but it uses the Open Document format. That is all we really need.. Imo, this isn't necessarily about OOo beating Office but getting people using something that allows you to use anything so there is no risk of losing access to your data.
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.
Office 2007 is both expensive and different.
OpenOffice is free and different (some would even argue less different).
That makes it potentially a good value proposition, unless of course you can stay on Office 2003 which is already bought and paid for. But I know companies still on Office 2000 and Office XP and those aren't fully compatible with Vista (and Windows 7) and while they can hang onto WinXP for a bit yet, they can see the end is near.
For them, OOo is genuinely a good value proposition.
to be fair to MS, the reason business chooses them is they are cost effective, not because they are the cheapest. compared to vendors like IBM and redhat, MS products represent good value for money.
does anyone seriously believe windows 2003 with sql server 2005 is a bad platform? i'd suggest if you do you've never used it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
With the coming recession, I can see quite a few companies deciding to cut their costs and switch to OpenOffice.
Switching corporate standards causes temporary increase in costs due to retraining and document conversion. Such a move may be fine in good times, but it is counter intuitive during recession.
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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?
My site moved to Exchange so I replaced my suse desktop with ubuntu and used Evolution to talk to Exchange. It was working well until just before christmas when my windows password expired. I set a new password then evolution refused to work. I will have another look when I go back on monday.
In short: its a bit brittle.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I was aware of the economic downturn since 2004, not because of the global crisis, but because of the local housing bubble. That's because I've been cautious, saving a bit, when possible (I have not automobile, and I live in a small apartment).
I forgot to mention that where I live (Spain), there is a unemployment insurance, that would allow me to get almost 1000 euro/month during two years in case of being fired (after 8 or more continuous worked years -we pay huge taxes here-, the 1000 €/month is the maximum you can get, it depends on your previous salary and paid taxes). In extremis, I think that with savings it could be possible to survive for 4 years with no other additional income (unemployment insurance + savings). Life is very expensive here, despite of the currency exchange, I'm sure you can get more for 1000 USD in the US than in Spain with 1000 euro.
We have a pair of products that are customized tweaks of an opensource ERP/POS combo customized for a particular industry. We've snared two customers away from using Netsuite for their ERP needs and being opensource was a huge hurdle to initially overcome. It takes time for people to understand the concept that they are paying us to come in, install the system, tweak/customize the system for their needs, provide training, and after sale support. The way it works with the POS software is an initial one time fee to do the customization then we provide them with a .iso that is tweaked version of OpenSuSE that is designed to boot and load only the POS software. After that we don't care if they install on one terminal or a million. (Granted we do charge a yearly fee per terminal for backup and support services). Very few other POS systems can offer that.
One of the biggest aces in the hole was PostgreSQL. The cost for us to come in, set up and install everything was cheaper than some other well known DB vendor's cost of database software alone.
Frankly the hardest thing for them to understand was the lack of vender lock-in. If they want, they can hire their own internal IT people to maintain or improve the system or another firm later on. So no matter what happens to us, they will be able to grow and expand the software with or without us.
We deploy on OpenSuSE & SLES by default. No specific reason other than a few months ago during development, SuSE happened to be the first distro where everything worked out of the box.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
In a recession, managers will be even more eager to have nothing to be blameable over. Remember, underlings get sacked first. If they go with Microsoft, the managers will feel reasonably safe, even if it drives the companies under. They will be paid the longest and will be the most likely to be re-hired quickly. Going with Open Source will be seen as taking a risk, something that in risk-averse times will not be looked on favourably even if it DID save the company's bacon.
I see the recession as a time when views will become far more entrenched in existing companies. Start-ups may be willing to go with OSS, as they need to cut costs to a minimum and they don't have shareholders to placate, but expect extreme conservatism to reign supreme. At least for the first half of the recession. After that, some of the brain-dead companies will also be financially dead, and more dynamic companies may well be profiting from their early risks. But that's a year away at best. 2009 will not be a good year for OSS in business, though 2010 might well be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This recession will not last years because pundits say so. Unlike other recessions, this one was predicted decades ago. (have a look at the book "Limits to growth" and the neat time line for peak global industrial output peak. The timing match is quite scary actually). It is not a coincidence that the banking system collapsed on the heels of 140$ a barrel for oil. There is no other currency than energy. Without energy (including food to keep people going), there is no economic "activity". Food production has peaked too, on a global scale. What will happen now, is that as soon as the economy starts moving again, demand of fuel will increase until we reach a level somewhat lower than the peak 85 million barrels a day or so, at which point, due the limited oil production, prices will skyrocket again, and a fragile economy will go right back into recession. The only way out, is reducing quickly energy consumption. And increasing alternatitve energy sources.. However, there is 150 years of infrastructure in oil, and even more in coal.... you can't replace that in a couple of years. It takes decades during which global population will continue to grow, and food production decrease (at an accelerated rate with the decreased availability of natural gas and gasoline). It's not the pundits that predict a long recession. It's mother nature.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Gmail and Google Calendar are not replacements for several reasons.
First being despite how responsive and AJAX, it's still a web client and still slower to work then Outlook.
Second, many companies are not willing to turn over their email to outside party that they cannot control what they do with it.
Zimbra is a nightmare and there is no reason to use Outlook as client but not use Exchange as backend. It might be cheaper but I've never seen anything that plugins to Outlook work as well as native Exchange.
Here are two honest questions:
1. Why did Microsoft make the equation editor in Word 2007 incompatible with that in Word 2003? (And yes, I know that they shipped the old equation as part of powerpoint 2007 and you could discover this with enough effort. But in my setting a few people upgraded and everyone else had to upgrade to be able to edit the new documents. No, the docx update for 2003 did not permit editing of the new equation format.)
2. Why did Microsoft ship Excel 2007 in such a form that it couldn't read old macros (circa Excel 95). In fact they have a simple fix for this, but it's not available unless you contact MS tech support.
I can see two reasons for these omission: 1) stunning incompetence or 2) a deliberate attempt to drive upgrades. I have a hard time believing it's not #2, but I have no evidence.
Just because it's FUD doesn't mean the F, U, and D are not justified.
This entirely ignores the question of how the FOSS people are paying their expenses. Many are no doubt coding on the company's dime, often with only tacit (not official) approval. Wanna bet how many of them get canned in the coming year? Or how many suddenly don't have as much 'free' time to devote to such endeavors?
Some of the classic arguments against FOSS are:
1. It's not free. You still have to train people and migrate data.
Response: But you don't have to pay for the upgrade, more licenses and still have the data migration issue.
2. There is no technical support.
Response: Actually the technical support is far better. Multiple forums exist for most FOSS applications. They usually have the answers too. Have you ever tried to get and answer to a problem with Notes, Tivoli?
3. Not as feature rich.
Response: Do you actually use those weirdo features in MS word? Have you used Firefox lately? Linux almost installs on everything including my fridge! Does Windows?
4. FOSS applications are not as stable.
Response: Certainly some FOSS apps pretty much crash 3 seconds after they launch. However the majority of FOSS applications that we use every day are rock solid. For example the most widely used web server is apache and it's variants.
5. FOSS applications are insecure.
Response: IE is the most hacked browser out there. Enough said.
6. The unspoken argument. Who do I sue when the applications wrecks my business?
Response: To be honest if your business is wrecked by software then you are probably incompetent. Yah there is always a risk. That's what insurance is for. But it doesn't really matter what is in the contract. If your business goes under as a result of IT systems. Well it's under, a law suite won't fix it.
7. If I contribute to FOSS then I will ultimately loose! As my competition gets a free ride.
Response: If you're an IT shop developing the next wonder product this may actually be the case. However if you are an IT shop and you want to off load some of the development of the required peripheral software that enables your wonder product it makes sense to support FOSS. If your Bob's Music and Flower emporium and you have a wizz-kid in the back that is contributing both to the company and the FOSS. The long term benefits are greater. As that software this kid made is now being supported and developed by many many people that you could never have a hope of paying for.
Comment:
I know I've locked the barn door and soaked the building in gas. Flame away if you wish.
HERE ARE SOME SLIDES FROM LIMITS TO GROWTH that I've uploaded. They concern only scenario#2, which is but one of the scenarios developed in the model (and the one I think is turning out eerily close to reality).
Slides 11 and 12 are particular sinister to me.
Obviously, I'm placing them here totally out of context, but when you read the book you see that they do make sense, and how these global variables feedback into each other. (Note. Other slides loosely related)
In the early 90s, there was a recession and linux was created about the same time. Around the turn of the century there was the dot-com bust, and at that time we got bittorrent. These are both pretty revolutionary bits of software. So yes, I'm quite keen to see what free software innovation that this recession fosters :)
While I cannot dispute the fact that Lotus might have used OpenOffice code in Symphony, the author of that article seems to be a paid-shrill for the OpenOffice camp. Check his article history at Linux Journal. He has quite a few articles extolling the benefits of OpenOffice. I'll wait for someone a little more independent to talk about Symphony before passing judgment.
Ok let me get this straight...
You are going to push Open Office and Linux as a cheaper alternative. Fair enough can buy that, but when is it cheaper? Now? Nope, gotta train those people to convert. Gotta work overtime to convert all of those documents. When was this going to be cheaper? Oh yeah 3 years from now when the economy is not in a recession anymore.
This is actually the problem I see with FOSS on the desktop. While the software is free, the training, upgrade, and fix up is not. Hence even in a downturn it ain't gonna happen.
On the server side we can have a different argument, but then again Linux is already making inroads...
Now I actually see a stagnation of Open Source... Those that did, did, those that didn't wont...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"