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

[RichardJenkins]

Amazing. It's like they're saying 2009 some special YEAR OF SOMETHING, oh, I dunno, how best to put it?

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

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

[faragon]

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.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[Tubal-Cain]

They are saying Open Source will gain marketshare, so it must be the YEAR OF BSD ON THE DESKTOP.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[theguyfromsaturn]

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.

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

[rmcd]

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.

Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share

[linhares]

Beautiful. I wish I had mod points

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)

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.

Companies will turn MORE to proprietary stuff

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:FOSS is not free...

[vux984]

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.

Not during recession

[hwyhobo]

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.

Re:Alternatives to Outlook?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:false economy

[Antique Geekmeister]

I cost a lot more than the average Windows guy, as a case in point. On the other hand, I replace about 4 Windows guys in personal productivity, and tend to provide a lot more services on the same amount of hardware, so it's a good investment.

Note also, that $0/box is misleading. Updates cost bandwidth, commercial support costs license money, and some Linux compatible software is licensed in ways requiring payment for commercial use. (The MySQL licenses and their interesting clauses come to mind.) Nevertheless, the ability to do very low-cost or free prototype and testing systems is invaluable in industrial work.

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: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.

We're seeing an uptick

[ducomputergeek]

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.

Don't bet on it.

[jd]

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.

Re:FOSS is not free... Yes, compatible.

[miknix]

Install compatibility mode on Vista, and they ARE fully compatible.

Yes, you are right. The Vista CD fits perfectly on my toaster. Too bad it won't last long.

Arguements against moving to FOSS are weak.

[upuv]

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.

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: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: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.

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.