Well, this has winkled me out and no mistake! The reality is that Linux is a minority and back-office interest. Fact. No modern enterprise (non-IT) is going to allow its integrity to be compromised by installing a "free" OS on its servers. It's going to go for something it pays for and gets support for - businesses *like* doing business with other businesses. As far as Linux on the desktop, or as a mass OS goes - as long as people mistake a computer OS for a religion and hold out against heresy, not a chance. Linux is no doubt lots-of-fun for a geek to play with and certainly, any of my 5,500 or so users could be taught to use it... but why bother? Once you factor in the time it takes to train the adminsitrators, the time it takes to decode the peculiar install routines for the various hardware fits you may have in your organisation, the time it takes to train the trainers, the time of the trainer and the trainee and multiply it by the number of users and then end up with a bunch of people who can't use Word or Powerpoint and hence can't swap files with people outside the company, the cost/benefit analysis looks very shaky indeed. Let the Linux taliban type their line noise (deliberate troll!) - out in the enterprises, people have their needs adequately catered for by M$, I'm afraid. Elitist talk of people being too "ignorant" to own a computer is nonsense. All our livings depend upon giving the *user* what he or she needs and, vitally, *wants*.
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Well, this has winkled me out and no mistake! The reality is that Linux is a minority and back-office interest. Fact. No modern enterprise (non-IT) is going to allow its integrity to be compromised by installing a "free" OS on its servers. It's going to go for something it pays for and gets support for - businesses *like* doing business with other businesses. As far as Linux on the desktop, or as a mass OS goes - as long as people mistake a computer OS for a religion and hold out against heresy, not a chance. Linux is no doubt lots-of-fun for a geek to play with and certainly, any of my 5,500 or so users could be taught to use it... but why bother? Once you factor in the time it takes to train the adminsitrators, the time it takes to decode the peculiar install routines for the various hardware fits you may have in your organisation, the time it takes to train the trainers, the time of the trainer and the trainee and multiply it by the number of users and then end up with a bunch of people who can't use Word or Powerpoint and hence can't swap files with people outside the company, the cost/benefit analysis looks very shaky indeed. Let the Linux taliban type their line noise (deliberate troll!) - out in the enterprises, people have their needs adequately catered for by M$, I'm afraid. Elitist talk of people being too "ignorant" to own a computer is nonsense. All our livings depend upon giving the *user* what he or she needs and, vitally, *wants*.