Open Office would continue more or less unaffected? I don't think so - 95% of the development effort that goes into OOo is done by Sun employees - when Sun pulls out of OOo the loud thud you will hear is a hugely inscrutable codebase hitting the floor with nobody around that can support it.
How much do you think it is worth for MS to have OOo out of the way? 2 billion? 20 billion? OOo is the single component that makes corporate desktop linux work. It is the kingpin of Open Source software.
Sorry, have to take that one apart;-) At the end of the day, however you look at it, Microsoft is winning, so not on the back foot. They have billions in cash, and that is what counts. FLOSS is threatening those billions, and they have to take defensive action. This is the first time in MS's history that they are being driven into an overall defensive posture.
1.) Do open source project in spare time 2.) Realise people like my stuff and use it 3.) get sacked/quit/start business based on project 4.) ???? 5.) Don't profit 6.) Shut down project
While I must confess to not knowing all the sordid details, I see this kind of stuff all the time - people start a business based on an open source model, without realising that it really is pretty hard - just as hard as running a business on a conventional model. They then act as if the whole world owes them a living.....
The vast majority of the companies I speak to regarding migrating away from MS are primarily driven to do so because of cost and dropped support from MS. The sinbgle biggest driver for a lot of the desktop migrations is dropped support for NT, for example.
Linux is scaring them shitless, and this is their reaction. The great thing is, they are reacting rather then being pro-active. MS seems to be on the back-foot for now.
Oh, BTW - forgot to mention it - Compiere is a really great Open Source package that will probably do what you need, but as it requires an Oracle backend, your customer probably can't afford it.....
$5000 for an assumed lifecycle of 3 years comes down to about $137 a month. If your customer can't afford that, especially for what is likely to be a piece of business critical software, he should consider a different line of work.
My work consists of helping customers evaluate Free / Open Source Software for businesses, and those that only look at FLOSS because it is free as in beer invariably end up not implementing FLOSS.
Those who use FLOSS because of other reasons, such as source code availability etc, usually end up as success stories.
Yes, FLOSS is a very powerful tool for the small business market, and my customers range from the 2-man-band kinda organisations, as well as the top of the Fortune 100, but if your business isn't worth an investment of less then $200 a month for your core system, you have to reasses your priorities.....
Re:If only they still supported PowerPC
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
·
· Score: 1
SuSE supports PPC on their sles platform. The home/standard and pro versions of the distro don't. It might be an idea to recompile the 9.1 distro to ppc though - except for the bootloader and some other little bits and bobs there should not be too much to it, other then loads of processor time. And it so happens I have a G4 sitting under my desk that isn't being used for anything.......
Sorry to burst your bubble here buddy, but that is a load of crap you just came out with. I use Linux 100% of the time as my desktop OS at work (big integrator). No brainer, really, given that I am the head of our Linux / OSS team and that my business card says "Linux Evangelist". We use Notes as our corporate email platform, so Notes is running pretty much all the time on my desk. Using Wine, of course.
On the rare occurance that I need to boot into my WindowsXP partition (to deal with braindead helpdesk drones, or to convert some MSProject or Visio files to a usable format) I always marvel at the fact that Notes runs twice as fast on Windows as it does on Linux. Of course, Wine = Wine is not an Emulator also translates to WinW = Wine is not Windows. To promise performance parity for Wine with Windows is plain stupid.
It is people like you making wildly inaccurate statements about stuff that make my job (convince enterprise customers to use Linux) so difficult. Being honest and open about the capabilities, strenghts and weaknesses of the platform we love so much is more likely to win people over - after all, they get enough lies and deceit from the proprietary side of the fence, don't they?
Setting unmatchable expectations to potential new users is only going to end in dissapointment. If you think that they will be so dazzled and blinded by the cool shit that is happening now that they run Linux, you are sorely mistaken.
Do all of us a favour - you and all your "Linux has no flaws - it is perfect" brigade - and get real, and set real expectations for new users. It is hard enough to fight the MS FUD, I don't need a whole set of Linux propaganda to fight through as well.
I am sure this will be modded flamebait by some kneejerk reactionary moderator, just the other reply to the parent, but what the hey......
I get really pissed off when a 2 second google query becomes a frontpage Ask Slashdot piece. This has nothing to do with Ask Slashdot, and everything with "looky here, how cool am I? I am doing improbable research into an improbable solution! But it's really cool"
and by "liberated" you mean "stolen", right? You don't own a television, you say - well, that is probably because you send all your money to Steve Jobs, for his crazy overpriced hardware, unstable operating system, and half-assed unfinished applications, thus reducing you to thievery. pathetic.
Yeah - OpenAFS is *still* really the only way to go for multi plafrom, disconnected, distributed filesystems. It positively *rocks* - the only downside from my perspective is the unwieldy kerberos management environment, but i am pretty sure that has more to do with my own lazyness and ignorance (wrt learning proper kerberos instead of simply rattling off the HOWTO) as opposed to a fundemental flaw in the system.
What the article's author doesn't get is that maybe Redhat is not so much succesfull because they have a subscription model, but more because their is direct interaction with their userbase (fedora) and the source is Open. A subsciption fee based model tends to be *really* good for the vendor (guaranteed, known cashflow that you can put on the books as revenue) and not so good for the end-user (expensive, bad for your cashflow). I'm sure that this time, the users have wisened up, and are using Linux.
also, the MSFT case wasn't *won* it was settled...
nope - there is something like 4500 years of prior art on this one - bedouin tribes have been using this for ever. I saw this used 10 years ago on holiday in Egypt. So Rolex grabs the first Nigerian that has seen something cool while on holiday and actually implemented it at home, and gives him a friggin "award" for his "invention".
Well, I used to do the cup thing, but then my PHB got an ergonomics expert to come 'round. Apperantly, this is "The New Wave In Usability" and it has something to do with making the Real Men Interface accessible to n00bs and so on. Apperantly, this whole soldering iron thing is the way of the future.
Real Men don't need no stinkin' text based command line - Real Men Never Make Mistakes so Real Men Use Soldering Irons. Hardwire the instructions straight onto the PCB.
You know, this whole "users only use 10% of features, but they are all a different 10%" line gets whipped out every single time MSOffice is discussed, and it is such bullshit. First of all, the average information worker users about 35% of the functionality of an office suite. They may not actually *think* of using it, but most still use them. Most of this functionality is either handed down to them through the use of well designed and implemented corporate templates, or it is locked into some vicious Excel Macro that Bob on the 12th floor made once, and now everybody uses, but nobody knows how it really works. And Bob *did* get hit by that bus last year. Anyhow, your average cubicle-farm inhabitant uses 35% functionality. Real Research(tm) shows that, dependinig on a bunch of variables, such as nature of business, usage of macro's, user attitude, change resistance and some others, between 78% to 97% of the information-worker population can be switched over to OpenOffice.org, no problemo. The rest need to stay on MSOffice for a variety of reasons (complex macro's that are to expensive to switch, Access lock-in, etc). As a rule, task-workers can switch wholesale.
You know what the real kicker is: even in a worst-case scenario, where you can only move 55% or 60% of your users to OOo it is still worth it Some dumbass somewhere decrees that you can only run one Office suite, because it is not economical to do otherwise. Bullshit. Maybe so if your choices are limited to using proprietary software only, but Open source software changes that - the value of you data liberation screws up most TCO models, and the fact that is is low-cost really offsets a lot here.
anyway, point I am trying to make is that this whole 10% stuff is crap. Don't believe the hype.
I usually wouldn't rise to this kind of stuff, but it is either this, or continue working on an extremely boring bid, so what the hey - let's pretend this is Plastic.
Chairman and owner may as well be the same thing, especially in this context. If you think that DC no longer being chairman means that he no longer has influence, buddies, network of friends and - most importantly - longer term interests in the wellbeing of that organisation, you are simply a dumbass, and in need of some serious education in the ways of the world. If, on the other hand, you are simply defending a political idol, through misdirection and half-thruths, you are only a dumbass. If you really, sincerely, think that DC and Halliburton no longer have any linkage whatsoever in any way, shape, or form, then you are truly sad, and in need of professional help.
Monsanto, Monschmanto - who cares about spelling - did you know what I was talking about? You seemed to, sort of - so I communicated succesfully, which is what counts. Anyway, I did not mention Iraq, why did you bring it up? Hmm... must be some knee-jerk reaction on your part. I was, in the context of the story, talking about Australia, but it could equally apply to most other countries. There is no doubt that Monsalto crops are good for the US - it is the rest of the world that I am worried about.
Now, if you could please stop smoking crack, and pass me the crackpipe, I can dispose of it in the appropriate fashion. -- You see, you even got my handle wrong, and read into it what you wanted to see. I think that when the black helicopters really arrive, you would be the first jack-booted thugh to jump out and kick in the door. Don't worry dude - when the revolution comes, you'll be the first against the wall.....
You will be branded a Rogue State(tm), part of The Axis Of Evil(tm), Your President/Prime Minister/Supreme Commander/Russian Overlord will be declared an Evildoer(tm), all your money will be taken, you will be held responsible for a terrorist attack in the form of an executive pretzel swallowing incident, and thus, after your nation has been drained from all resources, brainpower and any other useful assets, it will get the shit bombed out of it. When that is done your country will be placed on the WTO/WIPO shitlist, so your country won't have enough money to recover. Haliburton (owned by the vice prez of the country that wanted you extradited in the first place) will offer to rebuild your infrastructure he so thoughtfully bombed a month before, at outrageous cost, and then Monsalto will come and force GM crops down your populations throats at a high price (subscriptions available, terms and conditions apply), to be paid yearly.
Of course, being a good citizen of the Western World(tm) I merely jest, and at no time have thought any Really Unpatriotic Thoughts.... hang on, what are those black heli [no carrier]
Yeah, totally with you on that - got really tired yesterday of using Mac OSX (what a sad and pathethic excuse for an operating system that is) and decided to put a real OS on my G4 machine. Tried YDL in the past, and didn't like it, so installed Debian. Even used the Debian Installer Beta 3. Wouldn't work. Wouldn't boot, Wouldn't partition properly. RTFM, and tried again, with a similar lack of success. Decided it was to much like hard work, and insalled Gentoo. Install was flawless, easy, and just a lot of fun, really.....
heh - from his profile "From 2000 to 2002, Injong was on leave from his university position to found Togabi Technologies, INC, a startup company that specializes in developing and marketing multimedia applications and services for wireless Internet. He served as CTO/CEO of the company before returning to his academic position in 2003."
Maybe he got sacked as the CTO that didn't manage to make the TCP/IP stack in their chat application work....;-)
Well, now that you reminded me;-) SUSE do have some very cool directory/user management stuff against OpenLDAP - SuSE Linux Standard Server and SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server have a very nice management environment, that uses Samba, OpenLDAP, and all the other usual suspects and slap a pretty sane management frontend against it. it will do Windows Domains, so your windows users should be happy, and will also do Linux users. there are still some issues with using the same credentials against linux as well as windows, and some other minor details, but on the whole it works pretty well......
It is my experience that when people say "I want a directory for my infrstructure" (especially management), they really mean to say "i want a nice, easy, flexible and most of all pretty way of managing users for my systems. OpenLDAP, for all its nice features lacks in most cases the out of the box functionality (it is there, but you have to do a lot of work to make it happen for you) that most people would want. It lacks in most distros the default schemas all set up and ready to go for system authentication. It lacks the nice gui that will do this management in a comprehensive and consistent manner, with rule checking and semantics checking etc.Now, I'm not flaming OpenLDAP, as it is a robust and solid piece of directory work that is simply love to hate, however don't confuse the backend and engine with an "enterprise level solution".
Slashdot Mirror
Open Office would continue more or less unaffected? I don't think so - 95% of the development effort that goes into OOo is done by Sun employees - when Sun pulls out of OOo the loud thud you will hear is a hugely inscrutable codebase hitting the floor with nobody around that can support it.
How much do you think it is worth for MS to have OOo out of the way? 2 billion? 20 billion? OOo is the single component that makes corporate desktop linux work. It is the kingpin of Open Source software.
Think about it.....
This was actually asked sometime ago, sort of - the answer is OpenAFS
Sorry, have to take that one apart ;-) At the end of the day, however you look at it, Microsoft is winning, so not on the back foot. They have billions in cash, and that is what counts. FLOSS is threatening those billions, and they have to take defensive action. This is the first time in MS's history that they are being driven into an overall defensive posture.
Yeah - exactly my thoughts. How does this work?
1.) Do open source project in spare time
2.) Realise people like my stuff and use it
3.) get sacked/quit/start business based on project
4.) ????
5.) Don't profit
6.) Shut down project
While I must confess to not knowing all the sordid details, I see this kind of stuff all the time - people start a business based on an open source model, without realising that it really is pretty hard - just as hard as running a business on a conventional model. They then act as if the whole world owes them a living.....
The vast majority of the companies I speak to regarding migrating away from MS are primarily driven to do so because of cost and dropped support from MS. The sinbgle biggest driver for a lot of the desktop migrations is dropped support for NT, for example. Linux is scaring them shitless, and this is their reaction. The great thing is, they are reacting rather then being pro-active. MS seems to be on the back-foot for now.
Oh, BTW - forgot to mention it - Compiere is a really great Open Source package that will probably do what you need, but as it requires an Oracle backend, your customer probably can't afford it.....
$5000 for an assumed lifecycle of 3 years comes down to about $137 a month. If your customer can't afford that, especially for what is likely to be a piece of business critical software, he should consider a different line of work. My work consists of helping customers evaluate Free / Open Source Software for businesses, and those that only look at FLOSS because it is free as in beer invariably end up not implementing FLOSS. Those who use FLOSS because of other reasons, such as source code availability etc, usually end up as success stories. Yes, FLOSS is a very powerful tool for the small business market, and my customers range from the 2-man-band kinda organisations, as well as the top of the Fortune 100, but if your business isn't worth an investment of less then $200 a month for your core system, you have to reasses your priorities.....
SuSE supports PPC on their sles platform. The home/standard and pro versions of the distro don't. It might be an idea to recompile the 9.1 distro to ppc though - except for the bootloader and some other little bits and bobs there should not be too much to it, other then loads of processor time. And it so happens I have a G4 sitting under my desk that isn't being used for anything.......
Sorry to burst your bubble here buddy, but that is a load of crap you just came out with. I use Linux 100% of the time as my desktop OS at work (big integrator). No brainer, really, given that I am the head of our Linux / OSS team and that my business card says "Linux Evangelist". We use Notes as our corporate email platform, so Notes is running pretty much all the time on my desk. Using Wine, of course.
On the rare occurance that I need to boot into my WindowsXP partition (to deal with braindead helpdesk drones, or to convert some MSProject or Visio files to a usable format) I always marvel at the fact that Notes runs twice as fast on Windows as it does on Linux. Of course, Wine = Wine is not an Emulator also translates to WinW = Wine is not Windows. To promise performance parity for Wine with Windows is plain stupid.
It is people like you making wildly inaccurate statements about stuff that make my job (convince enterprise customers to use Linux) so difficult. Being honest and open about the capabilities, strenghts and weaknesses of the platform we love so much is more likely to win people over - after all, they get enough lies and deceit from the proprietary side of the fence, don't they?
Setting unmatchable expectations to potential new users is only going to end in dissapointment. If you think that they will be so dazzled and blinded by the cool shit that is happening now that they run Linux, you are sorely mistaken.
Do all of us a favour - you and all your "Linux has no flaws - it is perfect" brigade - and get real, and set real expectations for new users. It is hard enough to fight the MS FUD, I don't need a whole set of Linux propaganda to fight through as well.
I am sure this will be modded flamebait by some kneejerk reactionary moderator, just the other reply to the parent, but what the hey......
I get really pissed off when a 2 second google query becomes a frontpage Ask Slashdot piece. This has nothing to do with Ask Slashdot, and everything with "looky here, how cool am I? I am doing improbable research into an improbable solution! But it's really cool"
"I typed 1234 into vi, but when I used read() to get the first integer from the file, it came out 808530483. What happened?"
Eh, yeah. What did happen? You got me in suspense now. Don't leave me hanging on like this.
and by "liberated" you mean "stolen", right? You don't own a television, you say - well, that is probably because you send all your money to Steve Jobs, for his crazy overpriced hardware, unstable operating system, and half-assed unfinished applications, thus reducing you to thievery. pathetic.
Yeah - OpenAFS is *still* really the only way to go for multi plafrom, disconnected, distributed filesystems. It positively *rocks* - the only downside from my perspective is the unwieldy kerberos management environment, but i am pretty sure that has more to do with my own lazyness and ignorance (wrt learning proper kerberos instead of simply rattling off the HOWTO) as opposed to a fundemental flaw in the system.
What the article's author doesn't get is that maybe Redhat is not so much succesfull because they have a subscription model, but more because their is direct interaction with their userbase (fedora) and the source is Open. A subsciption fee based model tends to be *really* good for the vendor (guaranteed, known cashflow that you can put on the books as revenue) and not so good for the end-user (expensive, bad for your cashflow). I'm sure that this time, the users have wisened up, and are using Linux.
also, the MSFT case wasn't *won* it was settled...
nope - there is something like 4500 years of prior art on this one - bedouin tribes have been using this for ever. I saw this used 10 years ago on holiday in Egypt. So Rolex grabs the first Nigerian that has seen something cool while on holiday and actually implemented it at home, and gives him a friggin "award" for his "invention".
Well, I used to do the cup thing, but then my PHB got an ergonomics expert to come 'round. Apperantly, this is "The New Wave In Usability" and it has something to do with making the Real Men Interface accessible to n00bs and so on. Apperantly, this whole soldering iron thing is the way of the future.
Real Men don't need no stinkin' text based command line - Real Men Never Make Mistakes so Real Men Use Soldering Irons. Hardwire the instructions straight onto the PCB.
You know, this whole "users only use 10% of features, but they are all a different 10%" line gets whipped out every single time MSOffice is discussed, and it is such bullshit. First of all, the average information worker users about 35% of the functionality of an office suite. They may not actually *think* of using it, but most still use them. Most of this functionality is either handed down to them through the use of well designed and implemented corporate templates, or it is locked into some vicious Excel Macro that Bob on the 12th floor made once, and now everybody uses, but nobody knows how it really works. And Bob *did* get hit by that bus last year. Anyhow, your average cubicle-farm inhabitant uses 35% functionality. Real Research(tm) shows that, dependinig on a bunch of variables, such as nature of business, usage of macro's, user attitude, change resistance and some others, between 78% to 97% of the information-worker population can be switched over to OpenOffice.org, no problemo. The rest need to stay on MSOffice for a variety of reasons (complex macro's that are to expensive to switch, Access lock-in, etc). As a rule, task-workers can switch wholesale.
You know what the real kicker is: even in a worst-case scenario, where you can only move 55% or 60% of your users to OOo it is still worth it Some dumbass somewhere decrees that you can only run one Office suite, because it is not economical to do otherwise. Bullshit. Maybe so if your choices are limited to using proprietary software only, but Open source software changes that - the value of you data liberation screws up most TCO models, and the fact that is is low-cost really offsets a lot here.
anyway, point I am trying to make is that this whole 10% stuff is crap. Don't believe the hype.
I usually wouldn't rise to this kind of stuff, but it is either this, or continue working on an extremely boring bid, so what the hey - let's pretend this is Plastic.
Chairman and owner may as well be the same thing, especially in this context. If you think that DC no longer being chairman means that he no longer has influence, buddies, network of friends and - most importantly - longer term interests in the wellbeing of that organisation, you are simply a dumbass, and in need of some serious education in the ways of the world. If, on the other hand, you are simply defending a political idol, through misdirection and half-thruths, you are only a dumbass. If you really, sincerely, think that DC and Halliburton no longer have any linkage whatsoever in any way, shape, or form, then you are truly sad, and in need of professional help.
Monsanto, Monschmanto - who cares about spelling - did you know what I was talking about? You seemed to, sort of - so I communicated succesfully, which is what counts. Anyway, I did not mention Iraq, why did you bring it up? Hmm... must be some knee-jerk reaction on your part. I was, in the context of the story, talking about Australia, but it could equally apply to most other countries. There is no doubt that Monsalto crops are good for the US - it is the rest of the world that I am worried about.
Now, if you could please stop smoking crack, and pass me the crackpipe, I can dispose of it in the appropriate fashion. -- You see, you even got my handle wrong, and read into it what you wanted to see. I think that when the black helicopters really arrive, you would be the first jack-booted thugh to jump out and kick in the door. Don't worry dude - when the revolution comes, you'll be the first against the wall.....
You will be branded a Rogue State(tm), part of The Axis Of Evil(tm), Your President/Prime Minister/Supreme Commander/Russian Overlord will be declared an Evildoer(tm), all your money will be taken, you will be held responsible for a terrorist attack in the form of an executive pretzel swallowing incident, and thus, after your nation has been drained from all resources, brainpower and any other useful assets, it will get the shit bombed out of it. When that is done your country will be placed on the WTO/WIPO shitlist, so your country won't have enough money to recover. Haliburton (owned by the vice prez of the country that wanted you extradited in the first place) will offer to rebuild your infrastructure he so thoughtfully bombed a month before, at outrageous cost, and then Monsalto will come and force GM crops down your populations throats at a high price (subscriptions available, terms and conditions apply), to be paid yearly.
Of course, being a good citizen of the Western World(tm) I merely jest, and at no time have thought any Really Unpatriotic Thoughts.... hang on, what are those black heli [no carrier]
Yeah, totally with you on that - got really tired yesterday of using Mac OSX (what a sad and pathethic excuse for an operating system that is) and decided to put a real OS on my G4 machine. Tried YDL in the past, and didn't like it, so installed Debian. Even used the Debian Installer Beta 3. Wouldn't work. Wouldn't boot, Wouldn't partition properly. RTFM, and tried again, with a similar lack of success. Decided it was to much like hard work, and insalled Gentoo. Install was flawless, easy, and just a lot of fun, really.....
heh - from his profile "From 2000 to 2002, Injong was on leave from his university position to found Togabi Technologies, INC, a startup company that specializes in developing and marketing multimedia applications and services for wireless Internet. He served as CTO/CEO of the company before returning to his academic position in 2003."
;-)
Maybe he got sacked as the CTO that didn't manage to make the TCP/IP stack in their chat application work....
Yes it does - in fact plans are afoot to insert some stupid litte software thingy on your cartridge and then it will be a DMCA violation.
Well, now that you reminded me ;-) SUSE do have some very cool directory/user management stuff against OpenLDAP - SuSE Linux Standard Server and SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server have a very nice management environment, that uses Samba, OpenLDAP, and all the other usual suspects and slap a pretty sane management frontend against it. it will do Windows Domains, so your windows users should be happy, and will also do Linux users. there are still some issues with using the same credentials against linux as well as windows, and some other minor details, but on the whole it works pretty well......
It is my experience that when people say "I want a directory for my infrstructure" (especially management), they really mean to say "i want a nice, easy, flexible and most of all pretty way of managing users for my systems. OpenLDAP, for all its nice features lacks in most cases the out of the box functionality (it is there, but you have to do a lot of work to make it happen for you) that most people would want. It lacks in most distros the default schemas all set up and ready to go for system authentication. It lacks the nice gui that will do this management in a comprehensive and consistent manner, with rule checking and semantics checking etc.Now, I'm not flaming OpenLDAP, as it is a robust and solid piece of directory work that is simply love to hate, however don't confuse the backend and engine with an "enterprise level solution".