An employee suggested to me that we disconnect Spam Zombies on a few employees machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of disconnecting it for our employee's day-to-day protection. So I decided to let him disconnect the Spam Zombies (SZs) onto 5 employees computers to see how they got on. Besides, our IT manager had had his disconnect for a while and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the peddling masses?
Once he'd got the employees disconnected we let the employees try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: network speed was a pretty good and the employees could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the Spam Zombies running. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when the Spam Zombie suddenly stopped his daily delivery of penis pills.
Needless to say, the Spam Zombie team offered plenty support whatsoever. I made the employee restart all the Spam Zombies and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
From my experience, the only real heavy use of OSS in the commercial industry is server based. DNS, HTTP, email, database, etc. It's Apache over IIS, qmail over exchange, Postgres/mysql over sql server/oracle, Linux over Unix/Windows Server whatever, etc. The majority of people dropping these systems in place have loads of experience and can figure out problems. Support contracts become moot. I still fail to see where the money is going to come from. And if Linux conquers the desktop, are companies going to pay for dozens of support contracts or hire a couple of guys who know anything and everything there is to know about whatever distro they adopt?
And I speak from the perspective of working for a business who makes heavy use of OSS for the free aspect of it. The uppercase F does not really factor into the equation.
Didn't really answer the question of ???. "It may be commerce but it may be philantropy". Really, the only money to be made out of open source is business using it to cut costs. Unfortunately, that isn't going to put money in any OSS devs pocket.
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An employee suggested to me that we disconnect Spam Zombies on a few employees machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of disconnecting it for our employee's day-to-day protection. So I decided to let him disconnect the Spam Zombies (SZs) onto 5 employees computers to see how they got on. Besides, our IT manager had had his disconnect for a while and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the peddling masses?
Once he'd got the employees disconnected we let the employees try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: network speed was a pretty good and the employees could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the Spam Zombies running. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when the Spam Zombie suddenly stopped his daily delivery of penis pills.
Needless to say, the Spam Zombie team offered plenty support whatsoever. I made the employee restart all the Spam Zombies and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
Wouldn't this be akin to publishing grand jury testimony on the web? Or any other secret testimony? It is against the law to do such a thing.
From my experience, the only real heavy use of OSS in the commercial industry is server based. DNS, HTTP, email, database, etc. It's Apache over IIS, qmail over exchange, Postgres/mysql over sql server/oracle, Linux over Unix/Windows Server whatever, etc. The majority of people dropping these systems in place have loads of experience and can figure out problems. Support contracts become moot. I still fail to see where the money is going to come from. And if Linux conquers the desktop, are companies going to pay for dozens of support contracts or hire a couple of guys who know anything and everything there is to know about whatever distro they adopt?
And I speak from the perspective of working for a business who makes heavy use of OSS for the free aspect of it. The uppercase F does not really factor into the equation.
Didn't really answer the question of ???. "It may be commerce but it may be philantropy". Really, the only money to be made out of open source is business using it to cut costs. Unfortunately, that isn't going to put money in any OSS devs pocket.