[ILUG] Interesting article

[Kevin Philp]

On Thursday 28 April 2005 15:41, PJ Wall wrote:
>Niall O Broin wrote:
>> On 28 Apr 2005, at 15:21, PJ Wall wrote:
>>> Yep, I have no problems agreeing with you Niall, but I'm currently
>>> researching a thesis in this area at the moment, and that is exactly
>>> what a number of organisations are telling me.
>>> We all have to remember that some decision makers in organisations
>>> may not be aware of Open Source.  I agree with you that this is NOT
>>> an insurmountable obstacle as you say, but I also firmly believe that
>>> it IS a pretty big one.
>>>
>>> The incentives to go OSS are greatly diminished if a "critical" app
>>> is not Windows compatible.  Getting a similar app written can be
>>> expensive and time consuming, and there are no guarantees that the
>>> same functionality will be delivered.  We all know about the
>>> "software crisis" right?
>>>
>>> All I'm saying I suppose is that I think organisations with limited
>>> IT budgets (not to mention ROI considerations) are willing to put up
>>> with all the expense, poor reliability, and hassle that proprietary
>>> software brings, if the alternative is a switch to OSS that involves
>>> uncertanty and writing new software from scratch.
>>
>> IMO what's happening here, in a lot of cases, is that Linux is gaining
>> a lot of visibility, and senior people in organisations are musing
>> "Hmm - maybe we could use that". They ask the question of their IT
>> people who in many cases are diehard MS users and they seek something
>> to reinforce their position so they say "We can't move to Linux
>> because the XYZZY application is not Linux compatible" and as far as
>> they're concerned, the monkey is off their back.
>>
>> Any organisation deploying IT solutions should be evaluating those
>> solutions on a cost/benefit analysis basis, taking all factors into
>> account. If they were to consider a switch to Linux, one of those
>> factors would be say staff training costs, which for admin. staff
>> might be quite high. However, it's an awful lot easier to simply say
>> mention the XYZZY factor as above, and stay where you are, than to do
>> a reasoned cost benefit analysis.
>>
>> Never underestimate the power of inertia as a determinant of human
>> activity.
>>
>>
>>
>> Niall
>
>Niall
>
>Well said... I could not agree more.
>
>This is a very accurate representation of what I am finding as I
>continue researching this.

As we are a small company that does use Linux on desktops and servers I have 
noticed several things about my fellow small companies:

Generally they know nothing about computers and don't care. Its a tool. 
Computers as such just don't interest them.

Buying computers and software is an accepted cost of doing business. They 
expect to pay serious money so are not surprised when they do.....Inertia

Most where never offered a choice. The contractor just quoted for WIN servers 
and workstations (although I got a friend to request a Linux option... he 
never got it but they offered him a discount instead so he was 
happy!)......inertia again.

Most are shocked that we operate without MS/WIN and are further shocked at 
what we can do.... backups every hour, Apache Intranet giving access to our 
databases, hot desking with NIS/NFS, programs that dump data directly into 
OpenOffice complete with formatting.

At the end of the day we have Linux because I pushed it........If I wasn't 
here this would be a MS/WIN company because the others in the company are in 
the don't know, don't care category when it comes to computers. One of the 
bosses still gets Linux name wrong but all he wanted to know was: will it 
work? will it save money?

Kevin.