Businesses Slow to Adopt Linux

milenko81 and several others submitted this CNET story about corporate spending on information technology. The reporter seems to interpret it negatively because Fortune 1000 companies aren't dumping Microsoft 100% and going for Linux. But interpret it as you will.

Not commercial = bad?

[RagManX]

I'm having this problem with my site. They don't want to go Linux, because they can't blame someone if there is a problem since it isn't a commercial application. I don't understand this, because a)it isn't true (that's why you buy a distro and support package) and b)Microsoft sells commercial applications that have tons of problems, but their license agreement is such that you can't blame them if something goes wrong.

This brilliant company thinking has even extended to the security tools I use here. I can't use freely downloadable tools because someone might have trojaned them. Only if we can pay someone to ship us an install CD can we use it, because if we pay for it, *WE KNOW IT IS SECURE* or something like that. I mean, come on, Microsoft NT 4.0 is super secure, because we paid lots, right?

Let's just face it, techies don't run things, and non-techies are mostly idiots when dealing with this kind of stuff.

RagManX

Re:Not commercial = bad?

[Bobzibub]

Ask them this: "If all the resources of the US DOJ cannot beat Microsoft in court, how can our company's legal council possibly expect to win should they sell us faulty software?"

Re:Not commercial = bad?

[mpe]

Let's just face it, techies don't run things, and non-techies are mostly idiots when dealing with this kind of stuff.

The difference is with most other things the non-techie managers know better than to interfere.
Problem is that too many people think that being able to move a mouse makes them some kind of expert.

Re:It's the price, stupid!

[tclark]

True story about a company where I worked:

One day in a meeting, the president of the company said he was concerned because we were using MySQL. He said something to the effect of "How good can it be if it's free?". I could barely keep from laughing at him as I thought about the free software (Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, CVS, sendmail, etc) that our mission critical apps used. In fact, none of our critical software was proprietary.

Naturally, I didn't think it was necessary to tell him this.

Slow to take up?

[ColaMan]

The reason why companies are slow to take up linux? Because their trial 500GB linux data store is still working though fsck after some idiot MCSE pressed ctrl-alt-del to log in at the console!

It's happened before, and it'll happen again ...

'Gee, I've got this blank text screen thingy and it just says "Username:" ... hmmmm .... I wonder what it's for? I'll just press ctrl-alt-del to log in and ...
OH GOD NO!!! '

Re:Goldman Sachs

[_xeno_]

Anyways--linux is doing fine. Anybody running XP on a p2 266?

Actually, yes. I've used Windows XP on a P2 450 before and it worked quite nicely. It's reasonable to suspect it will work with a 266, although it may need to be moved out of true color mode.

Anyway, my Dad sent me the following about someone who truly decided to shoot themselves in the foot, but anyway:

It seems that he [a course instructor teaching my Dad's group] wondered if you could install it on a system that was less than the minimum requirements published by Microsoft.

He got out a very old system - principle use: doorstop - and tried to install Windows XP RC2 on it. Here are the results:

1) System: 386SX16 with 32Mb memory

2) Install was successful. But it took 5-1/2 DAYS!

3) Time to boot up: 8 hours

4) Time to start up Microsoft Word: 45 minutes

Not a very productive configuration but it actually ran (walked? crawled? even slower?)

this is why !

[fux0rz]

this is fux0ring why big bisnessez don't use linux for reall! cuz it makes you 1337 and condisending, and this is a bad atitude to when you have a client facing team... acting all "lunix is truly a superior operating system" then the client is all liek: fux0r you... you get no $$$ welcome mr www.nt4isGreat.com then you're fux0rd... who cares about j0nux or p00nix whatever... they wanna makka dah money to get their coked up wives into rehab so they don't have to masterbate to pictures of their daughters friends... jeesus peeple get a clue train