Linux In 2009 — Recession vs. GNU 355
RealityThreek sends this excerpt from an article at IT Management:"Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and actually benefiting from the hard times expected next year. ... [Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation] sees Linux and the FOSS ecosystem surrounding it as having insurmountable advantages in any market over its main competitor Windows — advantages that an economic downturn only intensifies. At a time when a search for the lowest possible price point is happening in such areas as notebooks, FOSS is available at no cost. It is easy to rebrand and customize in a way that Windows Isn't, and is also technically more efficient."
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:3, Informative)
I've admittedly not worked with Google's calendar. But the alleged 'drop-in replacements' for Exchange aren't, or at least not yet: they just don't work well with real Outlook clients. Replacing the tight integration of Outlook with its calendar tools is very difficult. All of the Exchange replacements seem to require an unstable and unreliable 'Connector' to inter-operate with Outlook, and it costs a lot more to support in IT resources and wasted user time than simply buying an Exchange server.
A mail client that uses an open source calendar source, and integrates it well with email, would be a great Outlook replacement, but I've not seen this either. Evolution, for example, behaves very poorly with its Exchange service, at least the last time I tried it. And don't even think of suggesting 'Horde': I spent a lot of time trying to get it integrated and working in a production kenvironment, and it was awful.
Replaceing both Outlook and Exchange together is theoretically possible, but it would have to have very tight, effective calendar and email integration. Is Gmail and Google Calendar working well? Even if it is, it raises the problem that your calendar and email are off-site and you are vulnerable to data theft and loss of services if your external connection is cut.
Re:Not during recession (Score:3, Informative)
No-one ever gets training on new versions of Office.
I have worked for large corporations, I'm working for one now. The last time I got such training was 1997, when I was working for a computer training company.
FUDsters keep claiming "but what about the training costs" - there are no such training costs because there is no training. I would like evidence that such training is widespread and expected. I would like evidence that it's anything more than negligible. Statistics, please, not anecdotes.
In addition, it reads and writes the 97-2003 .DOC format just fine.