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."
Companies will turn MORE to proprietary stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
Fear. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. If you complain enough, they'll cut you a deal. If you bet the farm on some hippy software from Finland, at the first sign of trouble, the blame arrow points to you and you get the axe.
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:FOSS is not free... (Score:5, Interesting)
The one thing these articles miss out is the massive costs involved in switching over and training staff. The old adage of "Linux is free only if your time is worthless" is especially relevent to the corporate world.
Office 2007 is both expensive and different.
OpenOffice is free and different (some would even argue less different).
That makes it potentially a good value proposition, unless of course you can stay on Office 2003 which is already bought and paid for. But I know companies still on Office 2000 and Office XP and those aren't fully compatible with Vista (and Windows 7) and while they can hang onto WinXP for a bit yet, they can see the end is near.
For them, OOo is genuinely a good value proposition.
false economy (Score:2, Interesting)
to be fair to MS, the reason business chooses them is they are cost effective, not because they are the cheapest. compared to vendors like IBM and redhat, MS products represent good value for money.
does anyone seriously believe windows 2003 with sql server 2005 is a bad platform? i'd suggest if you do you've never used it.
Not during recession (Score:3, Interesting)
With the coming recession, I can see quite a few companies deciding to cut their costs and switch to OpenOffice.
Switching corporate standards causes temporary increase in costs due to retraining and document conversion. Such a move may be fine in good times, but it is counter intuitive during recession.
Re:Alternatives to Outlook? (Score:5, Interesting)
The main thing that has kept the last couple of companies I've worked at from switching from Windows to FOSS is the lack of an integrated mail/contacts/calendar/tasks app that runs on our own servers. For us, this was a show-stopper.
I haven't been keeping tabs on the latest FOSS offerings, so nowadays are there any replacements for Outlook and Exchange?
My site moved to Exchange so I replaced my suse desktop with ubuntu and used Evolution to talk to Exchange. It was working well until just before christmas when my windows password expired. I set a new password then evolution refused to work. I will have another look when I go back on monday.
In short: its a bit brittle.
Re:false economy (Score:3, Interesting)
to be fair to MS, the reason business chooses them is they are cost effective, not because they are the cheapest. compared to vendors like IBM and redhat, MS products represent good value for money.
Re:false economy (Score:5, Interesting)
I cost a lot more than the average Windows guy, as a case in point. On the other hand, I replace about 4 Windows guys in personal productivity, and tend to provide a lot more services on the same amount of hardware, so it's a good investment.
Note also, that $0/box is misleading. Updates cost bandwidth, commercial support costs license money, and some Linux compatible software is licensed in ways requiring payment for commercial use. (The MySQL licenses and their interesting clauses come to mind.) Nevertheless, the ability to do very low-cost or free prototype and testing systems is invaluable in industrial work.
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:4, Interesting)
I forgot to mention that where I live (Spain), there is a unemployment insurance, that would allow me to get almost 1000 euro/month during two years in case of being fired (after 8 or more continuous worked years -we pay huge taxes here-, the 1000 €/month is the maximum you can get, it depends on your previous salary and paid taxes). In extremis, I think that with savings it could be possible to survive for 4 years with no other additional income (unemployment insurance + savings). Life is very expensive here, despite of the currency exchange, I'm sure you can get more for 1000 USD in the US than in Spain with 1000 euro.
We're seeing an uptick (Score:4, Interesting)
We have a pair of products that are customized tweaks of an opensource ERP/POS combo customized for a particular industry. We've snared two customers away from using Netsuite for their ERP needs and being opensource was a huge hurdle to initially overcome. It takes time for people to understand the concept that they are paying us to come in, install the system, tweak/customize the system for their needs, provide training, and after sale support. The way it works with the POS software is an initial one time fee to do the customization then we provide them with a .iso that is tweaked version of OpenSuSE that is designed to boot and load only the POS software. After that we don't care if they install on one terminal or a million. (Granted we do charge a yearly fee per terminal for backup and support services). Very few other POS systems can offer that.
One of the biggest aces in the hole was PostgreSQL. The cost for us to come in, set up and install everything was cheaper than some other well known DB vendor's cost of database software alone.
Frankly the hardest thing for them to understand was the lack of vender lock-in. If they want, they can hire their own internal IT people to maintain or improve the system or another firm later on. So no matter what happens to us, they will be able to grow and expand the software with or without us.
We deploy on OpenSuSE & SLES by default. No specific reason other than a few months ago during development, SuSE happened to be the first distro where everything worked out of the box.
Re:false economy (Score:3, Interesting)
linux professionals are harder to come by and cost more
You get what you pay for. Good Windows admins are harder to come by, and cost more. And a good Linux admin can do more -- manage more machines, spend less time doing it.
they also represent a large risk of taking secret knowledge with them.
And this is different than Windows admins, how?
to be fair to MS, the reason business chooses them is they are cost effective, not because they are the cheapest.
Almost. Business choose them because they believe them to be cost-effective. It's difficult to have an unbiased study back up either as more cost-effective.
does anyone seriously believe windows 2003 with sql server 2005 is a bad platform? i'd suggest if you do you've never used it.
I don't have to use it to think that requiring a video card on a server is fucking moronic. And there are plenty of other reasons to dislike it -- the most recent of which is the 10% premium on services like Amazon EC2.
Don't bet on it. (Score:5, Interesting)
In a recession, managers will be even more eager to have nothing to be blameable over. Remember, underlings get sacked first. If they go with Microsoft, the managers will feel reasonably safe, even if it drives the companies under. They will be paid the longest and will be the most likely to be re-hired quickly. Going with Open Source will be seen as taking a risk, something that in risk-averse times will not be looked on favourably even if it DID save the company's bacon.
I see the recession as a time when views will become far more entrenched in existing companies. Start-ups may be willing to go with OSS, as they need to cut costs to a minimum and they don't have shareholders to placate, but expect extreme conservatism to reign supreme. At least for the first half of the recession. After that, some of the brain-dead companies will also be financially dead, and more dynamic companies may well be profiting from their early risks. But that's a year away at best. 2009 will not be a good year for OSS in business, though 2010 might well be.
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't bet on it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bang on!
Not only will they not be making adventurous switches to FOSS, they'll be milking their existing systems for as long as they can with a minimum of adds, moves or changes.
On the other hand, who are we to get in the way of a really good self-delusion? It's New Years--the time for resolutions we don't keep, and predictions that we hope no one will remember we made.
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:3, Interesting)
Gmail and Google Calendar are not replacements for several reasons.
First being despite how responsive and AJAX, it's still a web client and still slower to work then Outlook.
Second, many companies are not willing to turn over their email to outside party that they cannot control what they do with it.
Zimbra is a nightmare and there is no reason to use Outlook as client but not use Exchange as backend. It might be cheaper but I've never seen anything that plugins to Outlook work as well as native Exchange.
Re:false economy (Score:1, Interesting)
windows 2003 is a perfectly stable OS and easily holds it's own against linux, look at the top uptimes on netcraft for crying out loud.
And how many years did it take to get there? We've had very stable OSes in the Unix world for over a decade.
What was the point of putting up with a (perceived?) flakey Windows release when you could have used Solaris or FreeBSD or whatever, and simply run things 24/7 without worry of collapse or worms for years?
and the fact that you think $5k is a lot of money to even a medium sized business shows lack of perspective.
It's not the $5K for one server, it's the fact that you need two prod servers ($10K) for failover, at least one stage/QA server ($5K), and one or more dev boxes (n*$5K). With a zero cost OS you can have as many machines as you want (each dev can have their own sand box), and you only have to pay the license / support fee on your prod box.
And that's just for one possible business app. Multiply that for each business app (10+), and you're talking the salary of a someone (or someoneS) who have mortgages and families to support that can be kept on the payroll.
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are two honest questions:
1. Why did Microsoft make the equation editor in Word 2007 incompatible with that in Word 2003? (And yes, I know that they shipped the old equation as part of powerpoint 2007 and you could discover this with enough effort. But in my setting a few people upgraded and everyone else had to upgrade to be able to edit the new documents. No, the docx update for 2003 did not permit editing of the new equation format.)
2. Why did Microsoft ship Excel 2007 in such a form that it couldn't read old macros (circa Excel 95) [microsoft.com]. In fact they have a simple fix for this, but it's not available unless you contact MS tech support.
I can see two reasons for these omission: 1) stunning incompetence or 2) a deliberate attempt to drive upgrades. I have a hard time believing it's not #2, but I have no evidence.
Just because it's FUD doesn't mean the F, U, and D are not justified.
and what about paying the programmers? (Score:1, Interesting)
This entirely ignores the question of how the FOSS people are paying their expenses. Many are no doubt coding on the company's dime, often with only tacit (not official) approval. Wanna bet how many of them get canned in the coming year? Or how many suddenly don't have as much 'free' time to devote to such endeavors?
Re:false economy (Score:2, Interesting)
why would anyone considering a server right now care? you need to consider what you need right now not gloat over what ever problems you believe windows had in the past
And when you start running multiple servers and spend $100,000+ like we do you get a volume license, which are much cheaper. i'll use our last migration as an example. we were running oracle, it was hellish expensive and we had to employ an even more expensive DB to keep it running (it was on linux). now even though linux was free, the DB and oracle licenses were about 3x the price of sql server + win2k3. not only that our existing dba's could now admin it. the other option was go to postgresql but that would mean hiring another person (no one besides me has experience with it and i don't have time to do DBA stuff anymore) which canceled out most of the cost saving and resulted in yet another sacred cow within the department.
in case you were wondering the DBA in question was given the option of towing the line and admining sql server, but i'm pretty sure he refused and quit. silly if you ask me.
Arguements against moving to FOSS are weak. (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the classic arguments against FOSS are:
1. It's not free. You still have to train people and migrate data.
Response: But you don't have to pay for the upgrade, more licenses and still have the data migration issue.
2. There is no technical support.
Response: Actually the technical support is far better. Multiple forums exist for most FOSS applications. They usually have the answers too. Have you ever tried to get and answer to a problem with Notes, Tivoli?
3. Not as feature rich.
Response: Do you actually use those weirdo features in MS word? Have you used Firefox lately? Linux almost installs on everything including my fridge! Does Windows?
4. FOSS applications are not as stable.
Response: Certainly some FOSS apps pretty much crash 3 seconds after they launch. However the majority of FOSS applications that we use every day are rock solid. For example the most widely used web server is apache and it's variants.
5. FOSS applications are insecure.
Response: IE is the most hacked browser out there. Enough said.
6. The unspoken argument. Who do I sue when the applications wrecks my business?
Response: To be honest if your business is wrecked by software then you are probably incompetent. Yah there is always a risk. That's what insurance is for. But it doesn't really matter what is in the contract. If your business goes under as a result of IT systems. Well it's under, a law suite won't fix it.
7. If I contribute to FOSS then I will ultimately loose! As my competition gets a free ride.
Response: If you're an IT shop developing the next wonder product this may actually be the case. However if you are an IT shop and you want to off load some of the development of the required peripheral software that enables your wonder product it makes sense to support FOSS. If your Bob's Music and Flower emporium and you have a wizz-kid in the back that is contributing both to the company and the FOSS. The long term benefits are greater. As that software this kid made is now being supported and developed by many many people that you could never have a hope of paying for.
Comment:
I know I've locked the barn door and soaked the building in gas. Flame away if you wish.
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:5, Interesting)
HERE ARE SOME SLIDES FROM LIMITS TO GROWTH [slideshare.net] that I've uploaded. They concern only scenario#2, which is but one of the scenarios developed in the model (and the one I think is turning out eerily close to reality).
Slides 11 and 12 are particular sinister to me.
Obviously, I'm placing them here totally out of context, but when you read the book you see that they do make sense, and how these global variables feedback into each other. (Note. Other slides loosely related)
Re:Arguements against moving to FOSS are weak. (Score:2, Interesting)
Good point about specialty apps. No argument there. By specialty app you mean something that is very specific to a particular function? I'm not including the likes of Photoshop. As their are alternatives.
Specialty users are probably another catagory. Those users that are so highly skilled at what they do their is still only one app/OS combo.
As for my arguments weak. Well as stated above they are. No room for detail on each point. As each point is probably a white paper in it self. So I stuck with a basic style argument method.
Please define "secret knowledge" I read that a few ways.
Recessions have historically been good for FLOSS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:FOSS Will Gain Market Share (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok let me get this straight...
You are going to push Open Office and Linux as a cheaper alternative. Fair enough can buy that, but when is it cheaper? Now? Nope, gotta train those people to convert. Gotta work overtime to convert all of those documents. When was this going to be cheaper? Oh yeah 3 years from now when the economy is not in a recession anymore.
This is actually the problem I see with FOSS on the desktop. While the software is free, the training, upgrade, and fix up is not. Hence even in a downturn it ain't gonna happen.
On the server side we can have a different argument, but then again Linux is already making inroads...
Now I actually see a stagnation of Open Source... Those that did, did, those that didn't wont...
Re:Arguements against moving to FOSS are weak. (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a software company that develops specialized CAD/CAM software. If our development tools break, that is a unpleasant thing but can be recovered by some overtime work. If e-mails/IM/VOIP, issue tracking or version management goes down, we can continue for a few days. But let's take our customers - if order processing goes down that is a REAL problem, if the the DB with data accumulated over years goes down, that can cost really big money, if the CAD system where the data is created breaks, that can be lived with for a few hours. If the software that drives the material processing machines (think plotters, cutters, drills, ...) which work 24/7 - that ... can be a disaster. These kind of businesses can be wrecked by software quite easily.
Now that can happen regardless of open/closed source. But when you say insurance - how do you think the insurance company will asses the risks and calculate the fee?