In a message dated: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 13:59:52 EDT
Greg Kettmann said:
>> 2. It was internationally developed (only the NSA and american-centrists are
>> concerned about this).
>
>I've never had anyone care about his one way or the other.
You aren't trying to sell into a foreign country with an anti-US sentiment.
Have you tried selling into Libya lately? Have you seen the reports of
the Chinese gov't wrt their adoption of Linux? It's not only because MS
software costs a lot, it's mostly that they don't trust the US gov't to allow
something to be sold to them without the NSA mucking with it!
>> 4. Support is nebulous and inconsistent. (This just depends on how often and
>> how much you pay the support organization).
>
>We at IBM offer the same level of support for Linux as we do for
>Win\95\98\ME\NT\2K, AIX or OS/390. True you pay for it but you generally pay
>for support in any large shop anyway. If you buy equipment preloaded with Lin
>ux again you get the same support as if it were loaded with another OS.
You know, it's amazing to me that in 5 years one company can release 5
versions of an OS, and not one of them works as advertised. With the amount
of people they have developing these things, you'd thingk they could perfect
just one!
<Company Hat on>
And we at Mission Critical Linux will provide Enterprise Support for any
distribution of Linux you choose to load. Need help designing and building
your environment, we'll help you there too. The nebulous support issue is
IMO, a thing of the past. There are too many companies offering support for
Linux now for this to be a valid point any longer!
<company hat off>
>> 5. It is not widely adopted by the corporate culture. There's no easy way of
>> telling how widely Linux is deployed.
>
>On the contrary, I have detailed statistics on deployment, from IDC. The
>problem is they're almost always too conservative. Two years ago only
>something like 2-4% were even considering Linux over the next two years
>later. Two years after that something like 25-30% are already using it
>with far over half planning to deploy within the next year. (DON'T
>Quote these numbers, I'm shooting from memory because I'm far too
>lazy to pull up my foils.)
The problem is that there is no easy way to verify this. IDC's numbers are no
where near accurate IMO. There isn't a lot of corporate culture support yet.
Sure, probably all of the Fortune 5000 companies are using, but how many
actually made a corporate decision to deploy, and how many had sysadmins like
myself or Derek who snuck it in the back door without telling anyone? There's
no way to verify these numbers. Especially the numbers of how many actual
users Linux has. There's no one to ask. Sure, ask RH how many packages they
shipped. But how many downloaded the ISO and burned it themselves, how many
are using Debian, etc. IDC can at best guess, but they'll never be close to
the truth.
>Now, I for one think that "reloading my OS and learning something new" is a
>pleasure. Heck, if you're running Windows you should be good at reloading the
>OS ;-)
You know, as much as I hate Windows and MS, I find that above complaint less
than a reality. The only people who re-install OSes in general are those who
know what they're doing. The average home user does not re-install Windows.
They don't even know that re-installing would likely fix the problem they're
having. Most just suffer and go along thinking that that's the way things
are. Hell, most Windows users probably don't even know how to defrag their
disks, never mind re-install. They figure their system is a year or two old,
it's slower than the one at work, heck, time for a new one. They never
realize there's an IT group at work automating things like Virus checking and
defragging for them.
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
I'm in shape, my shape just happens to be pear!
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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