Hi :)
Before Linux most of those servers would probably have been using Unix.  A fair 
percentage moved from Unix to Bsd too.  There are apparently other unix-based 
OSes out there and a few other odd ones that form almost all the remaining 
percentage.  
Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Wed, 18/4/12, Ken Springer <[email protected]> wrote:

From: Ken Springer <[email protected]>
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: beware of the m$ subsidiary
To: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, 18 April, 2012, 18:48

On 4/18/12 10:05 AM, Tom Davies wrote:
> Interestingly apparently many US government agencies and departments use 
> Gnu&Linux for most
> of their server-side and infra-structure but had to cave into users demands 
> for MS on their desktops.

MS has always been the choice for the OS in almost all cases, AFAIK, but the 
actual programs used varied widely years ago.  My agency generally preferred 
Word Perfect as the word processor, but when (I think) a government wide survey 
was taken as to an across the board single word processing program to aid 
document sharing, WP lost out to Word.  Lots of unhappy people in my agency who 
had to redo all their macros, templates, etc.

That surprises me not as far as the servers go.  It seems the general 
impression of US Fed employees is they are, in general, not terribly bright in 
a lot of areas, where my experience is just the opposite. Especially the tech 
guys.  They are well aware of the advantages of Linux.

The agency I worked for didn't use Linux on any servers, AFAIK.  Not because 
they may not have wanted to, but the support load the tech people had to 
provide so far exceeded their abilities to do a good job, they were always 
making decisions in a direction of having everything the same, to at least try 
to give everyone the help they needed.

The problem, despite the big government hoopla, is there's just not enough 
human beings to do the job well for the tasks assigned.  (Not going into the 
question of efficient operations, etc, as much of that is caused by people 
outside individual agencies, not the average employee.)

The average employee is prevented, intentionally, from having anything more to 
do with the servers other than using them to store their data on.  I was a 
supervisor, and I was at my last unit for 5 years before I even knew I could do 
that.  No one bothered to tell me I actually had access to the server's hard 
drives for file storage.  Our unit didn't even have a dedicated IT position, it 
fell to the administrative officer (total department personnel size of 1) as 
one of many collaborative duties, and when he passed away, it was given to me 
as a similar collaborative duty.  I was Chief of Maintenance (total dept. size 
of 3), as well as Environmental officer, Safety Officer, Fleet Manager, and I 
don't remember what else.


-- Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 11.0
Thunderbird 11.0.1
LibreOffice 3.5.1.2


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