The idea that an incoming Conservative Goevrnment will embrace Open Source development and opportunities is great news. There is today very little that can be done on Windows that cannot be done equally as well on Linux without the crazy licensing costs.What's more, if Open Source is embraced we won't find ourselves with the travesty whereby the amount of public money being spent on software is confidential from the public.
The Penguin and the Devil are coming, and there is definitely momentum amongst MPs.
6 comments:
Thought you'd like that: someone's gotta keep you sys_admins in work, eh?
DK
Hell yeah! Time for conusltancy rates and contracts me thinks!
"There is today very little that can be done on Windows that cannot be done equally as well on Linux without the crazy licensing costs."
I read a really good article last week explaining why this is *not* the case on the desktop. Irritatingly, I can't remember where.
But the thesis was: OpenOffice's spreadsheet is powerful enough for 95% of spreadsheet users - but the accounts department need the functionality of Excel. Its presentation tool is powerful enough for 95% of presentation-creaters, but the marketing department need the functionality of Powerpoint. And so on, for all Office functions (is there even a halfway viable corporate email solution that doesn't use Outlook as a front end? Anyone who mentions Pine will be mocked; anyone who mentions the abomination that is IBM Notes will be crucified).
And if the 5% of people in your company who do the most spreadsheeting use Excel, and the 5% of people who do the most presentation-writing use Powerpoint, and so on, then you rapidly reach the stage where the support costs are far higher than the £300-500 per desktop to just use Office and be done with it.
Back-end applications are a different story, of course. The only company I've ever encountered that willingly chose Microsoft IIS as its web hosting solution, for example, only did so because MS paid it £millions a year in consulting service fees that it didn't want to jeopardise... (note: the technology analyst industry is in no way corrupt).
John B
Isn't there a little problem using opensource ,namely our masters have some long contracts with the nice people from Microsoft.
No, not really. Nice conspiracy theory, though.
John B
I went to the event - young Osborne gave a good talk, shame about the walk! And his research was way out of date - Tom has 161748460 friends!
So, once the level of understanding among politicos moves up a notch on what makes large systems implementations fail, I will believe Conservative press.
As is, no!
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