Make way for open source!
Rick Hodgin has an interesting opinion piece on geek.com. In spite of its clumsy title -- "Death knell heard for Microsoft and really all proprietary efforts" -- its a well written piece on why you should start getting comfortable with open source.
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... consumers don’t really care whether or not they have Windows-powered devices or something else. It is the vendors themselves, the manufacturers and carriers who are saying ”No„ to Microsoft ... opting instead for the platform which will get the job done (perhaps even with better graphics, speed, less bugs, faster update times, etc.) while making them more money. You see, a lot of the expense in Windows-powered devices does not come from the device itself, but from the Windows license paid to Microsoft, which for netbooks is reportedly up to $50 per machine, a fee the OEMs must collect by passing along that expense to end consumers. |
He reckons corporate use is creating a snowball effect ...
| As more and more companies walk away from Windows ... their developers are forced to tweak and enhance existing libraries. And, since these are all open source efforts, the enhancements made by company Z are filtered into the products available for companies A-Y as well. |
And amongst other things he cites the maturity of Linux and its responsiveness to incorporating new hardware developments or even simply patching bugs.
| Linux has become mature, open-source has proven it can be a viable solution for businesses, and that the expenses involved in applying their own personal paid developer staff toward efforts which ultimately are given away for free, in the long haul are actually far more cost effective than paying continuously for proprietary access to systems, such as those provided for by Microsoft and Windows-based products. |
The French police reckon they saved €50 million switching to Linux, the New York Stock Exchange did it a couple of years ago and Amazon have been using it for almost a decade. If you're a user of Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Blender, Audacity, NVU, OpenOffice.org, Apache or MySQL you're already part of the movement. And if you're not, it really is worth a look!
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Comments
Opensource is great and for the non technical as Adrian mentions above it works just as good, if not better.
Posted by: CVB | July 13, 2009 8:20 PM
I work for a company doing office administration work, but also look after the computers. I installed a Linux server about 8 years ago and use a second server as a backup device. Although the users use WinXP on the desktop everyone is oblivious to the fact the main systems use open-source software. I have found the servers need minimal maintenance compared with trying to keep WinXP working.
Posted by: Adrian | July 3, 2009 4:25 PM