[plug] MS Office and TCO

[SweenyTod]

At 08:38 AM 11/09/2000, you wrote:
>Bradley Woodward wrote:
> > I'm very close to having permission to put a linux box into the department
> > for more than just evaluation purposes.  Last week I was with in a [g]nat's
> > whisker of getting them to dump Win2000 server, NT IIS 5.0, MSSQL 7.0 
> and ASP
> > web stuff in favor of Linux, mysql, Apache and PHP4.  I even had pricing to
> > show them how I was about to save the company damn nearly $10,000 in 
> software
> > licensing fees, not to mention hardware costs.  Instead, it's going on a
> > third party Solaris box, but damn it I kept my PHP4.
>
>Would they be sad if you quietly wedged a little '486 box (say, in a nice thin
>Osborne case like the one behind me) under your monitor and plugged it 
>into the
>network? One day, a tech may discover to his immense surprise that the
>enterprise revolves around a small antiquity on someone's desktop.

Our internet gateway, web proxy (squid) and firewall all run on a P200 
running RH Linux, so we're in that situation now.  I think the momentum is 
building, and I'm confidant that I'll have Linux doing important money 
earning work here quite soon.  I believe the main issues for a company with 
this are:

Support.  No biggie - you can sign a support contract with RH or whoever if 
you really feel the need to have somebody to talk to.  I find I've had more 
intellegant answers from mailing lists like this one, than I've had from a 
$130 support call to Microsoft.

The Unknown.  This is a huge issue for companies.  Microsoft might be 
regarded as not very good, but it's a known quantity.  Linux is 
unknown.  This is changing quite fast of course, but still hasn't 
penetrated the board rooms.  That's why reference sites are a massively 
good thing.  I've had a degree of success with this, by pointing to 
slashdot.org.  That place gets millions of hits per day, and runs on free 
software.  To be able to say to the boss that I'm planning on using the 
same technology for our projects is a big thing to them, because there is a 
visible example of reliability.  Any huge site that runs mysql, PHP, Apache 
and Linux would be very welcome.  The last big fight is still to come.

Cost.  It's amazing how uncomfortable people are paying nothing for 
something.  We've been conditioned to pay for what we get, and it's weird 
how hard it is to break that.  My solution to that is to order the CD for a 
product, like Redhat.  They feel better having paid $70 for it.

Have I mentioned reference sites yet?  Let me do it again.  Reference sites 
are important beond description.  It's vital that a company not think it's 
the first to deploy a technology.  They need tested and time proven solutions.

I think it's way past time I got of my soapbox now.  :)



=============================================================
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.    His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
Always trust an Australian with a razor.

http://www.sweenytod.com               Paranoid is normal, normal is good