[CLUE-Talk] "red hat - the new redmond?" comment from mainstream online media

[David Anselmi]

Jed S. Baer wrote:
> On Sat, 07 Sep 2002 09:46:02 -0600
> David Anselmi <anselmi at americanisp.net> wrote:
> 
>> It is too early to tell how Red Hat will balance their commitment
>> to share-holder value with their commitment to Open Source and
>> their commitment to their customers.
> 
> I think there has to be a shareholder knowledge piece to that commitment
> though.

I agree, but forgive me if I'm a little cynical about that.  Another 
problem with standardization--to many share-holders a company is nothing 
more than a symbol and a price.  Sadly, the big institutions understand 
what they invest in best of all.  But they care the least about anything 
other than money and they have the most influence.

> 
> As always, two ... four, maybe more sides to that. If I'm standardized,
> then I minimize the knowledge base that I have to maintain and train for.
> I need to know how to administer only one mail server program, so it takes
> me less time to manage multiple mail servers. I can manage multiple
> databases more easily if they are all Oracle, or PostgreSQL, etc.
> 

I certainly agree on the micro level.  I just put Debian on my desktop 
because it's what I use on my servers and it's nice to keep things the 
same.  On the macro level, across an enterprise, it seems to make less 
sense for headquarters to tell me what to do.  Especially in my current 
position where "headquarters" and all the various "divisions" are in 
very different lines of business.

> I hadn't thought of the term "brittle" to describe this, but I think it
> mostly fits. The migrations costs are variable. Yes, there are exceptions,
> but most office workers don't get deep enough into the fancy aspects of
> office programs to be bothered a lot by these things.

Which makes me wonder how companies justify upgrading the office 
workers' computer/OS/office suite every 3 years (or so).  I really like 
helping people use their computers to automate repetitive tasks.  It 
makes me sad that they think computers are magic boxes that only the 
adepts can control.  I think many companies have the wrong ratio of tool 
budget to training budget.  Wish I were smart enough to change that 
somewhere.

> Businesses have to weight the cost/benefit of all these issues, including
> the ability to hire people who are already conversant in "technology X".
> OK, I'm contradicting my previous argument. ;-) But that isn't always the
> case. So it still comes down to, not TCO, but "total cost of
> productivity". Can a business save money by switching to Linux? In the
> very short term, especially with larger businesses, probably not. In the
> long term I suspect the lower licensing and server costs would outweigh
> other factors.

Yes, that makes perfect sense.  But I rarely see decisions made with 
knowledge of the actual TCO or TCP.  A lot has been said about the TCO 
of MS vs Unix, but I've never seen actual numbers that seemed complete. 
   Maybe I've always worked at inefficient organizations.

One of the big savings to be had with Open Source is longer IT 
lifecycles, it seems.  I run the same version of Debian on an Alpha 233, 
a 486, a PII, and an Athlon 1.2GHz.  I don't run some things (KDE) on 
slower machines, but what I ran on them 5 years ago I can still run on 
them (in the latest versions).  I haven't figured out why this is yet or 
whether it is really significant, but it seems to be.

Dave