Wow. This entry amazes me. I can't even conceive of someone thinking this is at all correct.
Aaron's entry ignores the one important fact. Commoditization of the Operating System. Most of the mythical training Aaron cites as a reason that companies/consumers would be unwilling to move to Linux is application training. The price required to train/hire sysadmins comfortable with Linux administration is trivial compared to the price required to retrain all of your employees/users to use new software.
At work, we deal with this issue every day. Medsphere is actively involved in retraining end users to use our software. These end users are people with varying levels of computer skills, ranging from 'What is a mouse' to 'Ok, I kinda understand how to check my email'. A huge cost to Medsphere in any deployment is offering on-site training classes to the nurses, doctors, lab and pharmacy employees, and everyone touching this system. Now. Imagine a world where we have a crossplatform client that runs and operates the same on Windows and Linux. All of a sudden, for our end-users, who operate in a tightly controlled and constrained environment (a hospital), we have commoditized the OS, because their training is still valid on either system.
Obviously this training would have to happen if you were switching from Office on Windows to OOo on Linux, or OOo on Windows, but making it an incremental process will allow organizations to deal with it in stride, piece by piece. The best way to make this an incremental process is to have the same software available on either platform, so pieces can be replaced across time instead of incurring monumental training costs as every piece of their desktop suddenly changes, and their start menu becomes a foot. Look at Novell's migration to Linux. The first step was to replace Office with OpenOffice.
Already we have Firefox. Of course this is not nearly enough to even offer commoditization of the OS, however, lets use a hospital as an example. At most of the terminals in a hospital there are 4 major uses of any computer.
So if you take Firefox, Evolution on Win32, and OOo, and add in our crossplatform GUI client, you have a world where the needs for a computer in that setting are totally fufilled by a stack that works (without retraining) on Windows and Linux.
All of a sudden, Linux is used because Linux is better/cheaper/faster/whatever. Linux would finally be able to compete on even ground with Windows, because the argument of "Well, I would love to move to Linux but I don't know how to [Edit a Word Document|Check my Email|Browse the Web|Listen to my music] in Linux" goes away. Not only do the users know generally how to do it, but they will also be shown the same UI that they have learned/been trained on.
Plus, isn't OpenSource Software all about choice?
It is a huge win any way you look at it.
Posted by tberman at December 15, 2004 06:20 PM