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When Linux economics do not make sense
I’m as much a fanboy of Open Source as the next fella, but sometimes the fanboys for Linux, passing themselves off as journalists just don’t make any economic sense.
The Ubuntu Podcast #19 lead me to a blog post “French Lawmakers Hope to Inspire Linux Revolution” from the New York Times?
If the French National Assembly gets its way, the open-source Linux operating system will take over the governments of Europe, seizing on a weak economy to displace Windows.
About 18 months ago, the Assembly shifted from running Windows on the 1,100 computers of its members and their assistants to running a version of Linux called Ubuntu. (I profiled the rise of Ubuntu in a recent article.) According to Rudy Salles, vice president of the assembly, the decision to abandon Microsoft’s Windows software was both an economic and political gesture.
Fanboyish Articles like this really hurts the credibility of the Open Source ‘movement’ even if they do inspire some PR. Dig in and see if you can find assertions by the French Parliamentarians that such a “Linux Revolution” is actually being pushed.
1st (Article dated: January 21, 2009) If the French had known 18 months ago that we would be in the economic down spiral we’re in now, they sure picked the wrong thing to be worrying about (Operating Systems on PCs) and have shown themselves fiscally incompetent and any further discussion in that matter is banal.
Seriously people if the French knew 18 months ago that people would be losing jobs and homes on an unprecedented scale, what were they doing with that knowledge? If I were French it would seem an appropriate time to tear the government down for continuing signs of idiocy.
2nd 500,000 euro saving over 5 years on licensing an OS is such a stupid number. They could have quoted $15 million over 5 years and we’d still have no clue what that number’s supposed to mean. Let alone 500,000 euro being a lot less now than 18 months ago.
Shifting 11,000 PCs already running an OS to another OS seems something only politicians can dream of as fiscally responsible. How much would you consider will be the cost in man hours to complete the installation and reconfiguration of support infrastructure for these 11,000 PCs ?
Just because the OS is free doesn’t mean that it magically puts itself onto all the machines, nor correct itself if somehow the PC is different enough to have unique requirements. And those 11,000 PCs aren’t identical so the variations of installation/configuration is very large.
Oh, but they say that there’s no support overhead (oops, much much lower overhead) for Ubuntu than Windows, and they have all of FIVE (or maybe more) case studies for this too.
Amazing how people who don’t do support, or have even done a valid study of it, can be so authoritative.
3rd Open Source Software is good for the local economy
This is a rich distortion field argument. So, the company that got the contract is somehow not self-serving to state that because Microsoft doesn’t pay taxes in France that it’s better for the local economy to hire his company to roll out solutions. We’ll just ignore the stupid French tax payers who actually make money from using the Microsoft Ecosystem building and releasing products and services. Because obviously they’re not real French people ?
Dude, I can’t stand most Americans speaking in English. I don’t know how the French (as alluded by the post) have been able to stand the Americans providing so much of their training, installations, documentation in Americanised French (or have they all been delivered in American English?)
Ubuntu is a great product, and I use it everyday on my desktop and servers I manage but there are enough limitations on it that I’m more than willing to spend my money and also have a MS Windows machine with purchased software running on it. The above article is just lame, sounds authoritative because its from the New York Times, but could have been much better done.
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