Antispam - empowering employees

Sat Jul 19 13:54:12 PDT 2003

On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 02:18:11PM -0400, Chuck Yerkes wrote:
> >  But ultimately people are going to be driven to Linux because it's
> >  free.  They don't have to have any (outside) permission or license to
> 
> I find that's absolutely NOT the case in business.  And larger
> business created the DOS/PC market.  If anything, Linux is replacing
> Sun's and other Unixes.  I've yet to see it stand in for a Windows
> server.

I agree with you in general -- certainly, at least one of the places I'm
familiar with is currently a Solaris shop and they're looking to switch to
Linux to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware.

My current place of employment is an interesting counter-example of that,
and it's somewhat non-intuitive, so you may find it interesting.

Granted, the CIO's a huge Open Source fan, and we're hugely invested in
Zope, Python, etc.  The place is currently pure Windows, but he'd like to
change that on both the front and the back end.

The reason why he could actually get cooperation to do that on the desktop
(where Linux has a more uphill battle) is because they're incredibly
paranoid at this place AND are on a never-ending crusade to control the
workflow of everyone.  All our new apps are web-based, and the first week I
was there I was working on two conversion projects that both automate a
manual process but also -- and this is the important bit -- make all the
interaction web-based.

The nice thing about migrating your applications to the web is that then
all the people who aren't doing the high-end incredibly creative things,
which is the vast majority of your workforce, only needs a web browser.

Now, granted at some point we'll start hitting against the limitations of
that given that the actual CRM package (Onyx) is rather Windows-based, but
more and more of what people need to do is done outside of Onyx, through
webforms.  

Summary:  Ironically, a more restrictive environment may actually be more
accepting of Linux than a more loose one.

-roy