[Gllug] just preaching to the converted !

[John Hearns]

On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 20:00 +0100, Ben Fitzgerald wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 06:52:44PM +0100, Simon Morris wrote:
> > O
> Hi,
> 
> I think this is where Redhat have been very clever. They have filled a
> perceived vacuum in presenting themselves as a company with a nice
> corporate front of a good size. plus they do the whole "slick" thing
> quite well.
> 
> Leaving aside what you might think of redhat's distributions, they give
> non-technical managers a halfway house between the conventional approach
> and what they percieve as hardcore, out-there OSS. The leap is not so
> great and they feel redhat will catch them when they fall. It doesn't
> matter what we may think, it's what the man with the purchasing forms
> perceives.

Out there in industry, a company is probably running commercial software
packages which cost many, many times what OS support contracts (Linux)
or licences cost.
The producers of commercial software will certify that their software
runs and is supported on certain OSes.
So it does make sense for industrial companies to use Redhat or SuSE (*)


Remember - these companies want to run applications, not experiment with
Linux. And that remember is the jibe which started this sub-thread, that
OSS was 'experimental' and only for techies to play with.
The CIOs in this meeting were way wrong. Out there in the real world,
Linux is being used to design jet engines, virtually crash test cars,
explore for oil, make movies.



(*) What would happen to you as a systems guy if you spent weeks getting
Application A shoehorned into running on Your Linux Distro Of Choice
with maybe incompatible glibc or threads libraries, just because you
like YLDOC and run it on your home PC?  P45 time methinks.






-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug