[Sussex] Re: Gentoo problems.

[Mark Harrison]

> > Of course, there is always the flip side in that companies are afraid of
> > change.
>
> A much more likely scenario.  A recent study showed that for every
> windows XP installation in British businesses there are 4 windows 2000
> installs and 150 NT4 installations.

An even more likely scenario which explains both the low takeup of XP and
Linux in the "FTSE 100" space:

IT managers in large companies who value their jobs don't do anything as
damnably stupid as choosing an Operating System based on the cost of the OS
in isolation.

For what it's worth, I define a "large company" as having more than a few
thousand staff, typically in more than a few hundred locations - this pretty
much holds for 95% of the companies I've ever worked for, either as an
employee or a consultant.

The normal way to write an IT strategy is to start with "what do I need to
do", work from there to "how do I do it" (business processes), work from
there to "how do I implement it" (applications) and finally figure out what
operating system is required.

The general cost model for any IT budget is that software licencing
typically makes up less than 20% of the budget for any IT project. The
largest costs are user-retraining, and support.

Where linux is making big inroads is companies who basically use IT for
"office" functions - documents, email, spreadsheets, presentations. These
are all prime candidates for OpenSource solutions - with candidates like
OpenOffice.org moving the game ahead a long way. OpenOffice.org is still
behind MS Office, but it's certainly no more than 1 version behind now - and
there are some areas (XML support, say) where it's now ahead...

If, however, your business requirement involves supporting numerous vertical
applications, which happen (for historical reasons) to have been written for
Windows, then there aren't many realistic alternatives to paying MS a
licence fee.

One of the other main barriers to OpenSource adoption in the corporate marke
place is the lack of widespread support infrastructures. While a number of
us on the list have helped various businesses move to OpenSource, I'm not
aware of many companies which could realistically provide a UK-wide, or
European-wide support solution for an organisation with many hundreds of
branches... but there are many companies who will sell exactly this service
for offerings based around commercial software packages ranging as widely as
from MS Office to SAP.

This is changing, and I think that IBM's new view of linux will change the
penetration in large organisations dramatically.

However, many small IT consultancies dramatically underestimate the amount
of time and complexity involved in a major migration project... or fail to
understand the complexity of priority and decision-maker networks in
companies with more than a few thousand staff.

Mark