[Sussex] Linux market to exceed $35bn by 2008

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 08:42 +0000, Andrew Guard wrote:
> This is very true, it an issue of trust at the moment most business only
> trust Microsoft etc.  Over time with use of open source people will begin
> to trust open source software.  I think OpenOffice.Org is good for this
> but not the answer as business will not use it as not trusted but Firefox
> is a another issue all together.  

It's true that there is a certain part of the market that wants
commercial support, but Sun has done very well at selling very large
contracts for StarOffice (usually the software is discounted with these
contracts, often it is completely free).  

As for trust, well in my experience, OpenOffice.org goes down very well
with people right up until they start experiencing problems using exotic
MS Office documents that fail for some reason.  This situation is going
away rapidly - because people are submitting those documents with bug
reports at http://www.openoffice.org .

Please, please, please (I'm pleading here) if you find a document that
doesn't work (going in either direction) don't write an e-mail to this
list (or any other) moaning about it (thats just bad publicity that'll
show up when people Google), post it as a bug with OpenOffice.org and it
_will_ get fixed.  If people don't know how to go about this then let me
know and I'll sort out some full instructions.

OpenOffice.org version 2.0 will be with us in just a few months and
there are some major improvements.   Most distro's I've seen currently
distribute OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 or 1.1.3 - if you're having issues with
either of these I thoroughly recommend reading the release notes for
1.1.4 to see if those issues have been fixed and then install if
necessary.  Furthermore I'd advise not using packaged version of
OpenOffice.org if you can possibly avoid it.   I've yet to see one
packaged version of OpenOffice.org that was installed correctly (yes
that includes you Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Novell,
Mandrake, Arch.... etc, etc..)


> No cares that much is about a browser as
> done do much work with it and if goes wrong it easy to use IE.  The
> problem with Office software is people could be using all day and they
> have to trust it not to crash ever 5 minutes and they loss all there work.

OpenOffice.org is in my experience more stable in general use than MS
Office - though my experience of OpenOffice.org is on Linux, which may
be a factor.  Almost all of the crashes I've seen have been around the
import/export to MS's DOC and XLS formats (and almost all of those
problems have been fixed as of now).  This is a pain, but it's
understandable, OpenOffice.org developers do not have access to any
information describing MS Office's formats.

Once again I'm going to point to Europe as a saviour longer term.  The
EU is discussing making proprietary formats illegal for information that
is legally pertinent - this would include payment records, accounts,
invoices, contracts, HR information.. the list is endless.  Similar
legislation has been in place in a few other countries (i.e. Malaysia)
for some time now.  If this legislation came into force companies would
have to find ways to make their information available in non MS specific
formats and while this doesn't predicate a move away from MS products,
it would help to change peoples mind set and make them think about how
they are storing and distributing their data.  It would also make life a
lot easier for all of us that don't want to suckle on MS's filthy
nipple.

Now I know that people (looking at you Mr. Williams) will tell us not to
trust the EU, and with good reason, but they are an organisation with
legislative power over us and they are discussing it and they are
generally in the process of swinging away from bad decisions on IT (see
their handling of Software Patents for encouraging news).


> Now I think the big push for linux will happen during 2006.  The reason is
> simple Playstation 3.  The OS for Playstation 3 is going to Linux, in fact
> you can get linux for PS2 today if want to do some home software
> development upon it.  The linux PS2 is builded from is SuSE.  Now people
> will start to see open source in being use and that not crashing where
> they wouldn't much mind if crash or not.

You're average Playstation user wouldn't give a hoot what it ran. 

> This how it could happen?
> The little kid will play games day in and day out with no problems.
> One day the MD of what's you call it will have very day at work.  His
> computer keeps on crashing all day long.  So when he got home he wanted to
> put they mood on to the PS3.  Start playing games and notice the word
> Linux keeps on coming up on PS3.  He rembers he read about some Linux
> thing in the FT few weeks back where they where say that computers using
> seamed never to crash. He next day ask his lad did the PS3 ever crash
> work.

The word "Linux" will not appear anywhere on the playstation IMHO.  Can
you tell me what OS underlies PS2?  There is one, people don't write all
those games in pure MIPS assembly code.

Frankly the biggest impact the PS3 will have is driving down the cost of
the Sony/Toshiba/IBM Cell processor - it could revolutionise the
hardware market.  By a x86-64 PC and run Windows or Linux.  By a Cell
processor based workstation for the same price and get a load more
power, speed, etc.. but have to run Linux instead of Windows...

..of course all of that may still fail to break the power that 10 years
of investment in Windows has for most businesses, but its got to help.

-- 
Geoffrey Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology