Toolkit

Story: It's time vendors ate their own penguin food

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Baby steps, man.

Including the aforementioned vendors, how does any networked company roll out what is essentially a paradigm shift? Or commit to an arbitrary date for migrating business processes to new systems for employees already preoccupied with keeping the wheels of commerce at the company turning? It's naïve to suggest it is even possible to move any company's diverse enterprise network user audience lock stock and barrel into the open source world. Even if everything worked technically, there would be unacceptable business interruption because Linux is completely new and unfamiliar to 92% of all computer users. Most Windows-using people wouldn't do well with "new" technologies when it comes to doing their jobs because they've learned Windows. That's why OpenOffice is a good place to start conditioning garden-variety Windows users to the GNU world.

Besides the business hiccup, what organization is prepared to take the bullet for replacing current desktop technologies-investments often in the tens of millions--to further accelerate what is largely a fait accompli? Clearly Windows is insecure, proprietary and legacy, but when it's patched and stable it works and in most companies it's paid for. Open source has a definite role emerging on the enterprise desktop, and that need will be filled incrementally by design. But they probably won't be replacing Windows desktops en masse until PC lifecycles are exhausted or Windows OS upgrades are required. And only when the company is ready to support or pay for replacing the desktop hardware, software and key apps with stable, rich Linux equivalents and then commit to retraining specific groups of users.

Deploying Linux broadly on the desktop isn't nearly as important as it might appear, nor should it be. Both vendors and customers have a far greater near-term opportunity to deploy server-based applications on Linux and reap the benefits with little to no business interruption. After all HP did 2.5 billion last year, and very little of that revenue was on the desktop. For CTO bean counters, that would be known as the lowest hanging fruit. For journalists, it's yesterday's news. But it bears repeating, especially now that Linux has a bottom-to-top offering and can-do vendors behind it.

Let's start at the bottom of the stack and build a better, less predacious networked world from the ground up the next time around, okay?

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