From: Adam Flinton 

Chatting with an IT bod from a retailer (large) & the subject of OSS
came up (we were chatting/sharing horror stories wrt vendors & got onto
whether "OSS" is a vendor per se or a group of vendors or
what...).

The bod is a hardened cynic by profession as well as by nature (nature or
nurture..you decide ).

Got onto Linux (after various serverside things such as MySQL (vs Ora &
DB2), JBOSS (vs Websphere & Weblogic), Tomcat, Eclipse etc.etc.etc).

Odd comments:

1) Moving to Linux is a sunk cost. I.e. once the move is done (inc
training, deployment etc) then that's it. The money is sunk & supposing
Linux carries on OK then decision made & no going back. i.e all the TCO
stuff is then irrelevant as once done there is just about no way any non
OSS OS could ever match the TCO as the Cost graph spikes at the beginning
& then plateaus. With OSS/linux the plateau is much lower. With Windows
& non-OSS in general the plateau is higher & can add up over the
years to the equivalent of the initial spike of moving towards linux/OSS.
Bean counters are driving this as much as techies.

2) The *ix thing is now a biggie as most of the techie serverside skills
are transferable. They looked at moving Oracle people to Linux & it
was...."it's linux?...looks just like Solaris to me....but what would
I know I'm an Oracle person..."

3) Simple matter of support. If it's there (in a large retailer kinda way
(IBMGS/EDS/CGEY/HP etc)) then so long as the system stays up & alles
ist in ordnung day after day after week etc....

4) Training costs will decline. Simple metric wrt users & thus
sysadmins growing hence linux skills increasing thus supply increasing thus
price decreasing.

5) "Fit for purpose" (nee good enough). The only question he
really asks is "Is it fit for purpose?" Business needs dominate,
not anything else.

6) Choice. What appeals to him wrt linux is the hardware choice. IHO (see
point 1) the nice thing is once the sunk cost of moving to linux is in then
your hardware choices increase (also see point 5). PPC, AMD64, Sparc?,
Intel32 & 64 & possibly whole new chips in the future (&
machine types e.g. big PPC boxes or IBM mainframe etc) will be
supported/linux choices.

What humours me was when lawsons took over we had a meeting where they
stated "Our target platforms (on the server) are the Unixes supported
by IBM, Sun & HP". I piped up "Does that mean we should start
targeting linux?" Deathly silence..... Now however....

Unix & Windows are in trouble. If hardened big corp IT people like him
now reckon it's a done deal.....

Big DB & Appserver vendors had better be excellant. In a kind of
meaningfull metrics to the beancounters sort of way.

Adam

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