Linux: Is free really cheaper? (InfoWorld) [LWN.net]

InfoWorld is running a lengthy report on the costs and benefits of switching to Linux. "The more fully an enterprise adopts Linux across its infrastructure, the more financial leverage it is likely to get out of up-front investments in the OS. Those investments, which can be considerable, include Linux training and tools, and the costs of migrating from a Unix or Windows environment. And that financial leverage is improving steadily as better management tools, more third-party vendor support, and more skilled Linux system administrators arrive on the market." (Thanks to Max Hyre).

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The only real problem with reports like this

Posted Sep 4, 2003 18:22 UTC (Thu) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

Is that people sometimes read them.

In my *real world* of small to medium sized
business computing experience. No one spends
money on training. No one spends money on
support beyond what it costs to fix something
once it has already broken.

Where there are anywhere from 2 to 200 seats,
there will be someone, perhaps two or even
three people who have something of a clue
what the computers and the network are doing.

If these folks love Windows, the costs are really
high. If these folks love Linux, the costs are
really really low.

What Infoworld and others fail to realize, is that
more than just a handful of their readers use
Linksys rather than Cisco switches, they really
hate to pay for MS Office, and sometimes stoop
to installing it on more machines than they
should. On the old NT servers, nearly every
single client network I ever saw folks had gone
in and set the client number up to something like
100 or 500 up from the 5 the server is/was
licensed for. Samba is really very cheap comparitivly.

OpenOffice is a real nice product. It's funny I
don't see it written up more often.

I've yet to encounter someone, anyone Mac/Windows
whatever casual user who stumbles badly using a
KDE desktop. They click, edit, save, print. Training?
What training?