You left off...

> Several governments, including those of France, Germany, Britain and
> even Peru,
 
...China (one and a half billion people), Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Argentina,
Malaysia, the EU itself (e.g. their document standard is shaping up to be
OpenOffice with extra tags), Norway, England, India (another billion souls),
Pakistan, and I'm sure I could think of others.
 
> Since that commitment, IBM has only E*trade to offer as a high-profile
> case study.
 
...oh, and that IBM has more than made that billion back already...
 
> According to IDC figures, Linux sales on servers are falling.
 
(1) a single study does not a trend make
 
(2) you just finished pointing out that Linux costs less
 
(3) perhaps, even given support for the study and ignoring the unit
    price impact, more companies are installing their own Linux?
 
> But the hype around Linux appears to be inversely proportional to
> reality. The idea of free software sounds great, but the practicalities
> of implementing it across a bank or a car plant are another matter.
 
Good choice of industries. European banks use it, and Korean car plants. (-:
 
> it must be done without billion-dollar research and development budgets,
> which is what made Unix and Windows the platforms they are today.
 
To wit, obsolete on the one hand (too slow to adapt), and expensive,
unreliable security colanders on the other?
 
> But we should beware of vendors simplistically hyping Linux as the
> next great enterprise-wide technology.
 
We should be wary of vendors hyping _anything_ as the next great technology.
Remember the extreme agony (multiple tries, multiple faux pas, and several
times as many servers for the same job) Microsoft themselves went through to
get Hotmail off the ground on Windows instead of FreeBSD? Think back further:
do you remember a program called `The Last One?'
 
Linux isn't the _next_ great enterprise-wide technology, it is the _current_
great enterprise technology. 95% of the tools you need exist now, are being
used in worldwide enterprises, and - as has been said in many places - are
getting better faster than anything else around them.
 
My little corner of the market is already to busy for me to deal with, the big
problem is to get enough ex-Windows people up to speed on Linux to cope with
the stampede.
 
Oracle have just realised that they're undermined, Sun is panicking because
they're a bit brighter than Oracle and really have seen the writing on the
wall, SCO have essentially vanished from the map (less than 12 months between
`Linux is a fad, ignore it' to being bought out by a Linux company), and the
screams and thrashing from Microsoft are kind of self-evident.
 
SGI jumped on the bandwagon early, although they still seem to be unsure how
to ride it. Gartner don't seem to know what to make of it. Every new report
seems to work against the last.
 
Cheers; Leon
 
--
http://www.cyberknights.com.au/ Modern tools, traditional dedication
http://slpwa.linux.org.au/ Member, Linux Professionals West Aus
http://conf.linux.org.au/ THE Australian Linux Technical Conf:
                                 22-25 January 2003, Perth: be there!