RE: Linux at work (real world)

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

Here's an additional point or two:

When you buy a boxed copy of SuSE or Red Hat (or any 
of the others, I assume) you get some initial support 
included (mostly for installation/setup). 
You can also buy a support package or pay 
for individual support calls, ongoing (yes, you said that,
wait for it...).

HOWEVER, a big difference between that model and 
Microsoft's, for example, is that you have bought 
ONE boxed copy for $50 or $100, and you can distribute 
that to everybody in your company for no further cost.
There are no seat licences for the OS, nor for most 
of the... INCLUDED... fully-functional apps.

The next problem/glitch could come from ANY of your 
500 users, but if you can't solve it yourself (in 
your capacity as IT wonk), you pass it on to SuSE 
or Red Hat Support. Support answers your request, 
and doesn't inquire about which specific desktop 
it came from. In effect, they demand ONE retainer/fee 
from a single person shop or from a 500 person 
company. They aren't snooping into your organization's 
guts and trying to ferret out "piracy" and overlooked 
revenue sources.

Then, there's the point that a sufficiently nasty 
problem gets "escalated" very quickly to the 
people who actually wrote the current version, and 
they (and hundreds or thousands) of other eager 
programmers leap on the bug and thrash it publicly.

Immediately after that, thousands of eager Linux 
geeks leap on the resulting patch or interim kernel 
release, load it, run it, and beat the crap out of 
it in a very short time. In other words, the problem 
gets fixed AND the fixed SW gets tested with minimal 
delay, in a publicly accessible process. Nobody tries 
to hide anything, nor does anybody try to put a 
corporate spin on things ("that's not a bug, that's a 
feature... we charge for features").

You also don't get arm-twisting to "upgrade" your 
entire user-base at inconvenient times (budget-wise 
or otherwise) and at exhorbitant cost.

The connection to TW is getting tenuous, except 
for:

a) what it means to you if your company should 
   decide to go the Linux way and; 

b) what you should look for, and how you should 
   try to influence the process and the choices, 
   in order to make your own job better, easier, 
   more efficient, whatever.

We seem to have answered that the tools are quite 
sufficient for the job (tech writing, as well as 
almost any other job in your company), so it's 
finally looking like a viable option. Your job as 
a TW becomes (other than continuing to produce fine 
and useful documentation) one of ensuring that the 
change includes the tools you need to do your work, 
and that you don't *lose* any ground in the process.

Oh!  Just thought of a (semi)final point. If you are 
using Linux-based stuff at the office, you can outfit 
yourself at home for next-to-nothing. (The last time 
I did myself up with Windoze and Office, it cost me 
well over $1000 in addition to hardware.)

And finally, while you and your office are among the 
early adopters, you have almost no worries about 
viruses. Only when the majority are using Linux and 
certain apps, will we become attractive targets for 
virus-mongers.

/kevin

Kevin McLauchlan
Chrysalis-ITS, Inc. 
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Byfield [mailto:bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com]
[snip]
> This is another myth about Linux that's overdue for being put to rest.
 
> It's true that, if you download Linux for free, you don't get any 
> support. None, that is, except for a community of millions of users, 
> thousands of web sites, and hundreds of books - resources 
> which aren't 
> actually pretty good, once you get oriented. I've become reasonably 
> adept at configuring Linux using these sources, and I'm an English 
> major; in fact, I can configure a network faster under Linux 
> than I can 
> under Windows. But, naturally, you can't expect to get phone 
> and on-site 
> support for a free download, can you?
 
> However, every commercial Linux distribution sells support packages. 
> Moreover,  despite another myth,  the distributions are 
> similar enough 
> that an expert in one can generally give you the help you need in 
> another. As a result, even if a distribution company went out of 
> business, you still wouldn't be left without resources. And I haven't 
> even mentioned all the small professional services companies 
> around the 
> world that offer their own support packages.
 

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