[KLUG Advocacy] Reactions to the Reuters article and related folly.

[Robert G. Brown]

My $0.02....

1. I thought the Reuters article was a rework of a lot of old cliches and
   platitudes about Linux, mixed in with some newish quotes, many of which 
   were pretty weak IMO. It tends to reinforce my general view that a lot
   of the media doesn't "get it", and their understanding of what is going 
   on is at least 18 months out of date. If someone wants to quibble about
   that number, I don't have a hard time upping it to 24 or 36 in this case.

2. This thread belongs here, although I certainly understand Bryans point
   about this being a technical thread. I simply don't agree. Now, if you 
   want to split the thread into technical and marketing/political/advocacy
   subthreads, that's ok, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Both 
   elements are vey much worth exploring.

3. Bryan rightly points out a lot of the problens are exemplified by MS not
   even being compatible with itself across versions, OS'es or platforms. I
   think this is a pretty damn sorry state, for any set of software packages
   that goes under one name.

4. John Bridlemans political/marketing comments are pretty much dead-on. The
   boss needs something that works TODAY, and with data sources that are 
   really beyond the control of anyone in the organization. A lot of that 
   is also moving, since they're largely mounted on MS platforms, which Bryan
   has pointed out (in some legth and detail) as moving targets. John is right
   about answering NEEDS; I will comment on that in my presentation tomorrow 
   (notes online tomorrow NIGHT!).

5. Bryan seems to be moving towards proposing a way out of this particular 
   maze. Try to standardize on something that is well supported by free
   software, first by jumping off the upgrade treadmill, and then moving
   everyone over. Maybe the organization has to keep one licence current 
   for at least a while, perhaps for use in the breach.

6. My own experience is that about 99.2% of the documents go into Star/Open
   Office just fine from Office 97, and that I can generally ask people to 
   send me stuff in some older format from the others (like Office 97 or
   rtf, or even Word 6.0, I think). I have only encounter two problems on
   occasion...
     a) Word .docs with lots of text boxes in them do not render or hold
        together well in SO/OO. The results vary from the amusing to the
        irrecoverably messy.
     b) There are sometimes interesting (from amusing to tedious, but not 
        ever irrecoverable) problems with fonts in some spreadseets.

   I have Office 97, but hardly use it at all for the last couple of years,
   notable exceptions being to double check for situations like the above.

   Right now I don't plan on "upgrading" to Win2k, XP, or any other tools
   from MS. This is not a particularly ideological decision, it's pretty
   pragmatic. I have little call to work in the MS proprietary environments,
   the bulk of my client base has not been there. I suupose that I could
   get some huge demand for XP, .Net, C# and so on, but I'm not losing any
   sleep over it happening (or not). If it does, I'll manage, but I don't 
   expect it. I know my clients better than that.

7. Use of Windows desktops in the non-Unix workstation market is pegged at
   about 87-88%. This is a farily recent Gartner Group report. They report
   heavy bias towards the Macs in graphic arts departments (duh!) and rate
   Linux desktops at a wee bit over 5%. The remainder are mostly Mac, but
   there are others, too, in slivers. Do they have it wrong? Beats me! I
   have found then biased in a few ways. O honk there numbers are a good bit 
   lower for MS than I've seen before, but I'm not especially surprised at
   this.

I would expect that no one will be shy about commenting on my impressions,
opinions, or other comments. 
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---