Re: 5 business advantages of Linux Kernel [Almost Off-topic]

Jukka Tapani Santala (e75644@UWasa.Fi)
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 20:38:33 +0300 (EET DST)


On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Leam Hall wrote:
> I would like your opinions on the 5 most desireable business advantages
> of the Linux Kernel for an upcoming book.

Hmm, you should've asked replies in e-mail, I'm sure we'll all get tired
of the flood of reasons pretty soon, but since you didn't... here's my
opinions ;)

1) Not being at the mercy of a company that may have or aquire
conflicting interests with yours.

This is first because it's so crucial in theory, even if I can't
remember any casses where an operating-system developer took advantage
of their position to directly inconvenience a client for own goals.
I'm sure this happens, though, but perhaps not as visibly as it'd give
raise to lots of legal stuff... Netscape stuff comes to mind, though.
But just the thought of being at mercy of a company that may become an
competitor should be rather effective deterrent...

2) Technical superiority to much of the alternatives out there.

Well, this can always be debated. I take it for given, though, because
I believe this to be an inherent property to any well managed and
popular free software product. Altough commercial companies have lots
of research muscle, I think the pure numbers of free software
developers more than makes up for it. And even though commercial
systems generally keep their secrets and disallow reverse engineering,
most good algorithms have tendency to pop into public attention sooner
or later... In fact, a number of them are developed in universities
etc, sometimes released under licenses that prohibit direct use in
commercial environments. This could be continued by postulates on how
unwilling large companies are to change some things etc. ofcourse.

3) Support available everywhere, practically for free.

This is more than a controversial point, since often the reason cited
for _not_ choosing a free software product is the lack of support.
This requires a paradigm shift for the companies involved; "support"
can be given by person who knows the system particulars, often
internals, well enough to guide others in it. In large parts of the
system, the commercial vendors may have just a handful of people
fitting this criteria. With free software, it's called "Just a moment,
I'll look at the source." Various organizations offer support deals
for payment, if an organization wants somebody to blame and yell at ;)

4) Price of solution.

Well, practically speaking this is often, almost never, exactly zero.
I think this is an important part to stress when talking about a "free
software solution". An organization who goes down that way expecting
to pay zero is doomed to fail. Yet I think the price of a free
software solution is at the very least highly competible to the
commercial solutions. A company would say "But nobody here even knows
what Linux is! It's goint to cost us a fortune to train people to use
it, let's just use Windows, everybody has a copy at home and knows how
to use it..." But they readily forget not everybody knows how to do
something _useful_ with Windows, and are likely going to have to run
training to get people understand networking etc. These people can get
a free copy to use at home, and use at training. And I'm willing to
bet training people to use Linux, for example, is going to be much
cheaper, even if you need to be more vigilant you get what you pay for
due to stuff culminating in MSCE etc. If that still doesn't convince a
company, two words: maintenance costs.

5) Easiness of custom solutions.

Essentially, there's no way a large operating-system company is going
to customize their software to you, unless you're the kind of
organizations who're writing one or more operating-systems yourself ;)
With free software, you can just do the customizations yourself. If
you don't have the resources and skills, getting the changes done by
somebody else is much easier than with commercial products, altough
again, I think it should be stressed that no matter how "free", a
company should expect to pay for a service like this. (It may be hard
for them to understand why others should still be able to benefit from
it, though). This applies to new drivers etc. as well.

(Disclaimer-sort-of:) Notably, none of the reasons I presented here apply
to Linux alone. *BSD, for example, enjoys pretty much all the same
advantages. It can be speculated that there's more Linux-enthusiasists
around, though, allowing for faster support, less need to training, more
people capable of giving basic training, more people needing same changes
and so on. Forgot the other comment ;)

-Donwulff

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