The bulk of both business and domestic computer users don't give a fig
how it works. They just want it to do what they want done and keep
doing it. Big Business PLC. has been using techniques that fulfill the
later part of that deal for decades, but both the software licensing
costs and the price tag on the relevant hardware have been way out of
reach of the little guy. As you may have noticed the price of hardware
has plummeted. A setup that would have cost tens of thousands of
pounds, can now be as low as a few hundred. This just leaves the
software that makes it tick.
This comes in two camps. One, lead by Microsoft Corporation, involves
paying for virtually every component of the overall suite and quite
often on a repeating annual basis. The prices in that domain have not
really shifted that much; certainly not by the scale of the hardware
price drop.
The other, lead by nobody in particular, does not require any licensing
costs at all. This is the so called "Free and Open Source Software"
(FOSS) world. The Big Idea is that you already own the software and
have a perfect right to use it; in perpetuity. The way the software has
been released, legally, means that nobody can come along later and
start charging you for using it. This doesn't just mean that the
software costs in this domain have kept track with the hardware costs,
they have entirely dropped out of the equation.
To give an example, in MegaCorp PLC.. they would not dream of keeping
valuable data on their servers on a single hard disk. They would have
two or more disks tied together such that the same data was written
across several. The upshot being that if one of them dies .. which they
all eventually do .. the rest of them carry on regardless and the
machine does too. You can then pull the dead disk out of a slot on the
front of the machine and poke a new one in. The machine can then fill
up the new disk and it can join back in with the rest. Everything that
was running on the machine can keep going.
To do this with paid for software would require a fairly advanced
operating system and would probably need a server class license. In
case you don't have a price list handy, you can usually multiply the
cost by ten when you add the word "Server".
This is one example, the rest are very much comparable.
People have got into the habit of using the least sophisticated
software they can get away with, simply so that they can afford to run
anything at all. With FOSS software there is no need to do this. You
can use the best software for the job, cost not a factor. The job
required at a desk in BigCorp PLC. is in fact very much the same as the
job required by a small firm, a one man band and indeed a home user.
All these functions can now be done using FOSS software on cheap
generic hardware.
This has not been lost on BigCorp's IT people, nor on their computer
suppliers. The suppliers have almost all been shelling out lots of
money getting their feet under the table. They were quite nervous for a
long time about paying money to develop software and then simply giving
it away, but they have done just that. Some of us IT old timers will
still not quite believe that the likes of Big Blue have spent millions
doing just exactly that. In fact IBM have dumped a great deal of their
software and given bits of it away as FOSS. Some of their very biggest
computers now run FOSS instead of their old paid for software.
So why are you using it?
Very Good Question!
Mostly people use what they are used to and people are still used to
using the paid for stuff. The FOSS stuff isn't really that different to
use, but you have to actually switch over.
How do you switch over?
Start with the applications. Your web browser, email and office
package. These are what most people use most of the time. There are
packages that do these functions, in some ways better than the paid for
equivalent. If you switch to using those, the switch to using FOSS as
the underlying software becomes a whole lot simpler. You can even mix
the two for a bit if it makes life easier.
So what are these magical bits of software?
Web Browser - Replacing Internet Explorer Firefox
(11/2005 11.5% of 'net users)
Email Program - Replacing Outlook and Outlook Express Thunderbird
Office Suite - Replacing Microsoft Word and Excel etc OpenOffice
These are examples, there are other packages that perform these
functions, but the above are in heavy use by companies large and small
and by a fast growing number of home and home office users. People have
often found the transition eased by switching to the first three
categories first and then replacing the operating system. The packages
listed in those categories above have versions that run on both Windows
and Linux.
That's the Big Idea
Author: Andrew Meredith <andrew@anvil.org>
Date: 1st Nov 2005
Copyright: The Anvil Organisation Ltd
2005
