2013 February 14 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for February 14th, 2013

50 Years Old And 12 Years Free Of M$: Ernie Ball

Published by Robert Pogson February 14th, 2013 in technology. 51 Comments

Ernie Ball celebrated 50 years of business in 2012. In 2000 they were raided by BSA’s goons and vowed to be free of M$. Now, 12 years later, they continue doing IT the right way with Free Software.

Valentine From Steam for Linux

Published by Robert Pogson February 14th, 2013 in technology. 12 Comments

“Feb 14, 2013–Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST.

The Steam client is now available to download for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. Ubuntu is the most popular distribution of Linux used by millions of people globally and known for its well-designed, easy-to-use customer experience.”
see News – Steam for Linux Now Available

Cool.

- Robert Pogson

City of Munich Hammers HP’s Report On Their Migration To GNU/Linux

Published by Robert Pogson February 14th, 2013 in technology. 7 Comments

It really bugs me when some ignorant person pronounces judgment on something which he does not understand. HP’s analysis of Munich’s cost of migration to GNU/Linux is like that…
“The city’s IT department points out several errors in the published summary. The migration to free software did not require a thousand IT workers, that is the total of IT staffers working for the city. The firm also fudged the IT support costs, assuming incorrectly that the German city started out with 12,000 open source desktops. "The number of open source PCs rose gradually over the years, to its current number of over 13,000."

Contrary to the firms claims, the use of open source reduces the costs for computer hardware, writes the IT department. The firm also failed to distinguish the difference between a software migration and normal software maintenance, Munich writes. "They evaluate regular updates of the operating system as migrations."
see City of Munich stands by its calculation: open source saves millions | Joinup

Get over it, M$ and “Partners”, you can’t beat the price of FREE. Even your lock-in needs to be undone only once. That’s always less costly than buying Wintel repeatedly forever. That’s barely competing on price over just a few years. Cheat and lie all you want, M$. Your cash-cow is drying up.

- Robert Pogson

I Could Not Have Said It Any Better

Published by Robert Pogson February 14th, 2013 in technology. 0 Comments

Sometimes I weep at the lack of vision in IT as when someone says they are an “M$” shop…

Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised as when Gartner blogged, “revolutions happen, when the “lower classes” do not want to continue in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way. Enterprise information management and analytics practitioners do not want to process new and liberated data in the old way — they start using new technologies, sometimes in the cloud closet, but more often, openly. Upper management cannot carry on in the old way: companies have to compete and win in the data-driven economy. They are attracted by the shine of gold, a pure result of data alchemy.”

see Data Revolution, Part 1: Is It a Revolution?.

They were writing about big data and how people are trying to keep up with it. If price/performance matter we know GNU/Linux and FLOSS will have a shot. M$ doesn’t get a free ride when it comes down to sheer productivity of servers. You can see that in their SEC files where “Server and Tools” has the lowest margins of “Business”, “Client” and “Server and Tools”. At ~40%, it’s almost decent despite the free ride they get from their desktop monopoly in business.

- Robert Pogson