Monday, January 31, 2005

Good news and bad on the OSS migration front Two interesting stories surfaced today on the migrating-to-Linux/open-source front. NPR's Morning Edition ran a pretty good piece on Brazil's ongoing commitment to open source, managing even to scare Bill Gates. While we don't know if it happened, Gates apparently wanted to jawbone Brazilian president (and Workers Party leader) 'Lula' Da Silva at the Davos World Economic Forum last week. The example Brazil is setting is dangerous to Microsoft's business model. Yup, that's the idea. On the downside, ComputerWorld recently asked for an update on how things are going since IBM CEO Sam Palmisano challenged the company to switch all its desktop systems to Linux by the end of 2006. Answer: apparently not so well.  The company spokesdroid refused to give any definitive numbers. And the tech support department won't support any browser but Internet Explorer. Though IBM volunteers have set up an internal Internet Relay Chat channel where Linux problems are discussed online, users may experience problems running IBM's internal Web applications. Most of those applications are written for the Internet Explorer browser, which hasn't been ported to Linux. Internet Explorer is the only browser supported by IBM's internal support desk, according to another IBM staffer. "If you don't use Internet Explorer, you might not get very far with them helping you with the problem," he said. One upside is that they've apparently got Lotus Notes running under Wine. But the real question is when do you know if the CEO is speaking rhetorically, and when a "challenge" is really an order from the top? It would appear that both open-source advocates within the company and management as a whole (if they're really serious) have some work to do in turning this blue elephant around. "There are people using Linux, and nobody is telling them to stop," is not exactly a rallying cry. One other thing:  it's a little old (a week now), but apparently there's going to be a Windows port of the Evolution messaging suite. No timeline, but it will be interesting to see how the avowed Outlook-killer does on Outlook's native platform. 12:45:28 PM    comment []