Here from Computerworld.com is six-page piece by Sharon Machlis, its online managing editor, asking the question
Are you looking for a Windows alternative for serious office work? Many people are starting to wonder about their non-Microsoft operating system options, especially given Windows Vista’s hefty hardware demands, upgrade costs and license restrictions.
and coming to the conclusion that
After […]
This story has been around for more than a week; the time line in the dozens of posts can be seen in an early upbeat piece from PC World, a rather more measured piece from Information Week, a much cooler assessment from ZDNet UK and, today, a recapitulation of the story so far in The […]
… is still making news.
The allegation that Microsoft cut its prices to scupper the project is a new angle on the story. The inevitable denial is hard to square with this quote
The council gets a steep discount on Windows licences through a broader Education SELECT licence arrangement, paying £58 for a Windows XP […]
This item from the Antipodes sounds depressingly similar to the UK government’s slippery policies on open source - see our previous post for example.
… about the Birmingham City Council Linux project launched with such high hopes, quite a lot of hype in the technical press and in the mainstream press and in Europe, blogged here a year ago, whose outcome is becoming mired in controversy.
… is the theme of two (here and here) recent pieces. HP says it too, so it must be true.
… is debated here and here.
Both have radical things to say about addressing the problems device drivers cause to users; one says
Unfortunately, it’s their openness and freedom that is holding them back
and the other
the clash between proprietary and open source software communities contributes to the problem
Down under, something very big has happened very quietly. Kennards Hire, a major machinery rental company, engaged in a massive migration to desktop Linux, the biggest the country has yet seen, with nary a peep from the national media. Steven Deare of ZDNet Australia noticed this and decided to investigate:
[ZDNet] tried to cover the rollout […]
Inspired, as so often with these things, by the eye-opening usability of Ubuntu Linux, several commentators have changed their tune with regards to Linux’s prospects on the desktop and major media have been bravely asking their readers to give Linux a try.
David Wolf from Seeking Alpha has this to say:
Those of you who have followed […]
From Heise.de:
The administration of the Berlin Senate (the governement of the German federal state Berlin) has voiced its opposition to a complete migration of the authority’s computers to Linux. It thus opposes the Berlin Parliament, which called for a two-phase migration of servers and workstations to Open Sources systems. The report presented to heise online […]
Uber-popular distro Ubuntu’s latest iteration, the first to be billed as “Enterprise Ready,” is publicly released on June 1st - get em while their hot.
In a further display of the increasing closeness between Sun and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, the distro is being ported to Sun’s hypervisor, courtesy of Canonical, who will be providing support […]
*update* - the post originally linked to the wrong article on The Guardian’s site; it’s since been corrected. Apologies.
The Guardian today reports on the results of a series of case studies conducted by the Open Source Academy on the deployment of open source software in the local government sector . Although grandly claiming that “the […]
As the Ubuntu community gears up for next month’s release of Dapper Drake, founder Mark Shuttleworth’s for-profit open source company, Canonical Ltd., is preparing up to offer commercial support for the distro. The company already offers certification and Desktop Linux questions whether they have what it takes to position Ubuntu as a serious player in […]
You might remember a disagreement that occurred between the One Laptop Per Child project and the Puppy Linux community. Offers of their ultra-light operating system from the latter were quietly but firmly rebuffed by the former on the grounds of their closeness with Red Hat, after which the leader of the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, […]
The Free Standards Group, a consortia of Linux distributors, announced an agreement that could see a standard set of components included in desktop distributions, and thereby help Linux to take on the homogeneity of Windows.
“One of the big things that’s difficult is consistency, and that’s Window’s biggest strength,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the […]
With Vista’s delay adding to claims from the likes of Novell and Red Hat that this is the year Linux is going to break through, a senior analyst from the leading IT analysts the Meta Group has suggested that everyone should take a serious look at open source or web-based alternatives to Microsoft’s next generation […]
Gnome 2.14 was released on Thursday, and Novell unveiled SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 at CeBit.
Novell, or at least their marketing people, are aiming high with their latest desktop offering, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Their recent healine grabbing pronouncements are positioning it as the superior rival to Windows on the corporate desktop. The company claims it will be “more usable than any other desktop product on the market.”
Looking to capitalise […]
IBM announced last week that, come the release of Vista later in the year, it will not be installing the new operating software on any of its desktops. Furthermore, the company will not renew its desktop software contract with Microsoft when it expires in October.
They will instead migrate those users still on XP onto its […]
Search Open Source has a piece on one of the barriers to Linux adoption, the lack of an iteration of Microsoft Office for the platform. Focusing on the inevitable comparisons between OpenOffice.org and MS’s offering, it includes the sage advice “Stop whining and embrace change”:
There’s a contingent of IT folks, however, who discount these complaints […]