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The Linux distillery Joe the Plumber teaches how to weather the recession with Linux and Open Source models
The Linux distillery Joe the Plumber teaches how to weather the recession with Linux and Open Source models | Joe the Plumber teaches how to weather the recession with Linux and Open Source models |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 07 December 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Cain has realised he can replace much of his software spending with open source equivalents. He has begun looking into Open Office, Open-Xchange, Alfresco, MySQL and other products.Featured Whitepaper
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However, the resulting business transformation can be liberating to the team and to the IT budget. First, despite a lower staff headcount Cain has found his admins can individually maintain more Linux systems than they could Windows, with greatly enhanced flexibility and scripting control to perform routine tasks with comparative ease. As to the budget, while the total figure may be reduced, opportunities exist to reallocate what is there. With a swing over to open source the beleaguered Cain has found he has cut his anticipated software spend so much that he now has more money to put towards hardware. Historically, it is argued in some quarters, tech booms start at the bottom of recessions. The rise of personal computers emerged from one in the early ‘80’s and the Internet boom from another a decade later. Similarly, open source itself can be said to have in part materialised out of the wreckage of the dot bomb crash earlier in the 2000’s. If this viewpoint is correct then it stands to reason the current global economic situation may well be responsible for fuelling a new wave, namely the penetration of open source into modern corporates – as well as something else. As both Joe the Plumber and Cain the CIO’s experiences show, savvy minded entrepreneurs can turn the recession around by focusing on service-oriented business models with diminished upfront cost. In other words, if you’ve been thinking of kicking off your own company consider that open source is a model that is practically built for times like these. It’s in the customer’s interests, and this means it will be in your interest to sell solutions based on open source.
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