Enterprise Linux desktops are for real - are you?

Stan Beer
Monday, 10 April 2006 04:01

IT Industry - Market

This article is also available here 

Also see
Novell: it’s the Linux desktop user stupid – part 1
Maddog says desktop the final frontier for Linux 

By Con Zymaris

An expert in deploying open source throughout the enterprise tells us how to wean ourselves off the Microsoft drug forever.

I've been tracking desktop Linux uptake for around a decade. In that time, the platform has moved from an environment suited only to the technorati and those well versed in Unix windowing systems, to something which now has the polish and familiarity for the mainstream.

In fact, desktop Linux has matured so well that you could deploy it in a greenfields scenario, i.e, one where there were no computers used previously, and the users would take to it as quickly as they would acclimatise to Windows.

That doesn't mean that migrating to Linux is a quick or painless process, however. Unfortunately, Windows is an extremely difficult platform to move away from. This has nothing to do with the qualities or inherent capabilities of Linux mind you. Migrating from Windows to the Mac would be about as painful. And the Mac is considered to be the most polished and easiest to use of desktops.

No, the reason that migrating away from Windows is so hard, is due to the incredible extent of vendor lock-in that Windows has engendered. Here's why.

When you use Microsoft Windows, you obviously need to acquire software to run on that platform. In fact, due to the reality that Windows ships with so little functional software, you need to acquire an awful lot of software - office suites, graphics suites, calendaring, educational, development, technical, specialist business software and more.

With few exceptions, most of that software you buy for your Windows PC is in reality only available on Windows. Certainly, almost all of the Microsoft-published software is only available for Windows. Microsoft makes it a point of not supporting platforms which it considers a competitive threat. This means that when it comes time to move to an alternative platform, say Linux, you're stuck, because so many of your acquired applications are Windows-centric. Same goes for your peripherals with Windows-only drivers.
 
This is an example of Application Programming Interface (API) lock-in. That is, lock-in which occurs when software vendors don't write portable code, but lock their application development to a single (or small cadre) of operating system platforms and programming libraries.

Once in place, it is very difficult to re-write an application so that it doesn't just run on one platform, in this case Windows. We've seen this tactic occur time and again in the computer space. Why?  Because proprietary vendors love it. The more software published specifically for their platform, the more users will be locked into that platform, the higher their licencing rent to you, the user, can be. 

Microsoft is neither the first nor the most effective at creating such a lock-in scenario. All proprietary vendors have turned their hand to it: IBM in the past along with all the proprietary Unix vendors and even Apple. This is not how the open source community works however, as we'll see below....more

This article is also available here
Also see
Novell: it’s the Linux desktop user stupid – part 1
Maddog says desktop the final frontier for Linux