Community response ...

[John]

Jim Cheetham wrote:
> On Oct 18, 2004, at 8:59 PM, Jonathan wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 11:22:20PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>>
>>> No sensible enterprise would>engage in a large-scale deployment
>>> of pre-release software without serious >consideration and
>>> commitments.
>>
>>
>> They use Windows, don't they? ;-)
> 
> 
> That made me smile :-)
> 
> Many organisations are not "sensible" - even the ones with good IT 
> managers. At this stage in Ubuntu's existance, Matt is right that 
> large-scale rollouts are unlikely. However, there is a lot of press out 
> there about Ubuntu, and it's right now that the early adopters will be 
> having a look to see if it's got the promise of being suitable (it has - 
> I think it's an excellent desktop even at this stage).


FWIW one of my daughters works with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. 
She took one look and has ordered two (I hope someone upsells her!) CDs, 
one for the IT bloke at work.


She's not senior enough to make purchases or even recommend them, but 
the IT dept will find out.

ps The ABS is big on Notes. It's gotta run Notes. Without Notes support 
there's no chance.


They also use Lotus SmartSuite. The might switch to OO, but I wouldn't 
bet on it.






> 
> For businesses of the types I've had experience with (all IT-oriented, 
> from 3-man-bands to multinationals), the back-end servers are either 
> Debian or support-contract-backed unixes (RedHat, SuSE, solaris for the 
> hardware at least, etc). I don't know yet how Ubuntu will impact on the 
> server market - I expect it will steal a goodly number from Debian, in 
> order to be 'stable' with more recent apps - but I'm very confident that 
> it will clean-sweep the desktop usages of the above OSs ...


Don't be so sure of that. They won't switch just because they can.

Years ago, I bought a new Holden. If I were in the market for a similar 
new car now, I don't have any reason to choose any other brand. I don't 
think it's like significantly better or worse than others of its class, 
but that car served me well while I had it.

I switched from Red Hat, not because the software is bad, but because 
the company changed to a direction that didn't suit me. The software is 
fine, the tools overall better than Debian offers.

I'm sure that had I used SuSe I'd be able to say similar things about SuSE.