On Thursday 07 Nov 2002 12:45 pm, Alan Davies wrote:
Europe's Microsoft Alternative Region in Spain Abandons Windows, Embraces Linux By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page A01
MERIDA, Spain -- Luis Millan Vazquez de Miguel, a college professor turned politician, is succeeding where multibillion-dollar, multinational corporations have failed. He is managing to unseat Microsoft Corp. as the dominant player in the software industry, at least in his little part of the world.
[snip]
"There's been too much theology and not enough economic analysis in the debate so far," said Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, who oversees the company's global lobbying team.
"Consider that there's a lot more to the total cost and value of a product than the initial offering somebody might give you," Smith said. For instance, it is often expensive to find support services for free software, whereas such help comes bundled with the purchase of Windows. And companies like Microsoft have a vested interest in updating their products; that's not necessarily so with free software.
"Somebody might give you a free puppy this afternoon," Smith said, "but you're going to have to go buy dog food in the morning."
At least with a Linux puppy it'll be well trained and do what it's told. Imagine a M$ puppy. It'll chew up your best couch and then barf it up all over the floor while dumping all over the place.
To eliminate some of the headaches, the Extremadura government paid Andago, a Spanish company, to take one of the free versions of Linux on the Web and make it suitable for public distribution. Organizers called their version "Linex," combining the names of Linux and Extremadura. The software has become so popular that it has been downloaded more than 55,000 times from www.linex.org by people outside Extremadura.
I think that this shows what a specifically targetted cut-down dist can do to make Linux more accessible for the general public. I think that the current trend to put everything possible into a dist is counter-productive for the average Joe. Who needs two mail servers, and three web servers on one PC anyway?
From an initial setup and config point of view, Linex sounds ideal for the non-techie and therefore removes one of the biggest arguments against Linux (Yes I know installing a M$ O/S for the first time is much worse than installing Linux for the first time, but how many consumers do you know that have installed a M$ O/S). Also the suppliers pre-installing is a very big boost for this project.
If a group of schools or a LEA was to follow this example and create a dedicated dist then it would go a big way to getting Linux accepted. Unfortunately, with the way things are in this country I don't see this happening too quickly. It's a pity really when you look at how simple it would be to do. All they'd have to do is take a current dist (e.g. RH or Suse) and select only the packages required and generate a Kickstart for it. Adding a simple post-install script to config stuff would then make is so simple to install that anyone could do it. Support would also be much easier as all machines would be practically identical - hardware and local configs permitting. That's another one of the pro-M$ arguments won. -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000