March 20001© Dennis Adams Associates 10 False Reasons for using LINUX Or “Beware of Jumping on the Bandwagon” Dennis Adams

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates2 Why I am doing this Presentation Warn Management of being dragged into technical decisions –By “Techies” Who Love Technology –Particularly if they can get to Play with it ! Speaking as a Techie Myself. Magazines etc. have identified “Good Reasons” for moving to Linux….

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates3 1: It’s not Microsoft Not really a valid reason to purchase software You may not like Bill Gates / Microsoft etc. –But is that (in itself) justification for Linux ? The anti-Microsoft camp speaks about software quality. –The only valid reason for purchasing software is the business benefit

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates4 2: It’s Open Source So anyone can alter it.. Which destroys standardisation ! Are you really intending to read the source ? –No ! Then why the interest in Open Source..? –Yes ! Haven’t you got anything interesting to do..?

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates5 3: Support is available from anyone on the Web Do you really want someone who.. –You don’t know –has no real interest in your company –has no financial return for doing a good job –has no liability for bad workmanship –probably has no Q/A or Quality Control supervising his work Supporting Your Business ?

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates6 4: It’s available from multiple suppliers Each supplier has their own distribution Distributions differ between vendors Software Houses certify their products for a particular version of a given vendor’s product. Sounds like the early days of UNIX ?

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates7 5: It’s cheap to buy and use Cost of Operating System Software is only a small percentage of the total. Have you worked out the cost of supporting it ? –Often more than purchase costs

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates8 6: There is a standard reference version In fact, there are several. Like Unix And they change all the time –New versions of the Linux Kernel come out every few months.

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates9 7: Upgrades and Enhancements are very frequent. Which is not very helpful if you are trying to have a standard, supportable infrastructure for production deployment of mission- critical applications. It’s bad enough with HP/UX version 10.20, 11.0, 11.0i, 12.0 with Sybase , , etc..

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates10 8: It scales over anything from a 386 to S/380 So ? Great idea for software houses to develop S/380 software using a 386 Do you really anticipate such a breadth of compute power range ? And is it really as efficient on each possible type of hardware platform ? In fact, it lives best on Intel Pentium

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates11 9: It is immune to Viruses Are You Sure ? Certain ? Sounds like a challenge to me !

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates12 10: It can Emulate NT, 98, Atari etc. True ! The best emulator for NT is probably –NT. (Although some benchmarks suggest that Linux Emulators are faster than native NT !)

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates13 11: Millions of Apache users can’t all be wrong Sounds familiar ? –Millions of Microsoft Office users can’t all be wrong Can they ????? How do you get Competitive Advantage by using exactly the same solution as your competitors ?

March 2000 © Dennis Adams Associates14 Conclusions Beware of Bandwagons Make Decisions for Business Reasons Linux probably has a place in your organisation –But it’s your decision Not your techies’ decision.

March © Dennis Adams Associates 10 False Reasons for using LINUX Or are they ??