Re: [MLUG] Fighting the lock-in is hard to do...

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Phillip Kelchen wrote:

> On Thursday 27 July 2006 12:07, Mike Miller wrote:
>
> > So Open Office will make a .doc, but you don't trust it to look right 
> > in Word?
>
> Not with the footers I had and such. They look a little different in 
> Word- and they even look different between Word 2000 on my friend's 
> computer vs. Word 2003 on campus. I'll export to .doc if there is just 
> basic bold, italic, that sort of thing as I know it will work pretty 
> well with all versions of MS Word. OpenOffice does an excellent job in 
> reading MS Office-made .doc/.xls/.ppt files, but the opposite is not 
> exactly true.

Microsoft's fault, of course!!  That figures.  What is their incentive to 
make Word read .doc files produced by OO?  Not much, I'm afraid.


> Well, I just learned that not all places are covered by the same site 
> licenses. For example, the ag engineering building is not under the site 
> license for AutoCAD that EBE and EBW have, so they pay $15k to keep it 
> on 3 computers over in Ag. Engr.

OK, but I'll bet their Microsoft Office license is campus-wide. 
Microsoft is a force to be reckoned with and they can push for more than 
we want to give them and they can have their way.  In negotiating with a 
University, suppose there are some departments that don't want the site 
license.  I'll be Microsoft would say "OK, we'll give it to them for 
free!"  That seems nice, but in fact it costs Microsoft nothing while it 
increases the chances that more students in those departments will be 
locked into the Microsoft way.  Thinking along similar lines, Microsoft 
claims to oppose "software piracy" but such piracy is mostly good for 
business because it increases the rate of lock-in.


> So why don't we just put all of the proprietary stuff in only a few labs 
> (i.e. AutoCAD in MAE labs) and then on a terminal server a la Software 
> Anywhere and switch all of the workstations to Linux/OO and save 
> ourselves millions of dollars?

Because "we" suck?


> > Things are going well -- better than I would have expected 5 years ago.
>
> I'd say. I was barely even aware of Linux five years ago. I think I had 
> read an article about Red Hat somewhere- that's about it. Probably had 
> something to do with being on dialup with 5 other people wanting to use 
> the one computer we had. Now I use it daily and would never think of 
> using a non-OSS UNIX-based OS.

I first ran across Linux in a coffee shop in San Francisco in the fall of 
1996.  They had free internet access for customers on a collection of 
desktop computers.  I liked it a lot because it worked well and it gave me 
X in color.  Back then a color monitor for a Sun computer cost about 
$3000, so it was awesome to run a UNIXish OS on a PC.  It was years before 
I had my own Linux box though.

I still use Solaris.  It's a case of lock-in, but I will be able to 
overcome it soon enough.  It's just easier to keep the old Sun running. 
A switch to Linux will vastly improve some of what I do with email and web 
service.  Most of my scientific work is done on high-end Linux machines 
such as SGI supercomputers.  I also have an excellent Red Hat box that I 
bought from Dell a few years ago (two Xeon dual-core 2800s), but I don't 
have root permissions on it (that belongs to our IT staff) so it is too 
much of a hassle to move all my work to that machine.

Mike

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