Linux in the Public Sector..

I'm a bit behind here so pardon the catch-up post! I missed the last couple of classes due to aforementioned baby stuff. I was reading the kongregate case with interest. First, the gaming world thought that on-line games would go this way at the given time. But they have not really. Mobile came from nowhere and killed services like this pretty quickly. Oh, and the fact flash is buggy rubbish with more security holes than one of Tony Soprano's waste treatment facilities did not help one bit either. Yes they still exist I'm sure, but they are small beer.

Second, I asked to do Financial Management as one of my optional modules this summer. So I had a wonderful time locked in a class room on a series of wonderful sunny days! All the while having to take time off from work, it was great! I was learning about WAAC, Payback periods, bond yeilds and what not. As an aside, this is a subject which I *really* think should be mandatory for any masters course in a top business school like ours. If we are being groomed to be the next generation of business leaders, we need to be able to read and understand a set of accounts. I want to understand why my former boss loved capital expenditure and hated operational expenditure. Prior to doing that Financial Management class I had no idea. So we need to come out of courses like this with more than the ability to make a project plan and/or a set of slides!

The Linux paper is fascinating. I remember maybe 15 years ago [around the time this paper was written] and a tiny number of Linux-based companies had decent venture funding. A common question being asked is if "serious" companies take the risk of using Open Source software. If the software was free, how could it match up with something coming from Microsoft or Oracle. What happened is that Linux is not any kind factor in the desktop market [for home or for business]. But it a gigantic player in the world of "*.* as a service". I would think if we looked at data centers around the world, I would think a huge percentage run some kind of flavor of Open Stack. Which is built on Linux, totally open source, and as good an engine and set of tools for running your own cloud based system as exists. If you think big data, I think you are frankly insane to look beyond Hadoop and the related Apache Foundation Projects which work with it.

Yes Oracle is maybe faster and better, but it also will cost you a very serious amount of money every year...forever! The open source solutions are free. You can download them, and fork or branch your code and work away yourself. But you have the bonus that many companies with serious development teams pushing code into the open source code base.

So if you're a government or other public body, why would you go with anything else?