The Register reports that Telstra, Australia's telco, is planning on switching 45,000 desktops from Microsoft software to something else (presumably some Linux variant with StarOffice/OpenOffice).
Hmmm....
Re:Microsoft is feeling the draft...
jdporter on 2002-10-04T17:02:17
Oh, absolutely!
As a defection, this is of newsworthy size.
It must not be allowed to become fact!
Re:Microsoft is feeling the draft...
ziggy on 2002-10-04T17:06:56
It's an omen:To date, I can't think of a company of significant size that has successfully switched thousands of desktops from Windows to something else. Lots of companies have made noises, or replaced Windows on a small scale (intentionally or unintentionally).
- Peru is seriously considering adopting free software for a variety of reasons, such as license compliance (most Microsoft software in Peru is pirated -- even in the government, the courts, and within the organization that prosecutes software piracy).
- Venezuela is seriously considering free software because less than 5% of all funds spent on software stays in Venezuela -- the other 95% of it goes to licensing, maintenance and support fees to foreign business
- Mexico has a long history of using free software, especially in education
- Germany is agressively using free/open source software for running the government. Their sponsorship of Kroupware (an Outlook replacement) is only the latest story
- Wall Street and lots of other big American companies are adopting Linux. We can pretend that Linux is being used to eat away at installed UNIX systems, but it's just as viable a replacement for NT/2000/XP servers. (Stories about Cisco using Linux+Samba for "Windows file sharing" go back to the mid-90s.)
