Corporate Open Source

Sun Sep 7 17:39:10 GMT 2003 Corporate Open Source

I was talking to someone last night who just took a new job as (I think he said) a "Senior Exchange Administrator". This was in a noisy dance club, and I had earplugs in, but I *think* he said that they have 6 Exchange servers for 2,800 users.

Coming from the Unix world, that sounds like a lot of servers. Heck, I have a customer with a little HP desktop machine serving 400 users quite happily. I think if I were that company, I'd look at getting rid of those klunky Exchange boxes. A couple of beefed up Linux machines could do it, or one bigger Sun box.

I wonder if "Senior" means that there are also "junior" admins: my 400 user Linux company doesn't even have one full-time administrator for mail. In fact, the person who fills that role also "administers" their main Unix box and does application programming.

The corporate world is starting to take note of that. There's an excellent eight page article The Age of Corporate Open Source Enlightenment that is good reading for an ununlightened boss you might want to nudge in that direction.

Not that everyone needs nudging. I am getting more and more requests from folks who want to "escape" from Microsoft to some degree or another. It just makes sense, even if Microsoft offers you sweet-heart deals to stay loyal.

That kind of offer reminds me of the oil company we had for years. I trusted them, and didn't pay a lot of attention to how much they were charging relative to the open market. Then one day I woke up and looked around, and found that their per gallon price was almost 50% higher than the lowest price I could find. Checking back, they had been steadily inching me up for years - not just increasing prices as oil fluctuated, but increasing their markup.

I immediately switched to someone else, and shortly had a call from the old company's owner, who offered me an even lower price if I would just come back. He "valued my business", he said. I asked why he hadn't valued it enough not to gouge me more and more in prior years, and refused his offer. My reasoning was that I'd rather deal with someone I can trust, that I don't have to watch carefully every year. If I can't actually find someone I'm sure of, I'm certainly not going back to the guy who I *know* I have to watch. I think anyone tempted to take a Microsoft "deal" should employ the same reasoning. All they want to do is kill their competition so that they can go back to gouging you as soon as possible. Don't help them toward that end.

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