Calum, I don't normally do this,
do what? let's find out:
but you've left quite a few logical fallacies intact in your counterpoint. First, you're confusing middle management with company-wide decisions.
ok, this is interesting, i suspect you have misunderstood something i said, but i am willing to take responsibility for my part in that, do go on.
IBM is expanding their Linux userbase, mostly because of wider-spread demand for support by their products.
ok, i haven't done any market research but this doesn't surprise me, in fact it's kind of what i was saying, a company will not just go "oh linux is great, we'll push it to everyone immediately", a company like IBM responds to user demand. It's quite easy to believe there's a certain increase in user demand for linux systems, but i find the gung ho attitude of many longtime users that IBM is linux's knight in shining armour far too optimistic
That doesn't mean that individual jobsite managers (for example, at the office where you worked) are unable to decide for themselves whether to use Windows or Linux. Most are going to gravitate towards Windows, however, because of established precedent, not because of a company-wide decision.
if you say so, i still think the proof is in the pudding. At a Sun microsystems site last year i saw all the employees using solaris, and all their applications were java based. nice. the site provided support for linux systems and solaris systems, fine, except one of the employees told me that they don't actually support any linux machines in real life, they just say that they can, basically they only deploy solaris systems but they could theoretically support an existing linux site if they wanted to. Also it was quite obvious that the java based apps were not popular amongst the users either. they were generally regarded as being slow and clunky. My point is this, that regardless of who or what within a company decides to settle on a particular standard, you can't force somebody (customers, users, managers, CEO, whoever) to "like" and "want" something. some linux users may want IBM to be the linux cavalry, but it's not realistic in my opinion, that's all, same with Sun. Perhaps they will behave like the linux cavalry in some circumstances, but all i was trying to say was that linux longtimers seem sometimes to have this expectation that that's going to happen all the time. it won't. as you say, companies are motivated by their market.
Bear in mind that IBM was a huge purchaser of UNIX in its prime, and even came up with their own OS (Warp) to compete with it - ultimately being double-crossed by Microsoft in the development process.
actually warp (known simply as OS/2 until 1994) was originally developed to compete with windows. When IBM realised microsoft were screwing them over by developing ms windows on their own and not cutting IBM in (like they did with DOS) IBM decided to attempt to kill microsoft off by cutting them out of the development loop of OS/2 and making OS/2 "better" than windows. It probably was (although from user comments you wouldn't think so, not having tried OS/2 myself, i wouldn't know), but windows was cheaper and hit the market faster. Unix does not feature in this story.
That being said, I wholly expect that if IBM sees a strong competitor to Windows they'll jump on it at the first opportunity (don't forget the whole SCO debacle - they were involved there, if only on the investment side). Also, don't badmouth Sun until they've proven their greed. They've done more for the FOSS community than most other companies of comparable size, and were quite possibly the first to adopt Linux on any kind of wide-scale deployment basis. Just because they want clients, that doesn't make them inherently evil.
once again, you are putting words into my mouth, companies are not inherently evil but (and this is what some people do not seem to quite get) they are not *inherently good* either. it's not "microsoft == evil; sun == good", companies are motivated by what they believe is their market. for microsoft, it's their huge pool of cultivated morons that they have been nursing since 1975, for sun it's site managers with a network to run and services to keep running 24/7. we all know that after 2 generations, morons want windows, but network administrators do not necessarily want linux, and if they are pliable regarding which system they want, i suspect sun would rather push solaris.
If that were true, then I would need to report back to His Dark Majesty as soon as I finish posting here. As would most of the rest of us.
what? oh yes, we're still on the evil thing. well, when it comes to that linux is evil too, you know, see:
http://www.undeadlinux.org/index.php?category=2but then i never said being evil was wrong, now...
