Re: Computer Weekly Article 15/11/2005

[markelkins]

		  Patrick

Great piece of PR in a well respected publication. 

Cheers

Mark



Subject: Re: Computer Weekly Article 15/11/2005
From: padams1
To: committee@ossg.bcs.org
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 10:19:00 +0000


		  I agree with Mark, this is a good article Patrick. 

I'm not sure I agree entirely with some of the earlier remarks though.  You suggest that open source is widely used within sectors (such as webhosting) due to tight margins.  This may be the case in a many instances, but from my experience of webhosting and system administration in general, the real reason for using open source in this area is product quality.  Some of the websites that I host and have developed are fairly critical and downtime is just not an option.  I use Linux and Apache because, correctly installed, they just don't die.  Moreover, compared with IIS, Apache and Squid are easy to use/maintain and I think this is the real reason that Apache dominates in the webserver market.

As for Linux eating itself out to the mainstream, I couldn't agree more.  Of course, this is mainly because many system admins/developers are OS developers and not just users.  This is going to be the biggest hurdle that OS software is needing to cross in the coming years.... getting people from non-technical backgrounds to use OS software, not because of the philosophy or because their mate, a system admin, helped to wrote it, but because they choose to use it because it is great quality software.  And because I say they should  .

Definitely another great article Patrick.  Is that your second now?  Is there any way of ramping up our outreach in this manner?  It creates good publicity for the group and OS in general.