Blog: Pete Loshin

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Switching to Linux Stories

Just about every week I see stories about the strides Linux and open source are making into the enterprise business software market, and I keep telling myself it's worth a blog entry to note that, for example, Cuba is ditching Microsoft Windows in favor of Linux. The problem is that there are so many of these stories coming out, and they often mean less than they seem to mean.

So, in addition to writing more about this type of story in the blog (and in upcoming articles, I think it's time to start systematically collecting and collating information about companies, governmental agencies and other entities that are making decisions about moving to open source software. I'll blog about some of the more important or interesting examples, but more importantly, I'll be able to track the stories over time. If a CTO claims that her company will save millions in the coming year by switching to Linux, I can return to the story a year later and see what's actually happened. And I will also include track those organizations that announce they've considered open source and found it wanting.

To start with, I'm hoping to collect the following information:

• the name of the organization
• the source of the story
• the name(s) (if available) of those who made the decisions
• the nature of the decision (e.g., complete migration to open source, choice of some open source application over a proprietary solution, decision to support open source, or merely an acknowledgment that open source products are acceptable alternatives to proprietary products)
• the date the story was made public
• reasons cited for the decision
• statistical and other numerical information made public, such as, for example, the number of desktops to be switched, the amount of savings forecast due to the switch, and so on

What do you think? Are there other data points I should be trying to collect along with these?

And what about those companies, agencies and entities that have done the evaluation of open vs proprietary, but haven't notified the media? Have you or your enterprise gone through this process, and would you be willing to share the results?

Let me know!

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