Re: On LinuxToday... erm... today :)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Will" == Will Newton <will [at] misconception.org.uk> writes:

    Will> EDS most probably. One of the most evil companies this side
    Will> of Microsoft. :) Owned by Ross Perot they make their living
    Will> conning the British government into buying over priced
    Will> crappy systems.

I can't speak to the intelligence of UK governments on buying new
systems, but AFAIK EDS makes its gelt keeping legacy systems running.

Remember, the "system" is not a box plus the OS plus the apps; it
includes the bureaucratic interface.  You can't just plug a Linux
system in to the government; you have to train some civil servants to
work with it, and civil servants are not famous for enjoying
retraining.  There's no legacy system like a bureaucracy!  Or you make
the Linux system bug-compatible with the surrounding bureaucracy.

Unlike Linux distributors and package maintainers who can release at
will after the bugs have been shaken out (and still manage to release
buggy software much of the time, although it is both more reliable and
more fixable when broken than the proprietary stuff), most of these
systems must not go down for very long.  It would be interesting to
see how many of those hot-shot Linux advocates could survive in that
environment.  My bet (based on a very small sample of such advocates
whose development practices are more or less publically inspectable
because they maintain major packages) is a very small fraction.

And of course, they don't really want to.  Maintaining legacy systems
isn't sexy; you don't get to do billion-dollar IPOs with that as your
business plan.

Is it any surprise that a company willing to concentrate on that
legacy market can make very high margins?  Nor is it surprising that a
company whose goal is to be _bug_-compatible would be selling crappy
systems; I bet their engineers don't like many of the things they are
told to do any more than you do (based on human nature, not on contact
with the poor fellows).

All that said, I really would like to see governments take a bit more
risk and encourage tenders from small(ish) free software businesses.
Especially at the local level where systems can be more self-contained
and less critical, and results can be compared across similar
authorities on a semi-competitive basis to establish "best practice".

But I don't expect EDS's _technical_ competitive advantage to go away
soon.

IMHO, YMMV, and all that stuff.

-- 
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