Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over 304
ZDOne writes "In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to analyst Gartner — which has up to now been fairly cautious, or downright negative, in its previous predictions about community developed software. '"By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms,' predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a 'stealth' impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition.'"
Use != Take Over (Score:4, Informative)
Re:There's no advantage to propietary (Score:3, Informative)
Complete report (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless. (Score:2, Informative)
Most commonly used are;
Gartner seems way behind the times on this one. (Score:3, Informative)
All of them are running Windows and Office on just about every machine they have.
However, most of them are also using at least one Open Source tool to fill some need. For many of them, that's something like Subversion running on a Windows server and Tortoise installs for the devs to go with it, but still, they're using it.
Re:Heck, even Microsoft runs its wireless on Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless. (Score:4, Informative)
Good luck trying that with a typical piece of proprietary software. In order to stand any chance of doing this you'd need to take the company to court and win.
If there's a bug I want to be able to outsource the patch in the form of paying for it.
Which is something you can easily do with open source. With proprietary software you face both technical and legal issues even trying.
Where do they say "take over"? (but, Dr Evil...) (Score:3, Informative)
A company may have 3000 Windows systems running Office and one Linux-based router, and they will be 'using open source in direct or embedded form'.
Except that they're too late. I doubt there's a business in America that isn't using open source, one way or another. Even if they have nothing but Windows in-house: (oh, and what the hell are the "technical, business, or legal reasons" to reject open source?)
Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless. (Score:2, Informative)
Your "shortcomings" come from not understanding the tools available. To use your examples if you wanted to do a full backup and have it use compression- you're in luck- every backup uses compression. Want to do it from the command line but don;t know how? Try "command line backup" under help and support. Want to use pointers in VB. Look at byref, if that's not going to accomplish what you want do a google search for pointers vb ( or vb.net if you prefer) however pointers are inherently unsafe (which is why they are more difficult to implement in VB since there is no real need for them) but they are available should you have to use them to interop with com objects that require pointers.
Linux in general is needlessly complex, to use your example knowing that dd can be used for backups is a battle in itself. googling for "linux backup" dd doesn't make the top 5 hits and one hit from linux magazine (linux backup primer) says "Linux backups can be quite intimidating
Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless. (Score:3, Informative)
The 5th result when you search google for "flash ubuntu 7.10 [google.com]" is this [ubuntuforums.org]. You read through it, enable the Restricted Repositories in Synaptic, and then just install flash.
I think you may find that this is enlightening [oneandoneis2.org]. It boils down to this: Linux is NOT Windows. Trying to treat it like Windows sets you up for failure. You don't try to drive your car like you ride your bike, do you?