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Linux Lags On The Desktop


Business adoption is slow despite technical advances and vendor support

By Jennifer Maselli
InformationWeek
April 7, 2003 12:00 AM (From the April 7, 2003 issue)

Associates at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp.'s more than 330 stores have used Linux-based point-of-sale systems, inventory applications, and gift registries for more than two years. But CIO Michael Prince drew the line at desktops in the company's headquarters: Linux wasn't ready, for a slew of technical reasons.

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Until now. A lot has changed in the last six months, Prince says. Support from key vendors and advancements in the compatibility of Linux software gave him reason to put StarOffice, Sun Microsystems' desktop software suite that runs on Linux and other operating systems, on 300 office PCs. He uses it himself. But here's the catch: The corporate PCs still run Microsoft's Windows, and Prince hasn't abandoned Microsoft Office. He wants Burlington office staff to have the same applications as the retail stores, but he doesn't yet think a corporate transition to Linux on the desktop is worth the trouble of migrating existing data and retraining employees.

Linux looks increasingly like a technically viable option as an operating system for PCs, but it's still one that's rarely considered seriously in business environments. That's despite wide use of the open-source system in many companies' IT infrastructures: Research firm IDC says Linux has 14% of the $50.9 billion market for server operating systems and will climb to No. 2 behind Windows by 2006. Replacing server software and training IT staff to use Linux is one thing; getting knowledge workers to use a new system makes even the several-hundred-dollar savings between the Microsoft Office productivity suite and a Linux suite such as StarOffice not enough for most IT execs. "They're not willing to make a change from Microsoft when the Windows software is handling their needs and users are comfortable with it," says Nicholas Petreley, an analyst for research company Evans Data.

Linux on the desktop is confined mostly to workstations that rely heavily on graphics for digital-content creation and product engineering, says Jim McDonnell, senior VP of marketing for Hewlett-Packard's personal systems group. "This makes sense because it's taking advantage of the operating system for performance," he says.

But vendors haven't given up trying. Sun's latest low-cost Linux PC, slated to ship this summer, could spur wider use of the system on desktops, says Bill Claybrook, research director for Linux and open source at the Aberdeen Group. "Linux hasn't made a dent in the desktop marketplace so far, but things will change," he predicts.

Other changes are under way. Oracle said last month it will offer technical support to customers using open-source software from the UnitedLinux consortium. In February, CodeWeavers Inc. and Tarantella Inc. started bundling together Tarantella's Enterprise 3 access software with CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office Server Edition, to let users access Office applications from a client running Linux via a Java-enabled Web browser. Also, Ximian Inc., a maker of Linux-based desktop-productivity applications, says a version of its software, to be released this spring, will tightly integrate with Windows.


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The technical barriers are steadily falling away, Burlington's Prince says. Many of the company's applications have been loaded using Oracle's toolsets, and IT workers at Burlington use those same Oracle toolsets to do development work. Until recently, the toolset used to develop and deploy the applications required a special version of Java called Oracle J-Initiator, and up until a few months ago it had been available only on Windows. Oracle teamed with Sun to add Linux support, Prince says. Still, some of the company's older Oracle applications aren't Linux-compatible.

StarOffice 6.0 can open Microsoft Word and Excel documents, removing one of the most annoying problems of the past, Prince says. By deploying both StarOffice and Windows on corporate PCs, he hopes to ease any eventual transition to Linux. Still, a migration is a migration, so Prince isn't making a major operating system or productivity-suite change right now. "I'm not sure there's any payback in migrating people," he says. "Cost-wise, Linux is better, and it's more reliable, but migrating users one-by-one is a big effort." Prince will encourage new employees to use Linux instead of Windows, but he won't force them. "We want people to use what they're comfortable with," he says.


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