On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 16:49 -0500, Arch Willingham wrote: > I am on a committee of a national organization called Associated General Contractors. Our committee is called the Electronic Information Systems committee (http://www.agc.org/page.ww?section=Technology&name=Electronic+Information+Systems+Committee) and we are getting ready to have our annual meeting. > > As background, I am the MIS person for our company. For the last year +- I have been learning to use Linux. I started with Fedora FC4 then went to FC5 and now FC6. I use it on my personal laptop and have probably installed it twenty times and I am sort of getting the hang of it (sort of being the operative word). I know there are other flavors of Linux but have never used them (not enough time in the day). I have read everything I can get my hands on on Linux and really enjoy using it. I have deployed it to one jobsite as sort of a beta test site. The interesting thing there is that the guy had never really used a computer and had no preconceived notion of "that's not the way Windows does it" and the test has been great. > > I have to give a brief presentation this Saturday on Linux to my fellow committee members. There are so many resources I am not sure where to start. Would any of y'all have any suggestions? My thoughts are to sort of outline what it is, how many people use it, the issues surrounding the windows fear factor etc. I don't want to get too deep but I'd like to wake up more people to the virtues of the product. > > Any help any of you could provide would be welcome and deeply appreciated! Arch, By far, my favorite thing about open source software and Linux is the quality of the software. The freedom that open source software provides is great, but as a software _user_ what I really care about is that my applications work well. Because the software is built as a community effort, the software developers get a lot of feedback from users, and users who also happen to be developers sometimes join the effort and help that way too. Why is Apache the most widely used web server? It's not because people are attracted to it ideologically, or because of the price tag. It's because it's the best web server on the market. It's small, it's fast, and it performs really well. Same thing with MySQL. MySQL is giving the big database vendors a run for their money because not only is it free, but it's incredibly robust and scalable. It's a pattern that you'll see over and over. Ditto all the other common applications in the LAMP stack -- they're just the best in class software. The extensibility of the software is another huge asset. I work at a Web 2.0 startup company. You wouldn't think that we would have a huge need (or ability, given the small number of employees) to modify any of the software that we are running. But one of the proprietary backend tools that we bought from another company required some special mechanism for receiving audio. Rather than pay for their solution, one of the developers at work spent a couple days and patched lame to work with the backend, saving us a lot of money and making things easier to maintain. We also had a case where we wanted to do some mail filtering (in this case, removing certain attachments). Sendmail and Postfix have an open API for developing milters (mail filters), so one day I sat down and read the API and wrote a milter to meet our needs. This is something that just couldn't be done with an email server like Exchange. So to summarize what I'm trying to say here... as a sysadmin, I have found that the open source software out there is the best. It's fast and scalable, things are coded to open standards to the software interoperates well. And in the case that you actually need the software to be changed slightly, you're free to get in touch with the original developers of the software and file a bug report, or even make the changes yourself if you have people with programming knowledge working for you. -- Evan Klitzke
