9 questions to Nick Davis, Linux Honcho from IBM (part 1)
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| Certain sectors (financial services, retail and telco) have been
| quick to embrace the Linux product offerings. Open Source offers
| both potential benefits and potential challenges to those customers
| which they have needed to consider both before making a decision
| to implement.
|
| Here's some of the major potential benefits customers in the UK reported
| of deploying open source:
|
| 1. The cost of acquiring the software has been low or even zero in
| some cases - but support is usually charged for. However, customers
| can normally decide whether to pay for support. Typically they would
| do this for mission critical deployments, but may not in the early
| evaluation or development phases.
|
| 2. The software is easy to get hold of - either downloading from the
| web, or often available as part of a Linux distribution. This
| frictionless access makes it easy for developers to try out the
| software for themselves, without need to get purchasing involved.
| It also encourages the rapid prototyping and "do-it-yourself"
| computing popularised by scripting languages and the LAMP stack.
|
| 3. Since the software is open source, it can often be obtained from
| multiple suppliers and often runs on multiple hardware architectures.
| Combined with the option of buying support -- again often from
| multiple vendors -- this all adds up to choice and flexibility for
| customers .
|
| 4. The peer review process of open source development has tended
| to produce high quality code and robust community support helps
| turn around bug fixes very quickly.
|
| 5. Finally, the community approach allows developers to focus onv
| alue add components and deliver real differentiating value to
| the business.
|
| Many customers are reaping the rewards of Open Source and Linux
| and you can read many references stories in the IT and major
| media titles.
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http://opensourceblog.itproportal.com/?p=208
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