We all know that Linux is a "fringe" operating system that only appeals to a few die-hard geeks. We know this because Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson told us so during the antitrust trial, where he decided that Microsoft had no viable competition. Indeed, according to Patrick Thibodeau of the IDG News Service, Washington Bureau, he laughed at Microsoft's attempts to "paint Linux as a potent desktop foe".
Well, Linux may be too geeky for the average judge, but it certainly appeals to people running web servers, and there are undoubtedly corporate desktops where it can do the job. In fact, Linux's inability to take advantage of all the fun things people can do with PCs on and off the web could be seen as an advantage by IT managers who would rather their users got on with some work.
Last week, the city of Munich announced that it was going to give Linux and Open Office a go. It plans to convert around 14,000 of its desktop PCs from Windows, starting next year.
The mayor, Christian Ude, claimed in a statement that it was a "strategic decision [that] makes Munich less dependent on one IT supplier and sets a trend toward more competition". We're all in favour of that.
Munich's problem was that it had failed to keep its systems up to date, and Microsoft was phasing out support for Windows NT: it was faced with an expensive upgrade to Windows XP. An independent report by Unilog Integrata concluded that Linux was the cheapest option for the financially strapped council.
Munich stuck with this decision even after the personal intervention of Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer, offering a deal that made XP cheaper.
In fact, Microsoft argues that Windows is usually cheaper than Linux, because of its lower "total cost of ownership" (TCO) over five years, based on research by IDC. However, this Microsoft-sponsored research covers server operating systems, not desktops, and North American skills and salary levels, not Bavarian ones - though it is true that the cost of the operating system is trivial compared with the cumulative cost of installation, support, maintenance and other staff-related overheads.
But Munich's decision carries little risk. A year ago, Germany's interior minister, Otto Schily, signed a deal with Erwin Staudt, chairman of IBM Deutschland GmbH, to supply federal, state and local governments with Linux hardware and software at discount prices. Under this public-private initiative, IBM is also offering a portal and hotline support, and the version of Linux comes from a local supplier: SuSE Linux AG of Nuremberg, Germany.
No doubt the deal makes sense for IBM, the world's biggest IT company, which supplies hardware, software, applications, consulting, support and other services to the tune of $81bn a year. Indeed, it usually gave its own operating systems and software away until 1969, when the US government filed an antitrust suit to get it to "unbundle" them in order to create a competitive software market. Bundling someone else's operating system is even cheaper.
