The second of my mid-afternoon sessions is Linux on the Corporate Desktop: We Did It, and You Can Too with John Goerzen. This session popped out at me because we have a similar initiative at work. The company John works for has about 400 employees, so obviously no where near the scale we’d be deploying on. Hopefully, I’ll learn a few lessons from someone who’s done it before.
There are a multitude of troubles with using a proprietary operating system, as anyone attending OSCON is familiar. From cost to forced upgrades to vendor lock-in. Suddenly, companies are at the mercy of the vendor, and have lost so much of their own self-direction.
Not only has John’s company benefited from the Open Source community, they’ve contributed back to the community. That’s key, I feel. I’d like to see my own company contribute much more than they do.
I’m not sure who this talk was targeted for. It wasn’t really a good sales pitch to business-type people, and it wasn’t very high level for IT-type people. I don’t know what I expected from it, but I don’t think I got what I wanted out of it. Most of the challenges they faced, we’ve already solved. We’ve already created a standard image and can already deploy it on standard hardware. We already have Windows virtual machines for anyone who still needs to run Windows applications. We already have enough management buy-in for the project, too.
I do, however, like the sound of this “seamless RDP” he talked about. I will need to investigate it further. Also, it’s refreshing to hear from someone who has successfully (mostly) removed Windows from their enterprise.
[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, Linux[/tags]