Microsoft Windows ousted at California school district

As far as I’m concerned, Linux thin clients are a no-brainer for education, non-profits, and many businesses. The costs associated with purchasing, maintaining, and administering Windows based PCs is prohibitive even with the heavy discounts from Microsoft.

Scenario: High school with 200 Windows PCs.

• Admin Costs – How many IT personnel is it going to take to properly administer a network with 200 PCs running Windows XP? I’d say at least 2, if not 3, full time equivalents.
• Hardware Costs – How much is it going to cost to purchase those PCs? Minimally configured machines are going to run $500-600 (Canadian). You could beg for old donated PCs, but they are dog slow and break down pretty frequently which increases your admin costs.
• Microsoft Licensing? A minimum of $10-15K per year.
• Hardware Lifespan – What will be the average lifespan of those PCs before they have to be replaced? They get abused pretty badly so I’d put it around 3-4 years. Now you have to go out and replace them with new or donated hardware, configure them, roll them out, etc. This costs a lot of money.

Add it up and the school is looking at an IT budget that is easily $200K per year. Not cheap, especially for schools that are always trying to cut costs.

Scenario: High school with 200 Linux Thin Clients

• Admin Costs – A Linux thin client network of this size can be managed by 1-2 individuals. Huge savings here.
• Hardware Costs – Linux thin clients are half the price of new “thick” client PCs. Or you can just take donated PCs, pull out the hard drives, and then PXE boot them. Any way you slice it, you can save a lot of money on hardware.
• Microsoft Licensing – You’ll never totally rid yourself of Microsoft, but the licensing can certainly be cut by at least 75%
• Hardware Lifespan – The life span of Linux thin client hardware is going to be double that of comparable thick client hardware.

Schools, non-profits, and businesses that move to a Linux thin client infrastructure can easily cut their IT spending by 25-50%. Not only do the costs go down, but the performance and user satisfaction increases because the students and staff are now longer dealing with slow, unreliable, virus-ridden, computers. Linux thin clients are fast and reliable.

Like I said, in my mind it’s a no-brainer. What do you think?

Mark Shuttleworth: Keeping it FREE

We have to work together to keep free software freely available. It will be a failure if the world moves from paying for shrink-wrapped Windows to paying for shrink-wrapped Linux.

As free software becomes more successful and more pervasive there will be an increasing desire on the part of companies to make it more proprietary. We’ve already seen that with Red Hat and Novell, which essentially offer free software on proprietary terms – their “really free” editions are not certified, carry no support and receive no systematic security patching. In other words – they’re beta or test versions. If you want the best that free software can deliver, a rock solid, widely certified, secure platform, from either of those companies then you have to pay, and you pay the same price whether you are Goldman Sachs or a startup in Rio de Janeiro.

That’s not the vision we all share of what free software can achieve.

Very interesting (and heartening) comments from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Later in the article he talks about the success that Canonical is having attracting corporate customers that are willing to pay for enterprise class support. Nice to see that Ubuntu appears to be answering the nay-sayers and making the business model work. Here’s hoping Ubuntu is around for many more years to come.

Up until now, businesses who have embraced Linux have gravitated toward Redhat and Suse because of their stability, and long release cycles. Nobody wants to install a Linux distribution that is only going to receive security updates for 12-18 months and then be abandoned. We all have better things to do than constantly be migrating applications from one server platform to another!

Ubuntu knows what corporate Linux users want and it aiming to give it to them with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 6.06. The Ubuntu team has committed to provide security updates to 6.06 for three years. That is music to the ears of SMBes everywhere who are looking for a stable, license free, debian based Linux distribution.

I’ve installed several servers based on the upcoming Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) release and I’m very pleased with the stability, performance, and package selection. Whether you’re looking to build a web, email, file, or application server I don’t think that you can go to far wrong with Ubuntu.