[ale] Fwd: Bill's House

[Bob]

Computerworld News Wire
Sunday, October 4, 1998

Gates pushes hometown to Linux
Linux-based document system costs 10% of Windows NT solution

By Christine Burns - FRAMINGHAM
It's ironic that in his zeal to equip his new $US53 million home with
the latest and greatest technology - not to mention every modern
convenience known to man, woman and child - Microsoft mogul Bill Gates
drove his hometown into the arms of another operating system.

The official paperwork filed with the city clerk in Medina, Washington,
(pop. 3,082) concerning the Gates homestead had the city's file cabinets
bursting at the seams. Of the 10 file cabinets housed in the old ferry
terminal-turned-town hall set on the shores of Lake Washington, four
were completely filled with upward of 40,000 pages of building permits,
blueprints and change work orders all pertaining to the Gates estate.

Factoring in future growth and recognising that they physically had no
more room for storing municipal paperwork, the town fathers had to
decide on whether to spring for a new town hall or a document management
system. The latter being the more prudent choice, the town looked into
NT document management systems that might fit in nicely with the town's
Microsoft LAN. But what the town came up with was a product that runs on
Caldera's version of Linux. This product rang in at less than 10% of the
price of its NT counterparts, says Ray Jones, president of Archive
Retrieval, a Kirkland, Washington, systems integrator. Archive Retrieval
last month built and installed the city's new document management
system, called The Archive.

"When I asked the guys at town hall if they minded that the idle screen
would display a big Caldera logo, they told me I could point it toward
the window so everybody walking by could see it," Jones says.

Sorry, Bill. No hometown advantage here.
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© Copyright, IDG Communications Ltd, 1998. All rights reserved.