[ale] bout me company

[Jeff Hubbs]

Stephen -

You have an interesting opportunity here.  Your Win2K Manager (WinMan 
for short) appears to have been conditioned to believe that OSses are 
something you have to go to school to learn how to utilize.  The whole 
of Windows World has been set up to encourage this sort of thinking.  

Your WinMan might very well feel threatened by you and the things the 
CFO said.  He would probably feel less threatened if he understood that 
the kind of money-sucking "gatekeeper" system that has built itself up 
around NT/2K/XP is not a core feature of the Linux world.  /Even if you 
decide to teach yourself Win2K/, there's the issue of actually getting 
access to a legal copy.  You can probably get time-limited or otherwise 
crippled 2K versions with training books that are quite expensive, but 
to actually legally set up a 2K instance will cost hundreds of dollars. 
 Oh, yeah, and you can only do it on one machine at a time, so if you 
want to legally set up a tabletop enterprise operation to learn on - 
with more than one server and a couple of workstations - you'd better 
have a lot of money to spend.

Working for the Government as I did at the time I began working with NT, 
I could buy a few NT licenses without a whole lot of hassle.  But, in 
the two private-industry places I've worked, spending a few hundred 
dollars on /anything/, no matter how justifiable, was a big deal. 
 Buying a handful of NT/2K licenses "to mess with" under those 
circumstances would have been quite a hard sell.  With Linux, 
"gatekeepers" are pretty much nonexistent.  It's a meritocracy; what 
/you are able to figure out how to do/ is the overarching limiting 
factor.  As I have become fond of saying, Linux rewards your time and 
effort in pretty much direct proportion.  

Your WinMan is going to regard you with a lot of turmoil and conflict. 
 If he went to someplace like Gwinnett Tech and took a lot of courses 
having to do with Win2K, he invested a whole lot of time, money, and 
effort into being able to support this one company's one operating 
system.  If he sees you flying around trying to do magical things with 
Linux, he's got two conclusions he can make:  either your work and 
knowledge is illegitimate because you didn't come by it by way of a 
gatekeeper the way he did, or he was foolish to have put all his eggs in 
Bill's basket.  If it were me, I would tell him that it was admirable 
and valid to have gone through the gatekeeper system and that with the 
perspective that the industry works hard to enforce - that you must go 
through the gatekeeper - one could hardly find fault with taking such a 
path as opposed to some alternative.  I mean, pick up a copy of / 
Computer User/ sometime and just look at the pages of training ads.  How 
could a person look at that and NOT feel like, well, this is what I must 
do to work with operating systems (my excessive generalization here is 
deliberate).

Once this guy realizes how low the barriers to entry are for Linux and 
Open Source software, he might feel more encouraged.  Now, his 
resistance is going to be greater if he has simply never worked with any 
non-MS OS before because he won't have a broad enough context with which 
to regard Linux.  I worked with VMS quite extensively for a number of 
years before I first saw NT or Linux, so my initial regard for both 
those OSses were shaped by my comfort with and understanding of VMS.  In 
a lot of ways, I was seeing NT as an attempt to create something like a 
VAX with a GUI running on Intel hardware.

Hey, man, burn the guy some distro CDs (he'll probably flinch at the 
idea of actually accepting them from you; Bill trains his grasshoppers 
well)!

- Jeff



Stephen Turner wrote:

>well i found out why the win2k network admin doesnt
>like me much but the IT manager is my friend, the cfo
>said the first thing since i been here that made
>since, "linux is certainly the future" scares the crap
>out of win2k manager cause hes the one that said "i
>dont have time to go back to school to learn it." :)
>looks like i might have a future here ;) no wonder the
>cfo is friendly to me... well maybe its cause its his
>job but, id like to think more ;)
>
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