[ale] Business Case Was Riddle me this

[Jay Lozier]

John Dvorak on pcmag.com has a post were he argues the MS-NSA joint  
venture should make countries and companies rethink their reliance on  
proprietary software especially OSes. Apparently Windows has had numerous  
backdoors and slowly fixed zero-exploits so the NSA could "monitor" users.  
His comment was the US Department of Commerce should be very upset over  
the NSA scandal. He did come out and directly say switch to Linux or BSD  
but if you are not use a proprietary OS what are your options?  
Particularly since some industries have legal responsibilities to their  
clients not to share this information without express approval of the  
client or a valid court order.

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:50:12 -0400, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:

> Netflix and 86-Linux support isn't a technical issue.
> It is a cost-of-support, business decision, and perhaps contractual  
> issue.
>
> Linux on the desktop has never taken off with the numbers desired to  
> have a
> thriving business profit center for Adobe.  It is hard to justify  
> spending
> thousands of hours creating, distributing and supporting a platform  
> where there
> doesn't appear to be a future payback.  iOS/Apple's decision to end Flash
> support was the initial nail in the coffin. The fact that Android is  
> Linux is
> the other, though a business case could be made to sell support for the  
> 200M
> Android devices.  I think internally, Adobe management wants Flash to  
> die.
>
> Then there are the contracts around commercial media offerings.  There  
> are a few
> Linux-based devices that support Netflix, but these have DRM built-into  
> the
> chip.  Look at the "WD-TV Live HD Plus" as a start. I suspect Roku does  
> too.
>
> Heck, Netflix servers are all Linux-based, so I'm fairly positive that  
> the
> Netflix engineers WANT to support Linux desktops, but again, it is a  
> business
> decision.
>
> I can't blame any business for believing that the Linux market is  
> small.  We are
> a noisy group, but not in the normal ways.  We don't advertise like  
> Apple or
> Microsoft. 90% of the world has never seen or heard "Linux" before.   
> Until that
> changes, support for Linux will really be limited to niche users, fed-up
> businesses and servers.
>
> I've been thinking of an easy way to let people know how many Linux  
> users and
> machines running Linux there are in the world .... perhaps the ALE group  
> can be
> the starting point?  I'll make another post about this idea soon to let  
> all of
> ALE see it better - not buried in another thread.  Basically, it is an
> email-footer with a count of machines/devices running Linux.  It needs  
> to be
> simple, short, to the point.  I've had this footer for about 5 yrs  
> myself:
>


-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier at gmail.com