[GRLUG] WMNTUG Windows 7 Meeting

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A few hundred for Ultimate?  That's far less than a day's billable
>> work.  Not even a drop in the bucket. :)
>
> Multiplied by how many workstations?  Plus Office, Server, and various
> other application licenses most businesses end up with.  It's easy for
> a small business to pay $30k / year in Microsoft licenses.  Larger
> businesses can cost an order of magnitude more.  Just an example, it
> costs a minimum of $10k just to connect a SharePoint server to the
> internet - assuming you've already paid for the software.

5 workstations on Windows, one on Linux. OpenOffice all around.  One
server running 'Doze,  but nothing that doesn't look like it's going
to be migrated to a Linux VM under VMWare ESX Server.

>
> One desktop license isn't a big deal, but one desktop license for
> everyone in the company, along with associated infrastructure can be
> enough to hire another employee.

Nobody works here who doesn't independently admin Windows machines,
and only one person who doesn't admin a Linux box or three at work or
home. Everyone's fairly well cross-trained on everything that's
technical.

We had an intern this summer who I set up with that Linux workstation
and the open-source equivalents the tools he was trained on in school
(we even listed that as one of his internship goals) ... Within a few
days, he was sailing right along using Ubuntu 9.04 as a desktop
environment. The only real problems he faced were that Cinelerra is an
unstable piece of crap, and that he thought the system had locked up
on boot when ext3 hit its 35-mount automatic fsck. (On a rather full
1TB drive, that can take long enough so as to look like it's not
getting anywhere...)

We're not 'Doze junkies; Like Bob, we use it for what we need to use
it for.  Take that approach, and it can be a minimal expense.

-- 
:wq