More expensive Free software beats less expensive Microsoft bid?

brian on 2003.07.17 at 10:11 pm

When does a free product cost more than one that's not free? Well, here's a fascinating account of the city of Munich's search for a new IT vendor. It basically spun down to this: Microsoft made an expensive bid, $36.6 million. IBM/SuSE (Linux) came in a with a more affordable bid of $35.7 million. None other than Steve Ballmer comes to town, and slashes Microsoft's bid an astonishing 35%, to $23.7 million, instantly. City council picks the IBM/Suse (Linux) option, although it cost more. Why?

Though Microsoft underbid IBM and SuSE by $11.9 million in Munich, city officials were concerned about the unpredictable long-run cost of Microsoft upgrades, says Munich council member Christine Strobl, who championed the switch to Linux. And the more Microsoft discounted, the more it underscored the notion that as a sole supplier, Microsoft could -- and has been -- naming its own price, she says.

''Microsoft's philosophy is to change our software every five years,'' Strobl says. ''With open-source, it is possible for us to make our own decision as to when to change our software.''

...the offer from IBM-SuSE better met ''strategic'' criteria set forth by the Munich council

Posted in: Software · Politics · Linux

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Linux and Movie Magic

jake on 2003.07.10 at 04:11 pm

Linux clusters have been taking over studio render farms for a while. Including being used in the new movie Sinbad. eweek has an article about the trend. I was amazed by the comments about what 64-bit computing does to the process...

"DreamWorks had, for example, one sequence that took 24-hours to be rendered on a 32-bit system, but which took just 20 minutes on Itanium-based servers…"

That's crazy!!

Posted in: Linux · Movies

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Playstation is serious work

brian on 2003.05.24 at 08:03 pm

Playstation is serious work... at least if you've wired 65 of them together in a cluster, using Linux, for scientific research. Click on for more.

Posted in: Linux

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Jhai Laotian Wireless Update

brian on 2003.05.06 at 11:42 pm

Wired has published a follow up on the Jhai project we mentioned months back. The Jhai group has built a Linux (actually, Laonux- a Laotian language-based Linux build) powered, wireless connected computer designed to to be run on bicycle power in remote Laos. Unfortunately, the project has met some major set backs, but they are continuing on, and hope to have it running before June.

"Jhai" is Laotian for "hearts and minds working together."

Posted in: Technology · Linux

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