As each day passes we hear more and more about the concept of Open Source or 'free' software. Now, with this economic and financial crisis upon us all, and with even the U.S. Government reportedly considering the possibility of moving in the direction of Open Source, we at Markgraf are publishing a series of articles that are intended to help interested computer users make the migration to the Open Source system platforms that are available.
We have made the move. With the exception of a very few legacy applications all of our PCs have been migrated to an Open Source operating system platform. After careful analysis we chose the Ubuntu Linux distribution from Canonical Ltd.
We do not know if the crisis we are now living will be the push that Open Source needs to really take off and become a dominant player in the IT environment, but we are happy that we are not in the shoes of Microsoft at this critical time in the relatively short history of IT.
Some of us have made inumerous technology migrations, starting with the usage of punched cards in what were called EAM departments. This gave way to the first real stored program computers used for business purposes, which ended up being dominated by one company, IBM. This giant was dethroned by a pair of upstarts: Microsoft, with windows, and Intel with the x86 line of microprocessors.
Is the time of a new dethroning near? We think it might be.
Welcome to the world of Open Source Computing.
