I came an article the other day that reminded me of my moment when I switched from Windows to Linux. Heralding from 2003, this piece details Sterling Ball, CEO of Ernie Ball, the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings and their forced adventure into Open Source, and it's immediate rewards.
In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses.
Humiliated by the experience, Ball told his IT department he wanted Microsoft products out of his business within six months. "I said, 'I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,'" recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly."
This happened to me too, but on a much smaller scale. I had been getting tired of the restrictiveness of the Windows operating system when, not one day after Microsoft reported tens of billions of dollars in earnings for three months, my copy of Office was locked because I added memory and changed my video card.
Yes, Office had decided it was now installed on another computer, and had to be reactivated. I looked at my Office CD case, and promptly downloaded OpenOffice.org. Shortly after that, I was dual booting Ubuntu and not long after that, I was removing my Windows partition, and I haven't looked back.
The community support for Linux is better than the paid support for Windows, mainly because problems can be fixed because it's not compiled, closed source. I wasn't used to getting most solutions and software for free, and am glad to donate my time and money towards these projects. With Windows, it seems most everything comes with a fee.
This is a fantastic article and proof that a business, if motivated, can move to something other than Microsoft with ease and benefit. The article debunks many of the arguments against Open Source software and Linux, not in theory but in practice.
Lighten up Microsoft! This article was written in 2003, and Open Source is only getting better.
