Re: [seul-edu] Re: Unified Front...

["Stephen C. Daukas" <stephen@daukas.com>]

OK - I probably should split this into two threads, one for the "discuss" 
list Doug talked about and one here (because we eventually get back to 
ISOs), but I'll do this the next time round when majordomo has singed me up 
to the schoolforge-discuss list!

At 10:49 PM 4/24/2002, Leon wrote:
>On Wednesday 24 April 2002 22:45, Stephen C. Daukas wrote:
>[snip]> Of course, each flavor of Linux has a different
> > file structure so if you really wanted to run ColdFusion on Linux, for
> > example, you'd be nuts to select anything other than RH - right?
>
>Wrong. I have an NT-guru associate running CF under Mandrake 8.1.

You are thinking like a techie - now, cut that out!  ;-)  The context was 
market perception, not what you and I know about Linux...  My sarcasm was 
lost, so here is my position stated another way:  Those who are making 
purchase decisions see that a company "supports" Red Hat, and that is hard 
to overcome...

By way of an example, I ran software development for a company that thought 
about going Linux with CF (was a CF/Wintel shop when I got there).  I 
watched a seasoned techie, who was my boss, state that if Linux was the way 
to go, fine, so long as we stick with RH (because of the stated support for 
CF, as well as market share).  There are two interesting points here:  one 
is the point that the underlying technology becomes less important the 
higher up the food chain you go so long as success is ensured (as evidenced 
by using CF in the first place :-0 ), and the other is that issues like 
perceived risks (like finger pointing) are often more important to the 
decision process.  Of course, this is all predicated on the motivation of 
making money in corporate America, but I think the point translates pretty 
well into the educational setting none the less.

[snip]
> > One reason why M$ has been so successful is that they have avoided the
> > "religious" wars that existed in the UNIX community 20 years ago, and that
> > exist in the Linux community today, to a lesser extent.
>
>Wrong. M$ have had some pretty ferocious internal religious wars (e.g. NT vs
>9X), and even today people are plugging 95 into Athlons and being amazed by
>how fast it is compred to ME or XP.

That internal conflict was never perceived by the general public (the 
non-techies), nor even by most readers of PC Magazine!  There is no doubt 
about the fact that M$'s marketing prowess allowed people to not have to 
think too much when it came time to purchase...  (Remember the slogan "no 
one was ever fired for buying IBM"?  This was later replaced with "no one 
was ever fired for buying M$".)  Compare this to UNIX in the mid 80's, when 
there were great debates about which UNIX was better, and, by extension, 
which company/product was better to purchase.  People did loose their jobs 
over those decisions!

[snip]
> > Everyone went with M$ because they didn't have to understand the technology
> > to reach a decision
>
>No, you're describing Apple customers.

No I'm talking about M$!  Apple started out very well when they packaged 
what started as XEROX's Star GUI with Apple hardware, but Apple was 
overtaken by M$ because Apple rested on their laurels.  Granted, Apple 
eliminated the necessity to deal with hardware issues, but that wasn't 
enough because they were more expensive than Intel boxes at the initial 
purchase *and* you had to buy a new machine when they told you to 
(remember, Apple is a hardware company).

My comments apply to my experiences from the late 80's on, by which time 
Apple was already in trouble (based on market share) everywhere but in 
education.  The company I was working for decided to drop Apple and focused 
only on M$ and UNIX, as did many other companies.  Eventually, they went 
with M$ so they wouldn't have the high development costs of supporting 
several UNIX flavors.

> > - they just went with the market leader.
>
>No, Microsoft simply told them to buy Microsoft often enough and loudly
>enough, and followed it up by any means - fair or foul - of ensuring that no
>choice was available.

Hmmm...  ensuring no choice was available... Sounds like a market leader to 
me!  M$ were and are the market leader!  The title Market Leader does not 
connote fair play!  IBM went the same route that M$ is going (and the 
justice department actually prevailed against IBM), and Standard Oil comes 
to mind...  In their day, Market Leaders, all.

[snip]
> > I think it is pretty clear that Star Office is the productivity app of
> > choice, even though it has an occasional glitch with M$.  Beyond that,
> > everyone seems to have their favorite browser, favorite email client, and
> > so on.  Dare I bring up gnome versus KDE?  ;-)
>
>This is actually an advantage. To understand this, you have to step out of
>salesman's shoes for a brief moment, and ask what it is that Microsoft
>*don't* give their clients, and the answer is `real choice'.

But M$ became the market leader that way!  So, QED, markets don't care!  If 
anything, non-techies like to play it safe - choice is frightening!

I learned a great lesson from one of my brothers in this area:  He came to 
me with a question about purchasing computers many, many moons ago (when 
Apple looked like they were getting into trouble the first time).  After a 
lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of various technologies 
available, he asked me a simple question:  "which choice allows me to get 
my work done the easiest, cheapest way possible?"   I was disappointed that 
my various technical insights didn't seem to matter to him, but I learned 
something!

Now this guy is a chemical engineer and a physicist, teaching at U of 
Michigan and doing work for the DOE back then.  He was certainly capable of 
following all of the technical issues, but his concern, fundamentally, was 
how to best spend his money so he could get his work done.  He was more 
interested in being told who would "win" the competition so he wouldn't be 
faced with having to go through another purchase decision or having to 
learn a new way for getting work done in the future.

========== ISO stuff starts here =========    ;-)
[snip]
>I take your point that a standard package makes a good reference point, but
>even Microsoft provide the appearence of choice. This is an important
>marketing point, because the decision is beign transferred from `shall we buy
>into this or not?' to `how shall we buy into this?' or perhaps more
>accurately `which of these shall we buy into?'

Agreed, but he choice is still from one source - a comfort to many because 
of the inferences one can draw from that fact.

>My modest proposal is to have two or three families of packaging. For example
>(SuSE and other fans feel free to shoot me down):
>
>     Mandrake + KDE (Konqueror); or
>     RedHat + Gnome (Mozilla); or
>     Debian + FluxBox (Galeon)
[snip]

I think we can accomplish this without naming any vendor in particular 
(which is my position on the ISO).  I think you need to let those who love 
Red Hat to choose RH.  The Mandrake camp should be allowed to do the 
same.  Those poor SuSE people, well... (just kidding!)  ;-)

I think the way to go is to craft an ISO that doesn't actually care which 
Linux you have.  I believe the LSB is the standard to follow, because it 
allows binary distributions of software to run on any Linux system of a 
given architecture, regardless of which distro is being used.  (I think we 
should include source, where possible, as well.)

Then, and of course some will tell me I'm optimistic, you make an effort to 
get vendors interested in it.  Let them run with an "educational bundle" 
and worry about all the business issues.

>All would offer OpenOffice, Scribus and whatever other non-WM-specific 
>apps we
>could cram on. I'd recommend supplying a one-CD and deluxe version of each,
>and emphasise that each of them can be set up as insert-and-depart
>(fire-and-forget) installations. I know Mandrake and Debian are quite happy
>to be installed from a wide variety of network servers (HTTP, FTP, NFS, SMB
>at least), and presume that the same is true of SuSe and RedHat.

OK, I'm going to ask a simple question.  If we provided a ISO of the top N 
educational apps, HOW-TOs, documentation, war stories, got permission to 
distribute Star/Open Office, perhaps more, whatever (what I referred to 
once as a package), would that be enough to get a district excited and 
successful, or must we also include a Linux distro?

If the latter, then I'm right back to my previous statement - you have to 
choose one distro to run with, and you have to make it easy to run.

Only having briefly looked over some of the info I've learned about 
recently, would our ISO be suitable to bundle with the terminal server 
effort, or others out there?

Steve