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Linux in Government: The End Game for Vendor Lock-In

Jun 13, 2005  By Tom Adelstein
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Open-source and standards compliant Linux quickly is becoming the enabler in today's complex IT infrastructures.
Some Final Thoughts on Vendor Lock-In

Every generation of information technologists seem to have "the answer" that will revolutionize the world. From my involvement in the industry and my studies and research, I would say the answer changes according to advances in the market, social and economic conditions and business success. Ultimately, no one has "the answer".

In the last five years, Linux has proven to have a worthy paradigm for collaboration and it makes effective use of the Internet. Using Web service technologies and open standards allows enterprises to respond to security threats while providing higher levels of customer satisfaction and containing costs. The opportunity to use Linux exists now. Take the decision to the executive suite and see if it makes sense for you.

Tom Adelstein is a Principal of Hiser + Adelstein, an open-source company headquartered in New York City. He's the co-author of the book Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop and author of an upcoming book on Linux system administration to be published by O'Reilly. Tom has been consulting and writing articles and books about Linux since early 1999.

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Silos and licenses

Ralph's picture
Submitted by Ralph (not verified) on Mon, 06/20/2005 - 15:20.

I enjoyed reading about silos. I have often wondered about call centers that act this way. I never really thought about it being caused by lack of integration among systems. This seems like a problem that open source systems would have a big advantage in solving. Closed systems want to protect their interfaces, but open source systems can't and that is to the user's benefit.
The point I did not see mentioned was how vendors try to lock you in to their solutions with abusive licensing terms. The GPL is really the users best choice when it comes to flexibility of how you use your system. Some developers like BSD better for reasons I understand. They have their own interests to further. The user is the class that benefits from the GPL. And, that is one big reason that I think Linux has succeeded.

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