DARJIX

There have been a number of stories from analysts and companies about how Open Source will thrive in recessionary times. Sun made that argument today.

“We are preconfigured for the downturn,” Schwartz said in an interview with Computerworld last month. He claimed that users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, OpenSolaris and Sun’s GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress.

The basic argument is that because OSS is typically cheaper than their proprietary counterparts, that more companies will switch to open source (or choose open source over a proprietary solution.)

The argument is flawed because enterprise software tends to have very high switching costs. In other words, companies don’t tend to rip and replace systems to reduce their operating costs since it requires significant investment. I doubt that companies will want to invest, even to lower operating costs, in the middle of a recession.

Some enterprises will decide to purchase open source solutions, instead of a proprietary solution, to reduce their operating cost. However, since overall IT spending will decrease, it is difficult to ascertain the overall impact of this shift.

Many of the large Open Source vendors actually have mixed-source portfolios. Even if there is an surge in revenues form Open Source, these vendors should really be worried about renewals and sales of proprietary solutions.

Sean Michael Kerner writes that Ubuntu is not cash flow positive, despite its massive user base.

“We can’t make money selling the desktop that’s why we focused on a zero licensing cost business model,” Shuttleworth said. “The only way to build a business on Linux is to focus on services.”

Canonical is not a highly-ranked provider of services to the enterprise or to consumers. Like Novell, they are working with partners to build a support ecosystem around their product. However, without major brand-name backing, it is unlikely that large enterprises will want to purchase support services from unknowns.

It would not surprise me to see Canonical announce a large Desktop services deal with a major brand name provider, possibly Sun. Canonical is already tied up with Sun on the server side.

I was attacked by a Salmon Bot! How crazy! This has been written up elsewhere, so I won’t dwell on it.

I saw a picture of the Sony Xperia, and it has a smiley face icon for the symbol button. Very cool. Strangely, the other images of the Sony Xperia X1 actually say “Sym”.

I have no idea when this phone will be launched, but it looks pretty cool. I like the form factor, but unfortunately it is based on Windows Mobile.

A beautiful “fail” of my computer. The fan has been going, and I think the computer just overheated. This is the second IBM laptop that died on me in the last year. This one was fully depreciated, like the last one, so I’m not too worried about it.

On the bright side, I was able to back up right before it failed.