[ale] FYA: today's obligatory Gates-bashing story :-)

[Susan Liebeskind]

Allow me to be the first one to post this here :-)

> Sunday October 4
> 
> Gates pushes hometown to Linux
> Linux-based document system costs 10% of Windows NT solution
> 
> By Christine Burns - FRAMINGHAM
> It's ironic that in his zeal to equip his new $US53 million home with
> the latest and greatest technology - not to mention every modern
> convenience known to man, woman and child - Microsoft mogul Bill Gates
> drove his hometown into the arms of another operating system.
> 
> The official paperwork filed with the city clerk in Medina, Washington,
> (pop. 3,082) concerning the Gates homestead had the city's file cabinets
> bursting at the seams. Of the 10 file cabinets housed in the old ferry
> terminal-turned-town hall set on the shores of Lake Washington, four
> were completely filled with upward of 40,000 pages of building permits,
> blueprints and change work orders all pertaining to the Gates estate.
> 
> Factoring in future growth and recognising that they physically had no
> more room for storing municipal paperwork, the town fathers had to
> decide on whether to spring for a new town hall or a document management
> system. The latter being the more prudent choice, the town looked into
> NT document management systems that might fit in nicely with the town's
> Microsoft LAN. But what the town came up with was a product that runs on
> Caldera's version of Linux. This product rang in at less than 10% of the
> price of its NT counterparts, says Ray Jones, president of Archive
> Retrieval, a Kirkland, Washington, systems integrator. Archive Retrieval
> last month built and installed the city's new document management
> system, called The Archive.
> 
> "When I asked the guys at town hall if they minded that the idle screen
> would display a big Caldera logo, they told me I could point it toward
> the window so everybody walking by could see it," Jones says.
> 
> Sorry, Bill. No hometown advantage here.
>