[ale] bout me company

[fgz]

Well put, and diplomatic also. Stiffled my impulse to
think poorly of the WinMan just on general principles.  :)
A classy read, Jeff.

-fgz


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Hubbs" <hbbs at attbi.com>
To: ale at ale.org
To: "Stephen Turner" <artic_knight at yahoo.com>
Cc: <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: [ale] bout me company


> Stephen -
>
> You have an interesting opportunity here.  Your Win2K Manager (WinMan
> for short) appears to have been conditioned to believe that OSses are
> something you have to go to school to learn how to utilize.  The whole
> of Windows World has been set up to encourage this sort of thinking.
>
> Your WinMan might very well feel threatened by you and the things the
> CFO said.  He would probably feel less threatened if he understood that
> the kind of money-sucking "gatekeeper" system that has built itself up
> around NT/2K/XP is not a core feature of the Linux world.  /Even if you
> decide to teach yourself Win2K/, there's the issue of actually getting
> access to a legal copy.  You can probably get time-limited or otherwise
> crippled 2K versions with training books that are quite expensive, but
> to actually legally set up a 2K instance will cost hundreds of dollars.
>  Oh, yeah, and you can only do it on one machine at a time, so if you
> want to legally set up a tabletop enterprise operation to learn on -
> with more than one server and a couple of workstations - you'd better
> have a lot of money to spend.
>
> Working for the Government as I did at the time I began working with NT,
> I could buy a few NT licenses without a whole lot of hassle.  But, in
> the two private-industry places I've worked, spending a few hundred
> dollars on /anything/, no matter how justifiable, was a big deal.
>  Buying a handful of NT/2K licenses "to mess with" under those
> circumstances would have been quite a hard sell.  With Linux,
> "gatekeepers" are pretty much nonexistent.  It's a meritocracy; what
> /you are able to figure out how to do/ is the overarching limiting
> factor.  As I have become fond of saying, Linux rewards your time and
> effort in pretty much direct proportion.
>
> Your WinMan is going to regard you with a lot of turmoil and conflict.
>  If he went to someplace like Gwinnett Tech and took a lot of courses
> having to do with Win2K, he invested a whole lot of time, money, and
> effort into being able to support this one company's one operating
> system.  If he sees you flying around trying to do magical things with
> Linux, he's got two conclusions he can make:  either your work and
> knowledge is illegitimate because you didn't come by it by way of a
> gatekeeper the way he did, or he was foolish to have put all his eggs in
> Bill's basket.  If it were me, I would tell him that it was admirable
> and valid to have gone through the gatekeeper system and that with the
> perspective that the industry works hard to enforce - that you must go
> through the gatekeeper - one could hardly find fault with taking such a
> path as opposed to some alternative.  I mean, pick up a copy of /
> Computer User/ sometime and just look at the pages of training ads.  How
> could a person look at that and NOT feel like, well, this is what I must
> do to work with operating systems (my excessive generalization here is
> deliberate).
>
> Once this guy realizes how low the barriers to entry are for Linux and
> Open Source software, he might feel more encouraged.  Now, his
> resistance is going to be greater if he has simply never worked with any
> non-MS OS before because he won't have a broad enough context with which
> to regard Linux.  I worked with VMS quite extensively for a number of
> years before I first saw NT or Linux, so my initial regard for both
> those OSses were shaped by my comfort with and understanding of VMS.  In
> a lot of ways, I was seeing NT as an attempt to create something like a
> VAX with a GUI running on Intel hardware.
>
> Hey, man, burn the guy some distro CDs (he'll probably flinch at the
> idea of actually accepting them from you; Bill trains his grasshoppers
> well)!
>
> - Jeff
>
>
>
> Stephen Turner wrote:
>
> >well i found out why the win2k network admin doesnt
> >like me much but the IT manager is my friend, the cfo
> >said the first thing since i been here that made
> >since, "linux is certainly the future" scares the crap
> >out of win2k manager cause hes the one that said "i
> >dont have time to go back to school to learn it." :)
> >looks like i might have a future here ;) no wonder the
> >cfo is friendly to me... well maybe its cause its his
> >job but, id like to think more ;)
> >
> >__________________________________________________
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