[wplug] Moving to west PA

[Dave Neuer]

Pittsburgh is in general a very provicinal and
conservative town. The tech sphere in Pittsburgh tends
to center around banking and finance (as opposed to
software and high tech manufacturing as in the other
markets you mentioned), and in those industries the
play-it-safe/stick-to-what-you-know type attitude
seems to prevail.

On the other hand, Linux is definitely making inroads
here as well. Based on my own experience during
several jobs here over the last few years, I'd say
that there's probably a place for linux in most shops
in Pittsburgh, but what that place is depends a lot on
the type of place and the stage of tech development.

For instance, in the financial institutions and what's
left of the big metals industry players, most serious
"enterprise" servers seem to still be Solaris, AIX or
WinNT, and most dev workstations are WinNT. However
there seem to be a lot of little specialized servers
and things (like departmental router/firewall boxes,
EDI transfer machines, etc>) running Linux.

In a smaller, more tech-oriented company, I think
you're more likely to be able to make a case for an
expanded "enterprise" role for Linux. I administered
all of the publicly accessible servers at a startup I
worked at here, and they were all Linux.

I even know of one old transportation company that is
just switching over from ancient legacy tech to more
modern environment. They had an IBM S/390 and deciced
to run their new J2EE environment on a virtual Linux
cluster on the mainframe!

So, if you've got Linux experience and are personally
persuasive at all, there's definitely ways to
introduce Linux into a professional environment

But at some institutions and for some applications,
you'll still run into the "but there's no one to
blame/sue" crap. That seems to be the biggest
lingering bit of FUD around Free/Open Source software
these days -- it seems to be a given now that, at
least compared to most M$ products,
reliability/scalabilitly aren't issues.

As an example, a friend of mine who works in a
financial institution told me recently  that they
thought they'd discovered a bug in an Apache module
that they use on one of their web servers. At a
departmental meeting where the bug was being
addressed, someone quipped "they [the Apache Group --
as 'the vendor'] probably want you to fix it for
them." A round of laughter ensued. As if fixing a bug
yourself and having the satisfaction to know that the
fix would likely be incorporated in future versions
was somehow worse than having a commercial vendor
ignore you until at least the next release cycle!

Sigh.

Dave Neuer

--- "N. Iglehart" <sendai at thedustyshelf.com> wrote:
> I am moving to the western PA area(hopefully
> Pittsburgh) in the next few 
> weeks and I wanted to get a general impression of
> the corporate feelings on 
> Linuix in the area.  I am coming from Dallas and
> have been a reasonably 
> active DFW-LUG member for three years and watched
> the corporate opinion 
> evolve in the area from a general disinterest in the
> OS to Linux becoming the 
> drug of choice in many companies for unix
> workstations.  While some of that 
> shift was financially motivated, it was for the most
> part because of the 
> environment/creativity relationship that places like
> Dallas, Atlanta and SF 
> learned to recognize and exploit.  I have noticed
> that Pittsburgh and 
> surrounding areas are sadly behind in this respect
> despite the fact that Pitt 
> wishes to be a "tech center" so to speak.  Any
> firsthand experience?
> 
> Also, are there any membership requirements for
> wplug? 
> 
> Lastly, I have been kicking around the idea of a
> Linux on Sparc presentation 
> for the DFW-LUG, but it looks like I won't be around
> to give it.  Any 
> interest in west PA?
> 
> Nick Iglehart
> _______________________________________________
> wplug mailing list
> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug


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