Linux and Entrepreneurship

Linux?! What about it?!

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction when I was first told that I could use it in my business. My second reaction was “No games run on Linux. None, Zip, Keine, Niches, Zero” Then I actually engaged my brain and realized that businesses don't need to run games on their computers and that they are by far the biggest buyers of Linux machines.

I did some more research. My heart raced, I was in “The Zone” I was learning stuff. Stuff I had absolutely no idea even existed. In fairness I was already primed to receive this kind of information since I had been going on an open source crusade for various bits of software for a while but now I've started to put all the pieces into a business concept that I could consider mature enough to seriously pursue.

Many of us who are website developers, graphic artists and the like are no doubt familiar with the very high prices that many software packages command. Dream weaver costs £375, Coral Draw costs £300 and so on. For a cash strapped entrepreneur who needs to start his business on the cheap or a large company with hundreds of computers this is no small deal. Even, arguably the most basic productivity software packages, like office, cost £300.

In fact this is true to such an extent that I've identified 8 software packages that I need to have on the new computer I want to build for my business and these software packages cost a total of £2,358! That is a lot of money!.... However the really cool thing is that for each of these packages I've found an equivalent open source project that is at least comparable and in many cases better then the industry standard version!

Linux is just another open source project. The biggest problem with it is that it can be hard to setup on a system, but once that is done, it's just as easy as windows to any normal user. The fear of it being this insane thing that only computer geniuses use keeps a lot of people from using it.

The concept of saving £2,358 on a full development computer got me thinking that, surely there must be other people who would want to save that kind of money, but don't what to learn how to install Linux or spend hours searching through all the different open source projects for the really good ones. Naturally the biggest stumbling block is that people simply don't know about this other way of doing business.

In the next few months I'm going to be doing a few experiments into this to see whether my suspicions are correct.

The first experiment is this, Comment if you want my next post to say what all the software packages I found are and where you can get them for windows. If I get enough shouts I'll post them ;-)

- James