"Eating Dog Food"

Once, well maybe 30 times or so, I and others suggested that our famous Fortune Fifty company use an Enterprise GNU/Linux distribution on desktop systems internally, instead of a Microsoft one.

Managers eyes light up when you say millions in dollars saved. Been there, seen that.

But what if your company is so high-profile in the PC industry that every internal move is noted by MS? What if MS is permanently on-site? What if MS pays your company (in one form or another) to keep their desktop standard internally? What if MS coerces your business, despite all sound business advice to the contrary, to adopt XP or Vista early so they (MS) can show those licenses as sales to Wall Street? What if...just askin'.

But suggest Linux on the desktop inside the company and the only argument against it is, "We're eating our own dog food," meaning "We sell MS so we use MS."

I'm tired of eating your dog food. This argument has not been true for nearly a decade. The company I mention above uses Linux internally on servers, and has been selling it to customers for 8 years now.

IBM, Novell, famous German cities have been turning to Linux internally for many years as well. They ate some human food, I guess.

When someone mentions "eating their own dog food" watch out. This metaphor, taken literally will probably gross you out more than the OS you despise.

Dogs will be dogs. Food to them is relatively indiscriminate: If it is meat, eat it. So MS is meat we must eat? Are Linux adopters vegetarians, all? This is one of many questions you can raise by simply taking the metaphor literally.

I'm talking about the preservation of massive hardware investments on users literal desktops. I'm talking about reduced down time. I'm talking about innovation uncompromised by the small mind of Microsoft. I'm talking about network efficiency that results in reduced bandwidth usage by 1000's, in turn causing lower investment in new network infrastructure hardware. I'm talking about peace, freedom and love...between the users and the IT department (weird, isn't it?).

We all know that Red Hat's RHED and SUSE's SLED can do 110% of what the current MS desktop OS does inside a company. The cost/benefit analysis is obvious, if you are honest and unbiased.

It's embarrassing: Using a Windows-only application to record test results from Linux-specific tests. Imagine it not as a betrayal of a moral principle, but as a simple betrayal of human food for dog food. I've eaten enough.

Now, don't get me started about the metaphor, "Breathing your own exhaust..."