It's cheap and it works. But can you run your company on Linux?
The Linux operating system is hot. It's cheap. And it works. But can you run your company on it?
Wearing a blue windbreaker with a James G. Murphy Co. logo on it, Julie Murphy stands in the company's muddy auction lot in Kenmore, Wash., just north of Seattle. As she looks on, men in flannel shirts and logging boots inspect the tires and climb into the cabs of the used backhoes and dump trucks that will be going on the block shortly. Each year Murphy's company auctions off some $30 million worth of this sort of heavy equipment, along with used police cars, tools, and even the contents of an entire restaurant or sawmill.
But today's auction is different. For one thing, nearly 1,500 bidders have registered, far more people than the monthly auctions usually attract. And there's more than the average air of expectation in the auction yard. That is largely because of just one item: a one-of-a-kind, baby blue 1971 convertible Plymouth Hemi Barracuda "muscle car." Seized by police in Everett, Wash., in connection with a drug arrest, the car is in mint condition. No one knows how much it will go for when the bidding starts at noon, but it won't be small change: the city of Everett has suggested that the minimum bid be set at $250,000. One fellow has flown up from Phoenix to try his luck. Other bidders are on the phone from places like Blue Springs, Mo., and St. Paul, Minn. "This is one of the most exciting things we've ever sold," says Murphy.
In a previous life, Murphy was a certified public accountant at Arthur Andersen. Now she is chief financial officer, controller, and office manager of James G. Murphy Co. The company was founded in 1970 by her father, James. Murphy's older brother, Tim, is CEO and head auctioneer. Along with her many other duties, Julie Murphy is responsible for the company's computers.
Not every small business will be able to (or should) jump on Linux immediately.
And this auction, like all the others her father and his fellow auctioneers have held for the past four years, will run on Linux. In the company's cramped mail room, Murphy proudly points to a metal rack sitting in a corner behind the copier. It holds two computers that run Linux, the software program that has taken the computing world by storm. Since 1996 -- long before most people had ever heard of it -- James G. Murphy Co. has been using Linux to run its auctions. Today the company uses the program to run almost its entire business.
Linux, a computer operating system, is essentially a version of Unix, the software that runs powerful workstations sold by companies like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. It has two big advantages over competing operating systems (like Microsoft Windows NT, for one), says Bill Campbell, the Seattle computer consultant who installed the Murphys' Linux system: It is dirt cheap. And it is incredibly reliable.
That reliability is important if you're in charge of a 30-employee family business running auctions that sometimes draw more than 1,000 bidders. This morning, while most of the crowd is jockeying for seats in the indoor auction hall to get the best view of the bidding on the Hemi 'Cuda, others are lining up in the office to pay for the heavy equipment and trucks they acquired during the morning's auctions. Using computer terminals and PCs hooked up to the Linux server, 10 cashiers are taking payments. All the information they need is already in the server: descriptions of the items to be sold were entered before the auctions began. Prospective buyers received bidder numbers when they arrived this morning. During the auction itself, workers frantically typed winning bids into the system, so when bidders come in to settle up, says Murphy, "you just punch in their number, and it tells you what lots they bought and how much they paid."
Just to be on the safe side, Murphy still uses every auctioneer's favorite manual backup system: slips of paper. That's how the business handled payments before buying its first computer in 1986. What would happen if the company's computer system were to fail during a huge auction like today's? It wouldn't be a pretty sight, says Murphy. "I would probably just jump out the window."
Fortunately, the system has never crashed. That sort of reliability is typical of Linux computers. "Some of our clients have Linux systems that have been running for a year solid," says Jim Capp, president of Keystone Programming Inc., a computer-consulting company in Harrisburg, Pa., that sells a lot of Linux systems.
Linux holds another attraction for small businesses: it is essentially free. That's because it was developed completely by volunteers, led by Linus Torvalds, arguably the world's best-known computer programmer after Bill Gates. Torvalds, who started work on Linux in 1991 while he was a student at the University of Helsinki, distributes the software free on the Internet. It takes patience and Web know-how to download it, however. So most people pay a modest price -- typically $30 to $59 -- to get Linux from companies like Red Hat Inc., Caldera Systems Inc., and Corel Corp., which provide it on a CD-ROM, along with manuals, tech support, and other applications.
Linux can also save small companies money because it runs well on older, less powerful machines. When Campbell installed E-mail and a firewall -- a security gateway between the company's computers and the Internet -- at James G. Murphy Co., two years ago, he used an old 486 computer that Murphy was preparing to jettison. "I could have sold them a new computer," Campbell says. "But Linux runs just fine on that computer, so why sell them hardware they don't really need?"
