This explanation drew snarky hoots of derision from The Register and Gizmodo, both of whom ridicule the notion that a piece of free software could cost anything to manage.

Clearly, you don’t have to actually know anything about managing IT to write about it for these publications.  There is no such thing a “free” software, if by that you mean that the total cost of ownership is zero. Here’s what it takes to deploy Firefox to tens of thousands of desktops:

• Decide what lockdowns you need in your environment and build a local build of Firefox that implements.
• If you care about plugins, include in the lockdowns a restriction that plugins come from a local repository of approved ones.
• Package it.
• Distribute it.
• Support it.
• Rinse and repeat for each patch release.

What you can’t do in an environment where the user desktop is a managed resource is have users download and self-maintain a complex security-sensitive piece of software.  I’ve worked in organizations that decided that the costs of doing the above was worth spending.  But there was no illusion that supporting Firefox was free.  Even a “best effort” support model requires people to execute it.

One encouraging note was that lots of IT professionals gave these articles the comments they deserved.

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While my initial reaction was “Why?”, that’s really the wrong question.  The question is really when it makes sense.  Mantissa claims that a single mainframe can run thousands of virtual PCs.  So as large enterprises consider moving to virtual desktops (accessed by thin clients) it becomes a question of cost effectiveness. Which is more economical, a bunch of VMware or Windows servers hosting virtual PCs or a single mainframe?  I have no gut feeling right now.  It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

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