Boy saves Irish businessman €3,000 by installing Ubuntu

From France’s Gendarmerie Nationale (news passim) to an Irishman with 6 machines, using free and open source operating systems and software is saving businesses of all sizes money. The Irishman appears in a report in today’s Meath Chronicle of how an 11 year-old boy saved him €3,000.

Sean Mullen’s 3 laptops and 3 desktop computers needed replacing due to age and virus infections; this would cost an average of €700 per machine, including the added software needed for the business. He replaced the first one but did not trade in the computer for €60 as suggested by the retailer.

Fortunately Mr Mullen’s son had heard of 11 year- old Andrew Von Tonder installing the free Ubuntu Linux operating system around the area and told his father, who decided to see the result on the machine he hadn’t traded in.

As Mr Mullen told the Meath Chronicle: “The computer came back two days later. The computer started up in less than a minute in Ubuntu where it used to take up to five minutes in Windows Vista. It had all the software we needed – word processor, spreadsheet and more and it is all legal without licence payments. In the end, we saved around €3,000, which was very welcome”.

Mr Mullen said the work was carried out for free by Andrew and they gave him a present as a ‘thank you’ for his efforts.

Andrew’s father, Andries van Tonder, used to work in IT before becoming disabled and said that Andrew had been learning from him over the past two years.

To us, open source is child’s play and saves companies money; we just can’t think why business is so rigidly tied to legacy proprietary systems. If you’re thinking of migrating to Linux, why not contact us? 🙂

Hat tip: Dan Wood