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A Case for Linux in the Corporation
_UnderTow_ writes: "Saw this over at Anandtech. It's a pretty descriptive account of a reasonably large corporation (7000+ employees) transitioning their network infrastructure over to Red Hat Linux. Has details of the company's initial move to NT, and their eventual move to Linux as the cost of licensing gets out of control."
There are thousand cases of Linux uses in corporates (large and smaller ones as well) on MandrakeBizCases.com. Worth a look.
Yes, and with Linux you can call RedHat, or if you don't like their support you can call Caldera, or SuSE, etc. etc. etc. And if your problem is exceptionally tricky, and very critical, you can pay someone to look at the source and fix it for you.
This is literally the biggest Red Herring ever. You can get professional support for Linux, and you can pick and choose your vendor in a way that is literally impossible with Windows. When push comes to shove the only company that can really support Windows is Microsoft, and they don't have a sterling reputation for customer service.
Hi!
Like others, I'm a bit disturbed by the anonymous "case study" that was presented in this article. I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing who the company is, and some third-party verification that such a change actually took place.
But there's no denying the central argument: Microsoft's licensing fees have dramatically jumped in price, and the terms of their licensing agreements have gotten substantially worse. Yesterday, for instance, I received an email from Microsoft regarding SQL Server licensing. In short, I have till October 1 to upgrade all of my SQL Server 7 licenses to SQL Server 2000--or I lose the right to to "upgrade" price for SQL Server 2000. If I choose to upgrade after October 1 I will have to pay the full retail price.
I'm a big believer in the concept of "don't fix what isn't broken." While the move from SQL Server 7.0 to SQL Server 2000 isn't a big deal (at least for our SS7 applications) I see little reason to spend bucks upgrading server databases that don't need to be changed. But if I need to migrate those down the road, I'll have to pay substantially higher fees--the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later demand from Microsoft just infuriates me.
But the licensing problem gets worse. Microsoft has dramatically raised their prices and dramatically restricted their terms. Case in point: we're starting to develop a project for a small startup non-profit organization. This is a group that does physical therapy on horseback for handicapped kids--they used to be part of Easter Seals, but Easter Seals has dropped them. (Long, sad story.) They're on their own, and they need to get organized. We want to help them (we're working pro bono publico) and we're recommending a "virtual office" concept. Don't build/buy/rent an office building: instead, let volunteers and paid staff function from home. Manage the office functions in a web application, handle the phones with call forwarding and related telephony stuff, and so forth--it's the 21st century, and there's lots of cool things we can do to hold costs down so program funds can be focused on kids and horses.
Sounds great, right? Except--we run right smack into Microsoft licensing. We're a Microsoft shop--and part of the benefit of doing pro bono projects like this is the hands-on experience we get with new development tools. This would be the perfect project for Microsoft's dot-Net technologies. That is, until we go live--and have to pay $2500 per processor for the server license for the OS, and another $2500 per processor for the SQL Server 2000 license. I'm entirely willing to develop the site for Equi-Librium pro bono--I am also willing to pay Microsoft a reasonable fee for the software we'll use. But five thousand U.S. currency one-dollar simolians is most definitely not a reasonable fee.
So this lets-all-get-experience project may well get done with PHP, PostgreSQL, and FreeBSD. And when we're done we'll have experience with a bunch of non-Microsoft tools, and we may have a different answer for clients who want scaleable applications but can't (or don't want to) pay Microsoft's fees.
Despite the propaganda, Microsoft didn't win the PC wars by skullduggery or deceit. They won by targetting the "influential end user" (their words) and providing lots of information. Software consultants are precisely the kind of people that Microsoft has depended upon, and we've been a very loyal Microsoft shop. We've benefitted enormously from the Microsoft Developer Network program, and we've steered a lot of clients to Microsoft-based solutions (and thus Microsoft operating systems) over the years. But Microsoft's pricing, and licensing, and upgrade policies have us--among the most loyal of Microsoft loyalists--actively questioning our relationship to them.
John Murdoch
Wind Gap Technology Group
dlb, we must have very different support needs. Microsoft has never been able to help my company with Windows operating system problems. They never know the answers, and can't find them. True, we only call with difficult problems.
My experience has been identical to that discussed in the article published by the Boston Mac User's Group (BMUG) about who is better at answering Microsoft product technical support calls: Microsoft Technical Support, or The Psychic Friends Network? You can read it at http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html
Bush's education improvements were
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
When I used to write some web apps that ran on IIS (about 1 year ago - thank god those days are over) we worked with a fairly big NT shop.
Their policy was to reboot the NT web servers one per month on schedule, becuase if you went any longer IIS would go into a death spiral and take NT down with it.
This place was staffed with lots of MCSEs, etc. and this was their answer to problems with NT/IIS. No joke.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.