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Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?

zymano writes "This yahoo article says that almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices and that in a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that about 25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows servers with Linux."

5 of 612 comments (clear)

  1. Re:67.123% of statictics are made up on the spot by rat7307 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Mmmmmmm, Slanty

    </i> Dude!

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    Burma?
  2. wysiwyg web app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    just what the subject says

  3. glibc by mkro · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    It's not just a glib overgeneralisation to say that it helps admin, and from what I've seen of OSX server it has much the same advantages.
    I'm sorry for going off topic here, but could anyone give an URL to a page summarizing the whole glibc issue? Neither Google or the glibc webpage/faq provides easily understandable information on it. IMHO, a quick guide to what to do to avoid it, how to fix it if it happens, etc. could help a lot of people.
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    I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
  4. Breaking news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying

  5. You really offer only one reason. by twitter · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    The only thing I see above is a knowledge of how to get things done under Microsoft. It seems to have blinded you to better tools available at no cost as free software. Yeah, yeah, it takes time to learn how to use those tools, but nothing takes more time to stay on top of than Microsoft. In the free software world, you learn it once and don't have to worry about the rug getting pulled out from under you in the upgrade train.

    An easy way to run a large Debian network would be to make your own mirror with meta packages. All your desktops and servers can point to the appropriate mirror to get the updates they need through chronned apt-get update and upgrade. There are other ways to do things, of course but none so woefully inefficent as to take 20 staff hours.

    SMS, by the way sucks. Everytime the company upgrades, it breaks user shortcuts. Why? I'm not really sure, but it has something to do with deep seated flaws in the Microsoft platform that require version numbers or other unique names for SMS applications. The user experience is not smooth at all. I doubt the admistrative side is really much fun either. If inventory management was a breeze, thrid party software to do the same would not exist and Microsoft themselves would not have been hit by the SQL Slammer worm.

    The tools are there in the free software world. Free your mind from that M$ junk and have a look. You will like what you see.

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    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.