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Stories of Open Source Failures?
ahodgkinson asks: "We often hear about companies, government agencies, schools and other organizations that migrate from Microsoft to open source based systems. We sometimes hear about organizations that evaluate Open Source and then elect to remain with their existing proprietary system. Both of these events represent represent a 'non-failure'
for the open source movement. I'm interested in knowing more about the Open Source 'failure' events, namely when organizations move away from open source to a proprietary solution. Does anyone know of organizations that have moved from an Open Source based IT solution (back) to a proprietary system? Or where such a move was contemplated but not made? I'm specifically interested in larger organizations that have 'undone' a strategic move to Open Source, and their reasons why. Given your examples, is there anything we can learn from them?"
those receiving (and believing) threats from SCO for using Linux....
- VA Software
- SCO
Oh, and one more thing Balmer: we're not fooled by your clever pseudonym, we know its you.This one time I started writing a program. I built my makefile, put COPYING into the directory, and even made a test program that printed out hello world. Then I got tired of it. I lost the source code a couple years ago. I think it was on a disk that I mistakenly threw away.
It was an open source failure.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I have no idea what you just said, but it sounds absolutely brilliant.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
At work we were running a honeypot for about 6 months to collect some data for an upcoming security conference. It was a debian linux machine with ssh, httpd, bind, and nfs running on it. Unfortunately no new exploits were showing up on bugtraq at the time and all the scans we were logging with snort were for windows vulnerabilities. So we switched over to Win2K/SP3 and IIS and within 2 weeks the box was busted in half and we got the data we needed for our case study.
Now, they're running their mail system using around 10 (!!) high-end servers running Exchange. It sounds like every week, at least one of the servers is brought down for "maintenance" to keep it running (read: rebooted).
;)
I think this is pretty typical of Exchange. Remove the one or two UNIX servers doing temendous work for their size and replace them with two to five times as many Windows servers, which prove to be less reliable.
These are the primary advantages of Windows and Exhange:
1) Bigger budget requirements make the senior staff feel important.
2) Constantly running around to attend to Windows makes the junior staff feel important.
It's win-win
I feel sorry for those lone UNIX admins who manage whole server rooms. They must envy those MCSEs so hard it hurts.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I'd say that points to deficiencies in NT4 - which was Microsoft's first attempt at building a scalable OS.
Windows NT 3.X was the first attempt. NT 4 was just the one that failed so visibly that most people think it was the first.
Since Microsoft did manage to finally get Hotmail transitioned as a whole.
Maybe all that Hotmail spam is really Windows kernel source code mailing itself to the world...
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
but that was about selling games for Linux, which might in fact be tough thing to do for non-Windows OSs.
It's probalby even harder to sell games for linux on the Windows OS!
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