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EWeek Details Linux to Windows Migration
nakhla writes "Even though we always hear stories of companies migrating from Windows to Linux, eWeek is running a story describing several companies that have migrated from Linux to Windows. Among their reasons are inadequate support options, application compatibility issues, stability problems, and the added cost of troubleshooting."
I read the article and many of the issues faced by the "switch-backers" seemed to be issues with either the software they were running (illegal user entry crashed a web-store) or a poorly managed ISP (after switching from a Linux ISP to a Windows ISP downtime decreased). I also found it just amazing that one company claimed that under Linux there were few options for an SQL server, with Oracle being the only one.
In all my experience I could never imagine a properly developed and deployed Linux solution underperforming a Windows solution or being inadequatly stable. I think that the real problem this article points out (but dosen't mention) is that the numbers of skilled Linux administrators are thinning. Even worse, the number of Linux administrators that only think they are skilled is increasing. Many of my peers going through college now like Windows because that is all they have ever known and don't want to bother learning Linux. The problem also stems from how terrible the consulting business has become. There are far too many businesses out there today that I have run into that have a guy who read Linux for Dummies and is making cold calls to customer sites running Linux implementations.
Why did they have to use Oracle? Besides this, the article is seriously lacking in details. What type of support issues did they run into? Where they are specific things are even more mysterious. Why did the application die when too many items were ordered at once? And more importantly, what does that have to do with Linux or Apache? It sure sounds like an application problem to me. Another thing that caught my eye is that one of the companies switched to Linux without adequate internal support. If you migrate to something, anything, without training a significant portion of your staff to use it then you are asking for trouble. It seems like these IT directors wanted Linux to fail. It's a trivial task to make a project fail if you don't want it to succeed.
Added to this is that the endorsements are so glowing and positive that there is no way they can be taken seriously. I've worked with both Windows and Linux extensively, and there simply isn't such a thing as a major complex project going off without a hitch, especially when it involves migrating between two very different operating systems. I'm sure there have been similar endorsements made of Linux, "We switched to Linux and all our problems magically went away." I would be similarly skeptical of such claims.
The human resource costs of supporting Linux systems that aren't directly supported by a major hardware vendor can be high. What experiences have people had with vendors that really, truly, officially support Linux? I haven't seen too much direct support from the likes of Dell or Toshiba, especially when it comes to Laptops.
Kris
Kriston
It's easy to argue that the problem is with companies switching away from linux, but the point is that to them linux is just a tool. If you want people to use it, you have to change the tool, not the people.
One of the risks to deal with companies switching from Windows to Linux is their perception on how a system should work.
A boss who's been using Windows since 3.1 will find Linux totally insane to work on because her expectation is an easy friendly GUI that does everything (goods and bads) for you.
That's probably one of the reasons why MS is giving away so many freebies to schools and universities.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
It sounds like they had incompetent support personel and then chose to blame the OS. Once they had someone who knew what they were doing set up everything, suddenly things were rosey. Perhaps they should have set things up right in the first place...but most places tend not to.
everything is bullshit. in 3 days we will hear about who knows how many $ pumped by m$ into those companies.
the article lacks too many details (important ones) to be classified as a news.
it is not. it is made by m$ for their own evil purposes. that's all.
...this is EWeek. All the shills that are fit to print (except S.V. Nichols, he's a cool dude).
Why do we expect any different from them? Heck, they may as well give Steve Ballmer his column. I haven't seen so many Microsoft fan-boys since the last Sun shareholder meeting.
I was hoping to see some large-scale enterprise scenarios where Linux simply did not work - scenarios where it might make sense to put in a Windows solution. Something of substance.
These examples are terrible, and don't even begin to suggest that the issue is a Linux one.
From the article:
"When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
This doesn't sound like a Linux issue, it sounds like a boundary check problem. It's ridiculous to propose that this could be an OS function, and they don't back this claim up with any useful substance.
From the article:
Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
What function of Oracle made it more useful than MySQL in this case? It's certainly a valid DB for Web Applications - even if Oracle might scale better.
These are some pretty baseless arguements for switching to Windows. This is essentially a public shaming of these companies.
The only database option was Oracle? Why didn't they think about back-end indepenence when they designed the application? Oh well... I think they should have looked at dropping their web application platform in favor of a more back-end independent one (J2EE, PHP, whatever) before they just decided to migrate their OS. I just can't imagine anyone these days who would lock themselves into data-tier vendor like that. Of coruse, the article wasn't very descriptive about the "why".
Case also was concerned that his company did not have appropriate in-house Linux expertise. Those concerns were proved worthwhile two years ago when the ISP gave Combe two weeks' notice that it was closing its doors.
Read: "Case didn't want to spend the extra $73,000 a year to hire a full time Sr. Unix Admin to direct his dime a dozen MCSEs." Actually, I dunno, I can't really back that up. Anyone know the cost comparison's on Linux expertise in labor Vs. MCSEs and MS licensing?
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
There are a lot of schlock outfits, out there, that are putting together very poor Linux solutions. The poor client gets burned, and runs back to what they know works for them. A well built Windows solution will beat a poorly built Linux solution.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
These aren't organizations "stuck" on using Windows. They didn't fear change. They believed that running Linux would cost less than Windows enough to do it. Maybe, they even did it for some of the very reasons you mentioned such as bugs and security issues.
What they found is that at the end of the day, their costs didn't go down using Linux instead of Windows..... they went up!
You can't accuse these guys of giving in to the Microsoft hype, because they turned their backs on the Microsoft hype, gave in to the Linux hype, and got burned.
Communism was just a red herring.
Case also was concerned that his company did not have appropriate in-house Linux expertise.
This is the main concern I hear, that support costs are the main reasons for switching back to Windows. It's a double-edged sword though, because everyone and his dog's got an MCSE, whereas I'm able to charge more for my Linux knowledge.
This was the same reason why people stayed with NetWare over Windows NT 3.51. Eventually with the release of NT 4.0, Microsoft was able to do more than NetWare for less cost. Linux will do the same thing. Microsoft does not have a lock on ubiquitous tech support, they merely have a head start.
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Linux IS behind on gaming, desktop productivity, and development tools. The people switching were running php on web servers and oracle database apps?!?! Unix (and now Linux) has been excelling over windows in these areas like forever. Oracle, Progress and all the money-makers of the db world have been running on Linux forever. I don't get this article at all. Eweek didn't 'detail' anything. Linux may have its weaknesses, but they are NOT in the areas these people experienced. Perhaps the hospitality is particularly infested with idiots.
It might be easy for a company to employ a team of "Linux" guys and get the migration over and done with, but it is the employees who are using the system every day.
In my (Windows) company, it's easy to tell an employee to download a patch or open a file, because they knew how to do by default, 90% of "computer people" in the company comes from a Windows background, so while working on a computer, they do things the Windows way.
If you have a Linux system, they will still try to do it the Windows way, and that's where the support/troubleshooting costs still to add up.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
The arguments used by the two companies seem to be words taken directly from MS.
For one, they claim lack of support and give their own solution to it as well -- they don't have any technical linux staff. To switch over to linux without having anyone with the know-how to run linux seems naive, and is only asking for trouble.
Saying that there is only one available database for Linux shows they hardly did any research. This is further proven by a quote from them: "Even though [Linux] has moved into the realm of a production-level system and may become a competitor to Microsoft, that is just not the case where global support and robust development are required.". Please correct me if I'm wrong, but in all my years developing on Unix, Linux and Windows, I can honestly say there is not a more robust development system than Linux or Unix, and global support for the development tools on Linux far outrank those for Windows development tools, where internet development is concerned.
I would not be surprised if these companies were sponsored by Microsoft to switch to Windows and find to some reasons to support or justify that decision.
Furthermore, these are small, non-technical companies whose tech-deparments either consist solely of MSCE's or are hopelessly inept (or both). I don't believe their reasoning is worth serious consideration, and as such I find it strange that they made it to the slashdot frontpage.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Three years ago, the resort implemented an e-commerce system that used Red Hat Inc. Linux, The Apache Software Foundation's Apache Web servers and MySQL AB's MySQL database; the system was programmed in PHP.
"The decision to go with Linux was a cost-based one," Michele Roy, the resort's chief financial officer, told eWEEK. "We had not budgeted the e-commerce system setup in that year's business plan."
The potential savings were quickly erased by ongoing support expenses, Roy said. "We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."
Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system. System failures and escalating costs had the resort reconsidering its Linux decision when, over a weekend in late-summer 2002, in the midst of its season-pass sale--accounting for the sale of about 5,000 passes--the system went down. The e-commerce component stopped working for about a day.
Call me silly, but I'd be more than a little suspicious that management needed to be hit by a clue-by-four. If they did not think to even budget for - oh, I don't know, something that sounds like it was a critical system - I'm willing to bet they gave plenty of time to design and develop something works. Seriously, this sounds like something farmed out to rentacoder.com for $200, and they got what they paid for. I suspect that Microsoft had to go in and say they would provide some top shelf resources to help them make a PR case study, because it would not surprise me in the least if they would not bung up an ASP.NET application too.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I have to agree this is what we are looking at here. This is the story of two companies that hired a couple of contractors to write them software that runs under Linux, and they didn't want to pay a lot for it. The only database available for Linux is Oracle? A shopping cart that crashes the entire web store yet *still* charges the customer's credit card? ISP gave them two weeks notice? Come on people! Sounds like bad decision-making based on zero knowledge of the platform they were moving to, complete with a staff fully trained in using what they were switching *back* to. Gee, I wonder...
This truly appears to be a case of two small corporations trying to act like big guys, save every possible imaginable penny, and guess what they wound up with? A cheap piece of software that never should have been installed on a production web server. I'd whimper back to the only software my underpaid, under-trained employees can understand too!
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Two things aren't shocking here. First is the typical slashdot response of, "Oh, they were idiots, they used idiots, obviously it's their fault." Which isn't really very helpful; most people are, by slashdot standards, idiots. The goal of modern commercial software is to lower the bar such that idiots can use it safely. (That's distinct from the goal of so much open-source software, of providing more power to the gurus while scaring away women and children, to build up the developer's technical cred.)
The other thing that isn't shocking is that Windows is perceived, by some, as being lower cost and more reliable. And again, slashdotters will argue the moon away that it ain't so. And, again, for non-idiots in their lexicon, they're correct. But on average, they're wrong.
Years ago I build a pretty powerful product, cross-platform. Runs on BSD, Linux and Windows, using Sybase, SQL Server or MySQL. All but one sale over the years was Windows. Why? Because that's what the businesses use. Lower training costs. When things go wrong, they're fixable via GUI. Don't need to find a guru, any convenient semi-geek can do the job.
I've been very annoyed by this. I really expected BSD and Linux to take off. But corporates lack sufficient geekpower, on average, to use Linux. And that is the reality that too few geeks are willing to cater to. And I say this as someone who has, in the last year, done hardcore commercial development on all three platforms.
The article does a great job of making Linux seem like a steaming pile of shit whereas Windows is the shining knight. You are expected to just accept this despite the fact that the applications they are using, not the operating system were to blame.
In the second case they complain about how their ecommerce system crashed because of a built-in limit. How does switching to Windows fix this? That's a flaw in the application code and nowhere else. The first case is a little weaker in this regard, but still subtly close. Using Windows doesn't give you more enterprise class database vendor options than Linux does. So again, somehow the availability of applications and their quality is the fault of open source. (Plus, if we take the idiot factor into account, I wonder how much upgrading took place on their 9 year-old deployment.) Right.
I am not, of course, trying to discount their complaints. Open source support is a niche that requires some serious progress. However, that article is so loaded with spin it makes my head hurt.
Why bother.
Availability is the problem...
In the past, the high barrier of entry kept people from claiming knowledge that they didn't have.
I see a lot of people out there that claim expertise if they install the OS or get a service to run. Sadly, this applies to both Linux/*BSD and Windows.
It's even worse when you start getting into the "developer" categories where a homepage and a quick reading of "Web Programming with PHP and MySQL" makes someone an expert in everything from database design/administration to system programming in C.
The article simply points out one fact--people make bad decisions. CIO's are not immune to this.
They didn't switch from Linux to Windows. They had a contract with another company to provide their web site and services, and that company ran Linux. The other company took care of all of the details. It was merely unhappyness that the company with which they dealt would only offer them a (presumably expensive) Oracle database which caused them to start looking for a new provider. It sounds like the guys in charge were never too thrilled with Linux and we're just looking for a reason to stop using it, but until the DB thing happened were dismayed to find that it worked.
This is not a "We ditched Windows for Linux, but now want Linux again!" it's a "We switched contractors and didn't want to switch to one running Linux 'cause we're intimidated by it and have very small penis'."
Move along...
I want my Cowboyneal
I've been a "Windows guy" professionally for about 7 years. I like ASP+IIS+MSSQL as a development platform. But the reasons for abandoning Linux given in the article are just ridiculous. They're symptoms of IT managers who clearly don't know a thing about the systems they run. From the article:
::snicker::
Combe was initially wary about its sites running on Linux, but it moved to offset that risk by making sure its provider contract had built-in service-level agreements. Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
Oracle is the only database on Linux? Wow, that's news to me. On the high end, IBM's DB2 has been available for quite a while on Linux, I believe. In the midrange there's Postgres and Firebird, and in the lower midrange there's MySQL.
The potential savings were quickly erased by ongoing support expenses, Roy said. "We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort.
Uhh... Linux doesn't support enough "layers of information". Riiiiiiiight. Is there a kernel option for more "layers of information" that can perhaps be enabled? Which operating systems support the most "layers of information" right out of the box?
"Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system. System failures and escalating costs had the resort reconsidering its Linux decision when, over a weekend in late-summer 2002, in the midst of its season-pass sale--accounting for the sale of about 5,000 passes--the system went down. The e-commerce component stopped working for about a day... There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
This is obviously an application problem and not something intrinsic to the operating system. Sounds like the kind of crappy application error that could happen on any operating system. I can't believe the people involved in these stories even agreed to be interviewed in this article because they look like morons. I would hesitate to share that level of self-cluelessness with a good friend, let alone the world.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Atleast in Linux you can FIX the problem - rather then reboot, reinstall, or commit suicide. Windows certainly has it's benefits (I don't know of many, but I'm biast), but one benefit Windows CERTAINLY does not have is easy troubleshooting - hell - a good percentage of MS KB articles tell you it's a known issue - resolution is to completely reinstall Windows. I think it really comes down to education, more troubleshooting required because those admins were not very familiar with Linux. More support options is a geographically limited truth, some areas just don't have many (if any) linux consultants around. The biggest problem I see for Linux, from a corporate perspective, definetally comes from the lack of interoperability of Linux document formats with Windows (See MS Office) document formats. Namely, communications with other corporate offices suffer as a result of a migration. Herein lies the need for standards, to provide a level platform for fair competition. Right now, IMO (is this OT?) Microsoft's most powerfull tool is in fact their monopoly. Most companies don't care to switch software (for the most part) because all their customers, partners, vendors, et al.. use MS products - and that's where compatability issues come up, faulter communications, expand troubleshooting time, and basically just ends up costing money, and pissing off executives when their pie chart looks more like a bar graph. From my perspective, the biggest problem with Windows (when compared to Linux) is that when there's something wrong with Windows - a good majority of the time you can't even identify what 'exactly' is the root cause of the problem - let alone actually 'fix' the root cause of the problem. That alone makes Linux a winner in my book - because with Linux I can 'control' and understand 'exactly' what is happening - whereas with Windows I don't feel I have any 'real' control over what's on my system, how it works, and what method I choose to resolve the issue. Typically, I find the restart button to be the 'fix all' for most Windows related issues.
In the first case, the issue was inadequate support from the ISP and inadequate in-house resources in the company. I can see this as valid to a large extent. But the ID10T here was the ISP not the company (who was a victim of the ISP's poor handling of the servers). Of course the lack of internal Linux resources is an issue, but not a major one, but depending on the level of programming, might have been adequate by itself to warrent switching.
In the second case, the ecommerce solution was implimented without proper planning, consideration, and analysis. Perhaps here the customer did not do adequate groundwork or perhaps the solution came from an ISV who did not write proper software. However, in this case, the customer was left with an inadequate piece of software which was not adequately checking its input. Evidently, the customer either was unable to fix the problem themseves or they were unable to get the support they need. The right business decision was made to switch back, perhaps correcting a bad business decision (implimenting an ecommerce package without proper consideration).
In these cases, of course, switching to Windows was the right business decision. In one case, the ISP dropped the ball *big time.* In the other, it seems to me that the IT department was too eager to impliment something that they did not do the basic groundwork to make sure it would meet their needs.
I run a business which does Linux-oriented consulting and hosting. Our hosting services have had virtually no downtime in the six months we have been in operation, leading me to believe that the servers which had down time 2 or three times a year were badly mismanaged. Indeed last time I was running a system that was this unstable, I researched the problem and corrected it! An ISP should know better. (Actually the system in this case was a firewall and was not quite this unstable. The real problem was that the logging would suddenly stop after about a month or so if the firewall rules were reloaded. This required a reboot to resolve-- kernel was the problem, so I upgraded to the latest kernel and the problem went away).
Secondly, my job is often to help businesses make sure that their Linux migrations go smoothly and that the solutions we design meet their needs. The key is planning, planning, planning.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you have a reliable windows dealer around, with years of experience of making things work right. And you also have a new linux dealer around, fresh out of college and eager for their first contract, who do you go for?
Now, I'm not comparing apples with oranges, but people rarely have the choice of equally experienced linux and windows vendors. And for many people that the experienced windows operators are a better choice than the inexperienced linux operators. Like the article said, they swapped ISP and they got greater reliability -- well, neither linux nor windows are unreliable -- so what's the bet their old linux ISP was a shoddy operation?
I got quite a suprise the other day hearing a linux advocate describing going linux as having more lock-in than windows. You see, where I live there are plenty of windows firms you could hop between if one goes out of business or starts acting unreasonably. But if you go with linux then there is nobody else you can go to if your operator starts gouging you. Ergo, vendor lock-in! Of course, this is a short term position and in theory Linux has less vendor lock-in. But the real world is made up of short term positions, and customers must choose a vendor for now.
That the migration costs from Linux are not large.
This means that investing in Linux does not paint you into a corner and lock you into a single vendor. It's not a big deal to go Windows if you think it might work better for you.
That's an advantage of using Linux.
Now go ask your friends with significant investment in Windows whether they could migrate to any alternative for a reasonable cost.
Even just a small standardized piece of that infrastructure, perhaps?
Oh, it's all together and hard to separate out into standard components without breaking some other thing?
P.S. Note that Oracle is not the only SQL option on Linux.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
As much as it's utterly expected for a Slashdotter to confidently claim that any pro-MS/Anti-*nix story is automatically lies and FUD, but there are a couple of things that did catch my eye in this story.
Firstly, I find it hard to believe that a Windows server system is that much more stable than a *nix server... or was the Windows server kept responsive by the monthly reboots to apply Windows security patches? (I administer Win2k3 Server boxes in work, I know whereof I speak) Proper outages may have happened more often (although I'm not sure how) but that doesn't count the amount of times servers would be restarted.
Secondly though, a company proudly announcing that they have lowered their "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) always rings alarm bells with me. As everyone knows, that's the big thing MS are trying to push in their latest FUD atm; Linux may be free, but the TCO is higher. Saying that you have a lower TCO when you switched to Windows makes you sound like a Microsoft poster child, imo.
Okay, you can be concerned with the security of *any* system, and you could also take the opinion (as some studies suggest) that Linux and Windows are relatively similar in the amount of vulnerabilities/patches released (not my belief, but it's been suggested), but I have not heard of any cases beyond the Microsoft FUD machine where anyone has been concerned with the security of a Linux system and has moved to Windows as a result... again, just sounds like a Microsoft poster child to me.
The ultimate horror story that no manager wants to hear... the program crashed, and lots of time and effort was spent fixing it! omg! But then again, that sounds to me like it's a problem with the program they're using, not the operating system. If they were to switch to Windows, and use the same software (assuming it had a port) there's no guarantee that the exact same thing wouldn't happen. This again, imo, is simply FUD.
This could be a valid arguement in itself; if you do not have the skills in your company to deal with a Linux system (having previously overloaded your IT base with MCSE's :p) then you might have a lot of issues trying to administer the system internally. This, as other people have said, is a problem with manpower, not with the operating system itself.
However, it goes on to say:
Perhaps they were not able to implement it, but I would have a hard time believing that Linux would be unable to handle what was previously stated as a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) system.
Once again, no details are specified, simply a sweeping statement which heralds Windows as the solution to all IT problems.
Linux is not flawless, nor is Linux for everyone. I can imagine that some companies would rather stick with Windows than Linux, and I can also believe that companies might want to switch back when they discovered that Linux
Their ISP ran Linux/Oracle 9 years ago. That's 1995.
I recall that Oracle's announcements in 1998 about Linux.
If that article is accurate, it seems the company has a history of beta roll-outs for production systems.
Sorry, but if you think that Linux is the Ford, and MS is the Toyota, then you either know little about operating systems or know little about vehicles
Those gnaa posts and the website are too stupid to be offensive to anyone. Except maybe competent trolls and web designers.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
(Foreward: I agree about MySQL being a tad hobbiest, lacking recursive SQL in all its forms. I must pooh-pooh Postgres for having unacceptable "tablespace" limits [one database == one directory, so adding storage for large tables is "problematic"]. These opinions may be slightly out of date, or not, but they were definately germane to the timeframes from the cases mentioned in the article. Meanwhile, M$ SQL Server has some serious tablespace issues itself. To a great extent, if you want to go large, Oracle is the only choice on *BOTH* platforms... IMHO of course 8-)
The position (which I do not support) was not centered around "Requiring Oracle", it was "Requiring Choices Other Than Oracle" that "required" Windows. That is, the position is basically "Linux only provides Oracle so it is inferior to Windows which allows other choices."
It is a specious argument once put to forward translation, because there were other choices for both platforms.
This speciousness is endemic to the reasoning presented in the article. The switchers in question weren't driven from Linux to Windows so much as they forced themselves to flee from Linux to Windows by way of poor project vision/planing/execution/expectation.
So the complaints of the posters in this thread are that the article was weak and stupid because the users failures can be traced directly to the failure of the users to plan ahead or research options.
These complaints themselves are, in turn, based on a lack of information, as we don't know how much white-wash has been applied, and how much has been rinsed away in a flood of hyperbole, to the various positions presented by the lay-reporter. We really don't know What Really Happened(tm).
The reporting leaves us needing to take inference and forensic deconstruction as our clues to What Really Happened(tm) which is the hallmark of the very top-shelf FUD. The educated see the errors in judgement and the PHBs see the fear and failure, so the article is a masterful tool for preventing action on any kind of Linux agenda. It is fodder for anyone who has made a carrier of gain-saying everybody else's actions. (You know, the prophet of doom who gets to say "look, I was right" whenever anything fails, but never puts forward a solution themselves.) The very fact that the article confused you and the other conferees here with its passive-speak indictments is testament to its artful composition as FUD.
This is a fluff piece with the Shakespearian dollops of Sound and Furry being provided by all maner of diverse parties.
The article is about people who failed to implement some Linux solutions, for whatever reasons, and then switched back to "good old safe Windows".
It is, in fact, advertainment and propagandimonium most foul. 8-)
So point at the monkey in his leiderhosen and laugh as you see fit. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The definintion of "properly deployed" is the part that gets me. Its vague and allows for too much interpretation.
;-) E.g.: "XYZ is a peaceful religion." "But Bob kills people in the name of religion XYZ!" "Ah, but he's not a true adherent of XYZ."
Does your OS fail?
Its not the fault of the OS, it just wasn't "properly deployed".
This is an excellent example of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy, frequently used by Linux zealots and other religious groups.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Yes, such reasoning is a fallacy if applied without thought.
Once in a while, though, Bob really isn't a true adherent of XYZ. Bob and one of his friends might call Bob a vegetarian, but the rest of us watching him scarf down a BigMac would conclude otherwise.
As Linux server deployments become more widespread, there are going to be more and more system administrators and fly-by-night ISPs that will fall into a category we'll call "The Lowest 1% of Linux Providers".
Just like Windows admins, medical doctors, cable TV repairment, someone has to graduate at the bottom of their class and it's time we recognize that bottom of the barrel Linux admins can and will exist, too. Complaints about paper MCSE's and CCNA's can extend into the Linux world, too. We've grown beyond a small community of enlighted hackers on a mountaintop.
The bigger issue with the original story is that it is an anecdote, a sampling of a widely varying phenomena where induction of general principles from one point can lead to erroneous conclusions. Or not. We need lots of stories, randomly sampled. Being chosen as "newsworthy" suggests something less than random sampling, however.
"Provided by the management for your protection."