Latest Ballmergram Bashes Linux TCO

Phoe6 writes "Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has used the software giant's latest executive email to stoke up Microsoft's fight against the rise of Linux. The 2,600 word missive was titled 'Customer focus: comparing Windows with Linux and UNIX'. In it, Ballmer repeated the key themes of Microsoft's controversial Get The Facts campaign. Zdnet has its report here." Linuxworld also has a story.

Comments

Ballmer wants to hear from you

[scupper]

Excerpt from last paragraph of Ballmer memo:

If the evidence at our www.microsoft.com/getthefacts Web site doesn't sufficiently convey the benefits and value of the Microsoft platform, we want to hear from you so we can work even harder to get that information to you.

I can't wait to read the the response to his invitation.

So does the FDIC

[TykeClone]

http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2004/FIL11 404a.html

MS is sweating

[nels_tomlinson]

Monkeyboy is sweating. Unfortunately, that's nothing new.

Seriously, this is just the marketroids doing their thing. When the accountants start warning about threats from Linux, we know there's a real threat. Linux is getting mention in the latest annual filing, too.

Windoze in .edu? Bullshit on lower TCO!

[deunan_k]

With an educational discount, Windows 2003 server costs my department $142 (sure, it's more in a commercial environment), I can install it, set it up, run updates on it once in a while, run the baseline security analyzer on it, and forget about it. Give me a linux that does all this in an easy to use manner, and I'll switch. Sure, I could use apt and the others, but it just takes too much time, and you have to worry about various dependencies and what not.

At $142, that's $142 more you have to spend compared to FOSS solutions. What you've described, proved either that your educational institution is filthy rich and caters only for the rich and snobs, or you're just plain lazy.

Most educational institutions, whether state-run or even privately operated (esp. private with visions of education rather than for profit), are almost always tight budget! This is especially true in third world countries! That is why various bodies such as SchoolForge (and their Case Studies), K12OS, Moodle, OpenSourceSchools, KDE Edutainment Project and a lot more others are being founded and.. surprise! Thrives!

Personally, I love the K12LTSP Project. A branch out of the K12OS Project, which when deployed properly throughout the campus, can provide access to all students to high-grade apps in a very stable environment. Access from any terminal in any labs, authenticating via NIS, LDAP or whatever you prefer and access your mail accounts, website or whatever. With backend support tools available such as MySQL or PgSQL and PHP/Perl (okay, maybe that's a bit far out, but I've met 12 year olds who can code!)

Software cost? $0

Re:maybe the TCO is lower

[julesh]

Users are limited to 16 groups??

32, I believe. Still, it isn't perfect, and we should perhaps look at ways to improve it.

Only one group can have permissions applied to a file?

Not true. All major Linux filesystems support POSIX ACLs now, enabling you to apply whatever permissions you like.

And no group nesting allowed?

What are the security benefits of allowing this? Personally, I am not aware of any, as I believe whether it is allowed or not the systems are actually equivalent -- it is merely an implementation detail that should be ironed out by any reasonably well written management system.

You can mod this comment down, but you can't propose a security system like THAT to a company interested in protecting their assets. WAKE UP SLASHDOT.

Even without ACLs, it is more than adequate for 99% of companies. Hell, most of them wouldn't want to spend the admin time required to manage anything more complex.

Re:From Linux to Windows

[f()rK()_Bomb]

I would second this as i worked in a pure 2000 domain but if you actually think about uptime exactly how often do win2k servers reboot? We were generally rebooting the things every couple of weeks due to patches. Leave one up for more than 60 days and things start to get wierd. For instance our DCHP server decided to stop giving out addresses. Reboot and it was fine. I would definately consider this as unstable.