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Windows Cheaper to Patch Than Open Source?
daria42 writes "Is Windows cheaper to patch than open source software? Of course this Microsoft-commissioned report thinks so - but a number of people disagree, including a key Novell Asia-Pac exec, Paul Kangro. Kangro highlights problems with the report including the fact that it refers to problems faced by administrators before 2003: before significant improvements were made to Linux patching tools. 'We didn't have tools like Xen for Linux then,' says Kangro. 'When I patch my Linux box I don't need to bring it up and down any number of times.' Kangro also points out the report doesn't mention costs associated with rebooting systems after a patch is applied."
It might be easier if you have no idea how to really use a computer, and are not willing to learn. Those people will never leave the "comfort" of a familiar thing. They fear change, especially when it forces them to actually think for themselves.
And they said zombies weren't real!
So microsoft says windows is cheaper to patch, whereas Novell (who own Suse) say linux is cheaper to patch.
Can someone tell me why this is news?
Any company where the majority of the cost is in the patching process itself, rather than the testing of the patch, the secondary servers in the test lab that they can make sure it doesn't blow services up on, the payment of skilled people to identify the problems and fix them *when* they happen and various other people costs is of course going to be more expensive than "I set up windows updates once, so now it updates me magically whether I like it or not", even without the reboot thing.
There is also some really iffy logic in breaking down one single piece of the ownership cycle and claiming that it is cheaper and ignoring the rest. I tell you, paying for college for my persistently vegetative child is uber-cheap, I can't say enough for persistent vegetation...
The cost of rebooting on some machines is astronomical. I know we had some management software on a data line connected to the stock exchange. From the hours of 8-5 any downtime would cost over $10k/second, not to mention any lawsuits that could have been processed if someone lost money and couldn't sell their stocks when they wanted. On the other hand, most machines are not nearly that critical, and reboots can be done at off hours. I would say that Windows systems are less costly to patch for another reason. Almost anyone with technical ability can patch windows. You can hire windows admins on the cheap. To get Unix admins will cost more if you want someone that knows what they are doing. I wonder if they take the cost of knowledgable staff into the equation. Otherwise, the cost of patching for either can be huge or trivial depending on the patch and the situation. Also, Windows is a lot better now with the reboots. You don't have to reboot nearly as much as in the past.
/. ++
How about desk-bound employees and their patches? Don't we count?
I use a lot of non-MSFT apps, and if one of them fails to work with the patched Windows system, I'm goung to lose a lot of time. I've already had one "security patch" to something do wierd things to my system, making it impossible for me to see the hard drive password prompt. Multiple that by every laptop in the company and you have a lot of support calls.
Another "security patch" seems to have hosed the network finder so that it can't automatically pick up a new IP address from the LAN. I have to manually change the settings and ..... guess what? REBOOT to force it to pick up the new IP address. Every time I have to log on from home, that's TWO reboots and two manual interventions to what should be automatically happening.
We, Unixers, usually miss the point that, while we don't have to reboot the whole computer at each and every important patch, we have to bring services down and then back up when they are significantly patched. For a database server it's not the system uptime that counts - it's the database uptime. If it goes down, I could as well have rebooted the whole server - the phone will ring just the same.
While this is a whole lot better than Windows, they are getting closer.
And... Well... The fact it was paid by Microsoft says nothing about the report. I sure would like to see the other reports paid by Microsoft that say FOSS is cheaper, more reliable, more ethical and that are tucked away somewhere in a folder marked "secret"
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Yeah, because it would be better if it didn't remind you and you left your system unpatched.
No, it would be better if it [Windows Update] reminded me once and then respected my decision.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Sorry but this stuff is particularly trivial, patching 10, 100 or 1000 machines.
/afs/admin/scripts/patchme' >> /etc/crontab.master
e.g.
echo 'ALL:root: 15 18 * * *
Where the crontabs are centrally managed, patchme checks for resources, goes to sleep for a while, runs OS, platform and rev specific patch download and install subroutines which run yum update, apt-get update, patchadd, rpm -Uvh etc. Report progress to a central monitoring system like Big Brother or Zabbix as the patching process runs through the various stages.
Even talking about the cost of the patching process itself is missing the point. Anyone who has a lot of machines will already have a largely automated enterprise wide cross platform patching system in place. Applying a specific patch will be a case of dropping a pre-tested file into a directory on a file server. If you don't have such a system WTF are you doing wasting your time on Slashdot?
Deleted
Why is this a story? I mean seriously. These TCO articles come out all of the time, and they are bullshit all of the time. Don't we already know this? Does anyone with half a brain pay attention to these "studies"? There's nothing we can do to stop them, and we only discredit them here... Where everyone knows they are bullshit. It doesn't even have anything to do with some prejudice against Microsoft. Any company will bs their way to more sales. Welcome to life, people.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Sure this is an inconvenience, but (still) overrated. It's just not a major issue to reboot a machine. Word. Move on.
What continues to be a major road block to widespread adoption of Linux by the masses is not just patching, but just installing applications at all. It just can not be said with a straight face that installing patches or an application on Linux is as easy as with Windows for average computer users. There are just way too many pitfalls that can trap a user in hours and days of searching for strange dependencies and other things. And a smooth GUI installer....
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Can Slashdot concede that Microsoft-funded studies will come out in favor of Windows being better, and that some non-Microsoft-funded studied will come out in favor of Linux, and stop wasting our time with this banter?
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suwain_2
Windows installers are nightmares on the enterprise level. Too many dialogs that feature settings that should have been issued on a command line. Too many dialogs with non-installation information. (Hello?...EULA/README SHOULD BE HANDLED IN THE APPLICATION!!) These two create a situation where if you are going to install a piece of software on more than a handful of machines you really wish they had a silent install. More often than not you are stuck babysitting installs blindly clicking "Yes"s and "Okay"s and "Next"s. Yay for the TCO.
A "sin" Microsoft cultavated along time ago is confusing "installing" and "configuration" together. If you tie both of these process together it makes support murky. Did the installation fail to place files or did it mess up setting some value somewhere? Installers should be concerned with tracking/placing software components. Programs should be concerned with configuration. Because of MS including this level of complexity it also had the side effect of making it hard for a user to inspect packages before installing. There is no way for a desktop user to find out what a MSI package provides, what it requires, etc before installation. Another side effect is that people writting installers are often forced to package all depedancies with their application instead of making seemless stacking installs.
Making a Windows installer actually enforce component dependancies suffers from the same "DLL Hell" type problem that has plagued Windows forever. Most installations are written loosely: you can uninstall CompA which ProgramB depends upon and the system happily complies.
With all of that said, Windows installers are bad. Linux and other Unix-like systems are okay but they are more interested in software integraty than ease of use. You can't beat Mac: Drag a folder into the apps folder and its installed, take it out of the folder to uninstall it. At this point I can't imagine why anyone would any system to be more like Windows.