An Open Letter from Darl McBride

canfirman writes "Well, it seems Darl is changing tactics as he's now published an open letter proclaiming the benefits of UNIX over any other operating system. However, most of his letter involves comparing SCO Unix to Linux from not only a business acceptance point of view, but from a technical point of view, too. Darl throws in a bunch of stats in there, too: 'In a study conducted only seven months ago they found that overall, the most vulnerable operating system for manual hacker attacks was Linux, accounting for 65.64% of all hacker breaches reported.' I'd love for somebody who has more technical knowledge than me to look at his points and see if what he says is true or not -- assuming anything coming out of Darl's mouth is true."

Comments

a Linux server isn't free; nothing else is either

[arete]

1. Intelligently running a server is never really free, it requires admin time, power, hardware and software. Even if you can get some of these things pseudo-free you generally could apply the resources to something else instead.

2. It is likely that the lowest Total Cost of Ownership for your systems in the medium term is WHATEVER YOU HAVE NOW. Switching is expensive, and retraining your admins to know another system can be even more expensive. At first noone will be experienced with the new system, and that has its own headaches. Because switching is a big pain, generally the time to recover the cost of switching a _functional_ system is usually going to be measured in years.

3. If you are already upgrading the functionality of your system or creating a new system, it is usually cheapest to develop in whatever your inhouse admins are familiar with if they have time to work on the development.

So the actual number of cases where you can make a fair comparison between Windows and Linux is small because an existing company has an existing set of people.

But after that recovery Linux costs less to install new machines, less to admin servers, less to maintain and less to support equally-trained users on. (Versions of Linux generally have a UI intuitiveness slightly behind Windows, but this is more than outweighed by the number of issues that are legitimate windows and application/windows compatibility bugs)

Now, if you compare Linux to OSX on workstations you get even lower user support costs but higher upfront costs.