[Sussex] Appology / continuation

[Geoff Teale]

Mark wrote:
-----------
> However, you wrote:
> 
> > [...] but, I have to
> > say that IT managers buy Windows NT/2000 for file, print and web serving,
> at
> > massive expense then they are either idiots or they are not doing their
> job
> > properly - that annoys me - but it isn't relevant to this discussion.
> 
> I'm sorry, but I find that ill-considered and offensive. Neither of these is
> words I use lightly, and that I should use them of you is surprising - over
> the few months I've been on the SLUG list, I've come to the view that your
> posts are highly articulate and thought through.
<snip>

Firstly.  

Yes you are of course right.  That was really a throw away comment and
it wasn't pitched in quite the way I intended it.  I appolgise if any
offence was caused by it.

The contextial information missing from that comment was two fold:

1\ I have unfortunate tendancy to genralise from my own bad experience. 
I have had the misfortune to work for at least two IT managers who
(despite working in an organisation that was dominated by Solaris, HP-UX
and OS/390) not only could not see beyond microsoft but went so far as
to ignore thousands of man hours of research work we had done, and even
recommendations from Microsoft themselves not to use their products
(Microsoft happily recommended we use NT, but _not_ exchange or IIS) for
the systems we had in mind.  The same managers also refused to allow us
to employ a _very_ talented UNIX sysadmin with over 20 years experience
(including being a member of the team that set up Google) purely because
he didn't have an MCSE, and refused to let us buy Sun hardware for a
data feed (which incidently had to run provided software that would
_only_ run on Solaris 8) because they reasoned that for the same price
as machines with multiple UltraSparc III's we could buy some (then
cutting edge) 1Ghz Pentium machines (which had hardware that was
completely unsupported by Solaris for x86), steadfastly not
understanding why a machine with two 64-bit processors running at 500Mhz
in parrallel would beat a 1Ghz Pentium when processing data provided as
streams of data containing 128bits of header information followed by
several thousand bytes of 64bit integers (values in Pence and Cents of
course).  These men _were_ both idiots and were both failing to do there
jobs properlly - this is why they have now been sent to Siberia - or
actually Woking, but the effect is the same ;)

2\  Given a new network installation (i.e. as of today) I truely believe
that you would be hard pushed to favour windows 2000 as a file,print or
web server above an Open Source solution.  If there were a very good
reason for a particular user to pick these options I would, of course,
concur, but generally it is my experience that most people who make
these kind of decisions do so because they either haven't tried the
software in question or the simply believe that any given product is
actually better simply because it has the name Microsoft on it's box. 
In short, I will accept any ration reason for using this software
(though I can see few other than "we're already using it") but I will
always be annoyed by pig-headedness of ignorance - I do not mean to
offend anyone by saying that, but I _do_ believe it.  

I have heard people cite training costs, and staff "not understanding". 
In short, rubbish!  People who learn new skills on the job are not only
happier in their work, but they are also more likely to stay with their
employer in the long term.  People who can't figure out how to set-up
Samba as opposed to Windows Networking (for example) when provided with
a decent book and/or access to at least one knowledgable team member are
not people with the required skills to do their job.  I'm sorry but
there it is.  Any skills a personalready has _must_ have been acquired
somewhere and 99% of them apply to both LINUX and Windows.

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation