[Gllug] Discussion: Is Enterprise Linux a lock-in

[Tethys]

Ian Northeast writes:

>I don't see the logic there. What is unethical about it (unless of 
>course you consider all non free software to be unethical, as RMS 
>appears to)?

Yes, he does. Which is why he commented on it.

>For companies like mine (which started using Linux about a year ago, 
>having used only proprietary UNIX systems, mainly AIX, beforehand) the 
>cost is still low compared to what we're used to. 5000UKP for an IBM 
>Intel server and 800UKP for a copy of SLES is a lot less than 20000UKP 
>for a p Series (RS/6000) and 1400UKP for AIX (last time I checked).

The prices are a bit off -- the pSeries machines we've just bought were
around #8500 each, which isn't a million miles away from a 5K Intel
server. AIX is included free, IIRC.

>Of course we could use Solaris, but Solaris Intel doesn't have good
>support from the software vendors (no Oracle 9i for instance) and
>SPARCs are quite expensive.

Anything but! Sun equipment is at rock bottom prices at the moment. Look
at the V210, a 1U dual CPU server for 3.5K.

>It must be said that the proprietary platforms are improving here 
>- a few years ago AIX did not include perl for instance. It took me a 
>week to build it:) But without the competition from systems like Linux 
>shipping with perl, would IBM have bothered to add it to AIX?

Yep. I've noticed that *all* the proprietary Unices we use (Solaris,
AIX and Tru64) are all being forced to improve, and the driver for that
is the competition from Linux. It's just the little things, but then it's
the little things that make the difference. Recent versions of Solaris
now finally have the ability to have more than 8 partitions per disk,
for example, and ship with the essential goodies that used to have to
be loaded on manually (bash, less, gzip, etc.). They still can't edit
files in a window wider than 130 columns, but it's a start, at least...

Tet
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