[Gllug] Microsoft Get The Facts Seminar

[Alain Williams]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2004 at 11:38:34AM +0100, Richard Turner wrote:

> Linux is free: it's the support for it that costs money.  Windows is not
> free *and* support costs money.

Even if you don't pay for 3rd party you pay for your employees (sysadmin/...) time.

> Something that Huw missed in his write-up was the MS were concentrating
> in the main on the cost of migrating from one system or another to
> Linux.  If I decide on Monday to go into work and set-up a new intranet
> server there's no cost of migrating from any OS.  I'll install Linux
> with Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL etc. and that's that.  Free.  I'd have to
> buy another copy of a server edition of Windows that'll run IIS and SQL
> Server if I used MS technology. Any idea what Windows 2003 Server
> costs?  Indeed, how much higher spec would my server have to be to run
> it?

Green field is always much easier, however these are rare.
What is more common is setting up new services/subsystems -- ie business solutions.
There are many open source tools that have been ported to Windows,
use those - write the new solutions using them. What that means is that in
5 years time when the servers need replacing it is much simpler to move
the application from windows to FLOSS because it already runs using apache/php/mysql.

Simlarily on the desktop: install open office, etc.

Eat away at the edges, this takes time but is easier.

-- 
Alain Williams

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