[Gllug] Microsoft Get The Facts Seminar

Richard Turner richard at zygous.co.uk
Sat Jun 26 10:38:34 UTC 2004


On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 23:56, Tethys wrote:
> But the fact is, Linux *isn't* free. Yes, it's free to the likes of
> you or me. It's free to companies that have sufficiently clued up
> technical staff. But to the vast majority of companies, it costs them
> money in the form of a support contract with Red Hat or SuSE. It's
> a brave company that decides to ditch Windows in favour of a Debian
> or Fedora install, unless they have a reasonable amount of in house
> technical expertise. And most don't...
> 
> Tet

(Sorry for the long post...)

Running Linux isn't free, but that's true of running any OS.  Windows
doesn't come with support: all you have with the media and manual is
Windows Update.  So, an SME running Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000
and Exchange 2000, for example, is quite likely to want to buy support
from someone (and that someone doesn't have to be Microsoft: HP, for
example, are quite happy to take your money for that): they may be
point-and-click but they're still complex beasts and configuring and
maintaining them is a task far beyond the capabilities of the average MS
Office user.

So, an SME with no knowledgeable techies on staff is likely to want to
buy support for their servers.  In that case it makes little difference
whether they're buying support for Windows or Linux.  However, if they
use Linux they don't have to also spend that big wad of cash on Windows,
SQL Server, Exchange, etc.

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

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?

MS then contradicted itself by considering the costs of migrating to
Linux or Windows from Unix.  Assuming that an organisation has no Unix
experts and is migrating to Windows or Unix (and therefore have to pay
someone for support) then surely the cost of migrating to a system so
similar to Unix is less than to go to Windows, particularly since Linux
is free?  If, on the other hand, that company has a load of Unix experts
to do in-house support they're likely to be quite at home on a Linux box
and like fish out of water on a Windows one --  there's a lower cost of
re-training them.

MS tried valiantly to bamboozle us with a combination of half-truths,
statistics (worse than the 'damn lies'!), outright lies, marketing
jargon and gratuitous displays of new Windows functionality.  They were
never going to succeed.  However, the fact that they're even trying is a
sign that they're concerned about competition in the future.

Cheers,

Richard.

-- 
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."

FB53 8184 E61F 3604 FBF3  4CCB EF07 2942 30F2 739E
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