[Gloucs] As if I needed more reasons not to use Windows....

[Iain Calder]

William Roe wrote:

> Hi,
> On Sunday, Apr 27, 2003, at 22:47 Europe/London, Iain Calder wrote:
>
>> Of course, the point is you could roll them yourself or you could 
>> just upgrade to a modern Linux release, however I guess Microsoft 
>> deserve some credit for reasonably long support periods for their 
>> products.  These days rapid availablity of security patches is 
>> *vital* for any OS on any machine apart from maybe a single-user non 
>> internet-connected PC.
>
>
> Mmm, yes they do quote big numbers for their support time, but you 
> have to ask - how good is this so called 'support', if what I hear is 
> correct, not worth the meta-information its written in. 


Source code availability and public forums/newgroups beat paid support 
EVERY time in my experience;  here I was meaning support in terms of 
providing security updates, which IMHO is one of the most important 
features you are getting from your OS 'vendor'.

>
>
>> Contrast this with the current state of desktop Redhat, which now has 
>> only a year-long support period.  Of course, the solution for 
>> businesses is to buy one of Redhat's enterprise versions, but then 
>> one of the cost advantages of Linux immediately disappears.
>
>
> Ah ha! But Linux's _real_ cost advantage is in the ability to decide 
> where/who that money goes - i.e. if a company want to run Linux and 
> sort out their IT systems, they make a plan (with pretty little graphs 
> and such, I understand). Said company may well have some pretty 
> smoking computing guys/girls who they are already paying to keep the 
> companies servers alive and happy. So, they don't have to pay (or 
> license) some scheme someone else designed to satisfy themselves that 
> their servers/computers and safe.
>
> Mmm. That didn't make much sense when I read it back... I suppose your 
> point is valid since if a company wants lots of after sales support, 
> they go to those who sell it - RedHat, and if they have techs on 
> campus, they get a distro that techs like - such as Debian. 

It's not always that simple.  One of Redhat's killer features for the 
enterprise is it's 'kickstart' automated installation mechanism.  This 
makes automatic installation of many varied server configurations a 
breeze.  Redhat's method of consistently storing system configuration 
info in etc/sysconfig is also very clean.  Both of these features save 
time and money for businesses, and whilst I'd far rather run Debian for 
general features/performance, some Redhat facilities are hard to do without.

Iain