[Wylug-discuss] Defence of Linux at work

[Toft, Alex]

Gary Stainburn wrote:
> On Thursday 24 April 2008 18:01, Anne Wilson wrote:
>> On Thursday 24 April 2008 17:41:43 Gary Stainburn wrote:
>>> And went onto support the argument by saying that if he could, they
>>> probably wouldn't be able to support it to the same degree because
of the
>>> number of flavours of Linux.
>> That's about as true as saying there are many flavours of windows.
Come to
>> think of it, the flavours of windows are probably more of a problem.
>>
>> Anne
> 
> This is true, and on this I don't really have to argue.  (Thankfully
I've had 
> very little to do with Vista so far - although Office Vista is already

> causing backwards compatability issues).
> 
> The problem is that the shear number of companies out there, and their

> willingness to keep updating their skill-set on different versions of
one 
> mail server and one SQL server and one HTTP server.
> 
> I know that Apache is the most popular web server in the world, but if
I can't 
> get support for it in Leeds I've lost.

> You can. In Leeds, too. Or at worst, very close.
> Mike

I've supported a number of companies in Leeds and surrounding areas to
whom Linux/FOSS has been a Godsend. Only one of them has gone so far as
to move to Linux desktops, but all have saved themselves an arm and a
leg by using Linux servers. Ok, a Win Server license isn't too
expensive, but when you add the cost of things like Exchange, ISA, SQL
Server etc it all mounts up very quickly. Things like Squid, Apache,
Tomcat, MySQL, OpenVPN, Xen, rsync are out there providing functional,
reliable, low-cost solutions to a lot of companies. IPcop is another
prime example of a FOSS solution which can instantly save you a fortune.
These kind of people simply don't shout about it. The only shouting I
usually hear is along the lines of, "Why did we not do this years
ago?!".

As far as Vista goes, I don't know anyone who even has it on their radar
in terms of downgrading (sic) from XP. I run it (out of curiosity) on a
triple-boot dual-core MacBook Pro with 4Gb RAM and it's a dog, frankly.

Regards,
Alex T


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