Linux/Apache Wins TCO Survey 17
cant_get_a_good_nick writes "From this week's Apacheweek comes a link to a white paper discussing Total Cost of Ownership for Linux in the Enterprise. Some very good hard numbers here, although as always, YMMV. It shows that even with "expensive UNIX admins" having to switch over costs to a "new UNIX", admin costs are lower than for Windows or Solaris. Some great quotes too, I can see these plastered in posts for weeks to come. I wish they could have included FreeBSD in the survey, but all in all interesting."
Just... (Score:1)
*waits patiently for over zealous linux fans*
Re:Just... (Score:2)
I subminnted this a month ago, was hoping for front page so I could get some good flame wars^W^Wdiscussions going, sigh...
Servers, yes, Desktop, no... (Score:3)
This isn't, however, some wonderful thing for Linux on the desktop. So lets avoid the "see, now there's no reason not to switch to Linux on the desktop" posts, k?
Re:Servers, yes, Desktop, no... (Score:1)
Linux will never be on the desktop if it doesn't get easier to use. Most users don't know what a command prompt is, so how could they understand a linux console? There's not enough robust software to use and the choice between desktop environments (KDE and Gnome) would confuse people. Don't even get me started on the fact that there are multiple desktops...
Why not on the main page? (Score:4, Insightful)
On another note, wouldn't it have been nice to see more platforms included? X serve, FreeBSD, SGI, Alpha/Tru64 and Power 4 would have made good additions. Perhaps, if this is not just biased "Linux is the best because we didn't bother including good competitors", we could see some further research on this subject.
Re: Why not on the main page? (Score:1)
The '''Good''' Competitor might be FreeBSD here, but compared to RedHat 7.3, it's not as available or as easy to deal with for the Marketroids that mostly make decisions.
Re: Why not on the main page? (Score:2)
The bigger problem I feel is the documentation. Linux is the OS that killed a million trees, there are books upon books for it, and they tend to go from very broad (Linux for Dummies) to the narrow based (the linux 2.2 kernel map, I do everything in user-land, don't need to know the intricacies of the kernel). There's a billion tuning guides. BSD has two or three of any depth, and the guides for tuning it are hard to find. Last time I built a kernel on FreeBSD (4.1, wow, that long ago) there still was a big chunk in the kernel config file that had zero documentation, and a bunch of those were tuning flags.
Linux wins big, but BSD loses yet again (Score:2, Interesting)
By Chinese Karma Whore [slashdot.org], Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT [mit.edu] found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study [rice.edu].
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar [tuxedo.org], rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Hell, we all knew that... (Score:1)
There have been so many times I've managed to get a Un*x based system running again in minutes after a problem merely by using a mobile communicator with a VT100 emulator in it. I couldn't do that if it was running on Windows.
Re:Hell, we all knew that... (Score:1)
Solaris data in TCO. (Score:2, Interesting)