Reader Comments

It would seem that their major complaints about Linux are more related to choices they made - rather than to actual weaknesses of Open Source. My own Linux machines inform me when updates are available. Updating is simply a matter of providing the root (administrator) password. My OpenOffice documents are automatically saved into formats that open in Microsoft Office. Nobody complains about not being able to open my files. Open Source may have some weaknesses - but these problems were caused by the user choices - not the software.

A company I used to work for could bring in a Microsoft Server product under SA for around $800. For Redhat Linux, it cost $3,000.00 per year for support.

This presentation is extremely disingenuous. The 'Speedy Hire' case study posted by Microsoft on 12/13/2007 shows that this equipment rental company is a conglomeration of 10 independent Active Directory domains and 500 rental depots throughout the UK. The depots were equipped with Linux PC's and used an obsolete point-of-sale application. The company had "no internal support resources" for Linux. Imagine that - a shop filled with certified Windows professionals who don’t know anything about how to support Linux! While I tend to agree that it would be more expensive to support a split architecture such as described here, the more pertinent analysis would have been to move the company entirely to a Linux architecture. But perhaps too many of those certified Windows professionals would have been put out on the street.

All this Microsoft sing-song is just plan bullshit. Any cost estimate curve for 2 or 3 years will reveal that open source costs will outperform any proprietary system. Migration to open source is just a 1-time fixed cost. Microsoft cost is a once-every-year cost. How come. Windows doesn't even have a proper DNS client resolver. How would anyone expect it to be standards compliant?

tgillx0: open source does not necessarily mean Red Hat. Was your company able to have the same level of support with Microsoft equivalent to Red Hat for 800 USD? I have a hard time believing that. Really.

@gnichola What if you are not the admin of your own machine, and don't have root pwd? This is the case for many (most?) workstations in a corporate environment. Would an admin have to personally visit each workstation to do an update? I'm asking, I really don't know the answer to my question. @felipe.alfaro It's not a one-time cost, since even for commercial software, the cost of paying your IT support people is greater than software licensing costs.

@zeblon Any more you do not need the root password as the root account has been disabled for years on most distributions. Instead, any user belonging to the admin group can "elevate" to root, similar to the UAC prompts in Vista (which were borrowed from *nix, btw). *nix also has a way to elevate a single command in the command line to an administrative task using "sudo" instead of having to elevate an entire cmd console like you do in Vista. LInux has a bit of a learning curve on the IT side, that's just a fact. But so does Windows. The costs balance out in the end.

JMHO, but for my home and office preference it's MS all the way. For my server preference it's Linux. Open Office has some very attractive features, and in some ways is more flexible than the latest MS Office Suite. Linux includes more additional software (besides the OS) than most companies would buy. I prefer Open Office most of the time while most secretaries seem to prefer MS Office. Probably becasuse they started out on it some time ago. "BTW", I'm migrating back to XP-Pro from Vista 64-bit (after nearly two years of letting it try to function reliably) for my main work box. The Vista Home Premium 64-bit disk, along with the hard drive it now lives on, is going back into the box to wait on the shelf until some future update fixes all the bugs that still inhabit that puppy. Vista-64 bit has wasted more of my productive time than Linux was ever able to waste, including the semester of Linux classes at the college. Maybe I'm just slow, who knows. ;-)

@freakyfelt Thanks for the info. I'm mostly wondering if a large number of workstations can be updated without requiring personal attention at each machine. I was on a Unix machine for years, up until 2003 or so. Every time IT wanted to apply security patches they had to log in to my machine and install them. They could do it remotely, which is better than having to come to my office, but they had to apply the patches one machine at a time. Considering the thousands of workstations we have on site, it was a LOT of time and money. Since I moved to a windows machine I've only had to have personal attention a couple of times. Instead of looking at each machine, they publish patches to thousands of computers at once. Just as gnichola's computer tells him about updates, my computer tells me about updates, but the difference is that I only see the updates IT wants me to be aware of, and most of the time I have no choice about whether to install them, and it requires no action on my part other than logging in. IT decides which OS patches I get, not the OS vendor (i.e., Microsoft), and not the workstation user (i.e., me). That's very different from giving users elevated priviledges that allow them to apply patches themselves. How easy is it to manage/patch thousands of *nix machines, without relying on regular users to install patches, and without having to update machines one by one? I'm asking out of ignorance since IT environment support is not my field, and I haven't used *nix as my primary environment for about 5 years. The answer to that question makes hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference in many corporate environments.

*WOW* What a level of ignorance in the World of Minsweeper Consultants and Solitary Experts (MCSE). *nix is a true multi-user environment maade for the net (unlike everything MS has ever sold). Of course it can be remotely serviced..

"What a level of ignorance in the World of Minsweeper Consultants and Solitary Experts (MCSE)." Yeah, that would be the "I'm asking out of ignorance" thing I mentioned in my own posts. What I have to go off of is 10 years of using a Unix box as my primary workstation (mostly IRIX) in the 90s and early 2000's. Not once in that 10 years was my workstation updated without an admin logging in to my machine. Remotely at times, yes, but not in bulk. As condescending as MysterMask's response was, it still didn't answer my question, and neither has anyone else. Can you update 100 *nix machines without needing to log in to each machine one at a time, remotely or otherwise? And no, I'm not an MCSE or MC anything else. I develop cross-platform desktop applications. I don't maintain networks, workstations, or anything along those lines.