Re:Open source, closed networks
Perhaps in 10 years you will have enough experience to see the flaws in your logic:
In many organizations, the upper levels of management have neither the experience nor the time to investigate new technology, and sometimes are afraid of change. In these environments the back door is frequently the best entrance for innovation. Several years down the road they said “maybe Linux is a good thing, perhaps we should test it out” and I said “OK, will do, so far we have only been running all our e-mail on it for the past couple of years, but we’ll test out databasing also.”
We are now moving our database systems to Postgres/MySQL on Linux with Coldfusion front end on Linux, with the hardware already purchased and the programmers hired to convert the apps. We are soon to be setting up test machines for using samba to do file/print sharing, which would completely eliminate the current use we have for NT.
By the way, if you were a programmer you would know that variations are irrelevant in Linux. The kernel source comes from one place, so you compile the app on your flavour and it works without DLL conflicts or service packs to apply in the correct order. And the code becomes efficient.
Terry Fielder
Network Engineer
Great Gulf Homes / Ashton Woods Homes
My company moved to Unix from a proprietary minicomputer environment before 1990. We ran our software on DG/UX and UnixWare; Data General no longer supports the former and Novell passed the latter on to SCO and finally to die at Caldera.
For the past two years we have been moving all our clients over to Red Hat Linux, which has not been problem-free but has been much simpler, cheaper and better overall for our clients. One site has 125 stations running on one Linux server and we expect to move our larger clients over to Red Hat within the next year or so. We are very happy with our change to LInux and so are our clients.
Why do you consider single companies inherently to be more “accountable” as vendors than a flexible open source community? Proprietary companies merge, drop or sell products, go out of business, etc., and the buyout frenzy of the past few years in particular has resulted in a lot of abandoned products. I personally feel far more comfortable for the long run with Linux. (And as an aside here, I find it incredible that you consider Windows NT a “mission-critical environment” — one of our major selling points is the reliability and stability of Linux compared to Windows options like NT.)
Nancy Tienhaara
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