Fedora and the System Administrator -- there are a lot of variables here ...

[David Holden]

On Thursday 02 Oct 2003 6:51 pm, William Hooper wrote:
> David Holden said:
> [snip]
>
> >> > As far as I know for version of Microsoft OS's your guaranteed >3
> >>
> >> years
> >>
> >> > use of that OS and security updates are *free*.
> >> > (Yes I know microsoft and security are words that really don't mix :))
> >>
> >> Secondly, Microsoft has the volume to sustain security updates on a
> >> $99-199
> >> product.  Red Hat does not.
> >
> > Of course which is back to my original post,  about the cost of doing
> > this,
> > assuming the WS edition (>3x179) again $99-199.
>
> Make sure you are comparing apples to apples.  Microsoft's OSes in the
> $99-199 range are desktop platforms, so they only thing they can compare
> to is RHEL WS.  Even that is a stretch because WS includes HTTPd and NFS
> servers.  And an office suite.  And a full development environment.  Do I
> need to continue?
>
> If you want to compare anything to RHEL ES, then you need to start looking
> at Microsoft's Server OSes.  Of course ES includes a proxy server, a NNTP
> server, an IMAP server, most likely a couple SQL servers, etc.
>
> In the end if you are trying to determine what to buy just based on price,
> you have no real applications that require one or the other.  As someone
> else on the list pointed out the price of the OS in a number of cases is a
> small part of the total cost.  More often then not the applications
> dictate the OS, not the cost.

I agree with this, and personally there is no way I would use M$ product,  but 
the point is that we are not comparing apples with apples, Microsoft has a 
great deal of inertia and mind share on its side with "non-techical" managers 
so to get them to move linux has to be a way better value proposition. After 
a great deal of debate I managed to persuade my bosses that the "old redhat" 
proposition ($60/year 2-3year security updates) was worth giving up the 
windows desktop (Office/Photoshop/IE/Outlook..all the things he knows well) 
for Linux.

Then redhat suddenly says "no, its now $180/year and $345/year for a server 
version". So the cost has now tripled on the desktop and x6 on the server. 
This still might be comparable even somewhat better value that Windows but 
its blown a big hole in one of my arguments for moving to linux, I suspect 
that there are quite a few small businesses who have not already made the 
jump won't be on these prices.

 Dave.




-- 
Dr. David Holden. (Systems Developer)
Crystallography Journals Online: <http://journals.iucr.org>

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