On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 07:11, George Toft wrote:
> Some stuff to chew on . . .
> The notion that OSS software is less expensive in a business environment
> - at least to the bean-counters and managerment - is a complete falacy.
> Whereas the reality may be different, here are the reasons.
>
> - Linux OS costs are the higher. PC's ship with Windows, which is
> included in the PC cost. Reimaging them with Linux costs labor and
> licensing. Licensing? Yes - no large company or gov't body is going to
> buy a product without support, which means buying a support contract.
> Red Hat prices for RHW: $3500/50 copies
> <http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/> which comes with 30 days
> of phone support and 1 year of web support and 1 year of upgrades. So
> you get to spend $70/year/user on top of the Microsoft Licensing.
----
Not sure what you're comparing here. License 6 costs? Office, CAL's ?
Clearly the conclusion that this is a fallacy isn't supported by the
argument you gave here. Then of course, there are costs...initial cost,
life cycle cost, purchase/repurchase etc.
----
>
> The reality: My first-hand experience with vendor support is lackluster
> at best - for both Microsoft and Red Hat. My previous client spent
> $2700/license (times 60 servers = $162,000) and all we got out of Red
> Hat support was "we've never heard of that problem" even though the
> hardware vendor had the solution well documented on their support
> website. The client ended up supporting themselves on the issue.
----
indeed but interestingly enough, I have found that with the open source
stuff, the various projects software authors are available as well as
the source code so the ability to effect solutions to problems is
infinitely greater.
I believe that the $2700 per was for 24/7 Premium support and it should
have been first rate or there was a problem. That being said...you can't
expect the software vendor to be up to snuff on hardware issues.
I recall a few instances where it took a few phone calls, lots of time
on hold and some serious begging to get Dell & Micron quality tech
people that were knowledgeable to help.
----
> - Driver support costs are higher with OSS. No kidding. My previous
> client has to recompile the NIC driver with every new kernel that comes
> out. In the last year, I've seen 16 upgrades to the kernel from Red Hat
> for security reasons. Each upgrade requires additional effort to
> compile and test the NIC driver.
>
> The reality: That is the reality. Hardware was selected on the cheapest
> bidder, and it used hardware not supported by Red Hat. And it gets
> worse from there.
----
that is a problem and though newer kernels are likely to have worked the
driver issues through more thoroughly, they are not always part of the
'stable' packages that are part of the 'Enterprise' distributions. I
doubt that this problem is unique to Red Hat but it may be.
----
> - Third party support for Linux is poor (but getting better).
>
> The reality: When Veritas changed their software a few months ago (to
> make it more like the Solaris version), it made the kernel upgrade about
> 100x more difficult. Difficulty = money.
----
bad choice in Veritas? Never been a fan.
----
> - Support costs for Unix/Linux is higher. Windows admin labor is cheaper
> than Unix labor on a per hour basis.
>
> The reality: A unix admin can make a change on 30+ servers running a
> script in a matter of minutes. The same change using a point&click
> interface can only be done 1 server at a time and takes 5 times longer
> per server. On the otherhand, I have seen wonderful results using SMS -
> like updating 10,000 desktops overnight, so Windows admins win out.
----
SMS -- software update services? Nice response to network administrators
to be sure.
The apt/yum/up2date paradigm permit you to operate your own repositories
for updating enterprise wide so I hardly see much of a difference here.
----
> - Neeto Whizbang Multi-media Presentation plugin is not available under
> Linux.
>
> The reality: It probably isn't necessary to support the Business anyway,
> but you will not be able to convince them of it.
----
People that are convinced that they need the latest and greatest gizmo
on the desktops aren't likely to want FOSS anyway.
----
> My experience with my previous client is that it cost them 1 extra
> full-time resource to support deploying Linux servers that they were not
> expecting. That was an extra $100K+ do deploy that cheaper OS. In
> their particular case, however, they saved money by deploying Dell
> hardware instead of Sun hardware, so every box deployed saves them $20K.
----
This was a comparison between Solaris and Linux so it is not germane.
----
>
> Please don't get me wrong - I ran a business on Linux for years - up
> until this month. I am now at a point where not using Windows will cost
> my company money as I either have to use Quicken (2x licensing), or pay
> my bookkeeper to do data entry. This debate can swing different ways
> (especially with regards to who is doing the Data Entry - me or her),
> but even for a small business owner, there are critical apps that are
> not available under Linux.
----
Having my ex-girlfriend refuse to enter data in gnucash - very much
preferring Quickbooks, I can sympathize...been there, done that. Once
again, it is the problem of proprietary software dictating what and how
things are done. In reality, Quicken imports data fairly simply and
someone with your abilities shouldn't have much of a problem getting
that done.
I would agree with your assessment that if the attraction is big money
savings, that you may fall short on that goal, at least in the small
time increments that a typical corporation uses as measure.
Unfortunately, governmental agencies also use their annual budget as the
measure of costs and that is why you have stupid things like Arizona DES
outsourcing their call center to India. The reality is that technology
costs do not understand annual budgeting.
At the start of your posting, you linked to the sourceforge posting by
Maricopa government response to the open source initiative which
included awards that they have gotten for various technology application
which included an award for the Maricopa county court system.
Interestingly enough, I was tracking a case (relating to aforementioned
ex-girlfriend ;-) ) and found that it crashed several times a month
(problems connecting to MS SQL server it appears). All that glitters is
not necessarily gold.
This all smacks of a defense of Linux when compared to Windows and I'm
sorry that I took the bait. Clearly there is room for Linux, FOSS, etc.
and if nothing else, it makes Microsoft a more competitive company.
Lastly, all I need to see is a situation like the other day. A neighbor
bought a new box, cpu, memory, video card and moved his hard drive over
from his old computer. That's all you need to do to appreciate the
difference between open source and Microsoft licensing.
Craig
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