Craig White wrote:
>
> 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.
> ----
I'm comparing OS costs. The box comes with Windows, which the company
pays for. Linux is extra.
Even if you look at the *retail* price for 10,000 copies of License 6.0
for Windows+Office, it's only $140/year. The above site shows RH OS is
$70/year, StarOffice is $25/copy. Assume a 4 year life-span, and your
Linux+StarOffice cost is $76/year. I know from our meeting with
Maricopa County's CIO that they get a good deal on the licensing. Let's
assume they get a 25% discount. Now we're comparing $105 against $76.
Is $31 per year per user worth the extra effort to support?
> >
> > 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.
It was not a hardware issue - it was a driver issue - the driver that
was shipped with Red Hat AS 2.1 was over 2 years old and buggy. RH
refused to acknowledge the problem. As a RHAT stockholder, I am
disturbed by this.
> 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.
> ----
Dell told us how to fix the problem, but self support was not a part of
what the company thought they were getting into. Surprise!
> > - 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.
LVM was not offered in RHAS2.1. It is in RHES3.0. The company would
not allow the downloading of that "eeeevil open-source software" for
deployment on the servers. It had to come from the vendor and be
supported by the vendor. (Just like that NIC driver - let's not go
there.)
From an operations standpoint in a company that is well-entrenched on
Solaris+Veritas, it makes sense to deploy Linux+Veritas as there is no
learning curve for the Solaris admins. This becomes critical when a
server is down which is costing the company $thousands per minute in
lost revenue, and the admin has to google for how to grow a volume using
LVM when he already knows the Veritas command.
> ----
> > - 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.
> ----
Exactly!!!! If there is no difference, why switch?
> > - 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.
> ----
Exactly.
> > 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.
> ----
Actually it's very important. If you can save 75-80% on the cost of a
server, you would switch to Linux, right? Which is why many loading
docks have Dell and Compaq boxes on them, RHAT stock is up 3X over the
last 18 months, and Sun eqyuipment is dirt-cheap on eBay. You can't say
that about Windows - there is no hardware savings (it's the same
hardware), so it's application, utility, OS & support costs.
In my thesis (somewhat outdated now as it was in 1999), I determined
that OS costs was nearly irrelevant in the Total Cost of Ownership of
servers. Downtime and lost productivity are the major contributors.
But we're discussing workstations :)
> >
> > 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.
No bait - lively discussion. I'm sorry you took it that way. I am a
great supporter of Linux, and have never seen where it could NOT be
deployed in large businesses (thanks for Matt's brief reply we can
include small businesses in that list). The problem is in the corporate
mentality - despite what they say, it's not about the money. I've seen
companies lay off employees, then turn around and give those that
remained beach chairs. The cost of the beach chairs would have paid for
6 employees for the next year. They scream about budget, then spend
$180M on BS Microsoft software that nobody will use. It's business.
Business is about one person that has something that another person
wants, and the deals between 2 people to make a trade. To that end, IBM
and Novell are making great strides toward promoting OSS.
> 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.
Hooyeah!!! Broke him of that nonsense, didn't it?
George
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list -
PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings:
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
(text/plain)