On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 20:17, George Toft wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > ----
>
> I'm comparing OS costs. The box comes with Windows, which the company
> pays for. Linux is extra.
----
Boxes do not come with Windows. Some vendors (Dell comes to mind) do not
sell desktops/workstations without Windows. Others (HP IBM) do sell
without Windows pre-install/pre-priced. Extra is a nice way to term it
though.
----
>
> 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?
----
It would seem to me that an 'Enterprise' will get special concessions on
pricing regardless of the distribution, be it Microsoft or Linux.
Moreover, an enterprise has a vested interest in support and they aren't
likely to be concerned with update & support services such as RHEL
offers since they are going to roll their own configurations and
updates.
As for getting a good deal on licensing, I suppose that depends upon
whether you consider anything a deal when you are talking about
licensing.
----
> > 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.
----
Seems to be the way of proprietary software...we'll fix it in the next
version, of course, you need to purchase the upgrade. What, RHEL 3.0
upgrade is free?
----
> 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!
----
self support is the way things are - I no longer have a clue what is
being purchased when you purchase support. A toll-free phone number that
links to India where someone has a script to try to get you to identify
one of the 50 most likely known issues.
I have a client that bought a number of Dell desktops with Gold Support.
System wouldn't boot from hard drive. Booted XP CD, recovery console,
ran fixboot and fixmbr. Worked a week. Then that fix wouldn't work.
Called Gold support (American voices). Told me that the machine wasn't
qualified for Gold support, transferred me to secondary level support
(need I say India), guy asks, why are you calling me, system has Gold
support...transfers me back to Gold. Gold support tells me to reformat,
reinstall. Great stuff.
----
>
> 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 :)
----
If we're discussing workstations, why all this about RH AS 2.1, Veritas
and Solaris? It would have been easier to keep this on one topic.
----
> >
> > 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?
----
yeah, Windows licensing restrictions enforced with activation mode
controls.
Generally, when someone says, it's not about the money, I become
convinced that it's about the money.
Anyway, the future of the desktop is bound to change. The current model
purchasing a box and installing all the software on it is too costly for
corporations, governments, etc. The thing that is keeping it alive has
been the shrinking cost of the hardware. That has allowed Microsoft to
continue bundling to hide the cost of their OS and continue raising the
price of the Office Suite to new heights.
Craig
ps - it's not just Novell, IBM and Red Hat making money on open source
stuff. It's a dangerous time because people are actually making money
from it.
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