Pros and Cons of Unix

[George Toft]

Tooting my own horn:
http://georgetoft.com/thesis/results
It is an ex post facto (i.e., non-experimental) research into the total 
cost of ownership for NT, Netware, and Linux that I did for my grad
school thesis.  There were not enough responses to draw conclusions 
about Solaris, HPUX, or any other Unix variant.  Scope of the research 
was limited only to use of the above operating systems as workgroup 
servers.  

Summary: In a workgroup environment, Unix has a lower Total Cost of 
Ownership than other operating systems.  This directly contradicts one 
piece research performed by Microsoft and Compaq.  The slick part of
their research (and the disclaimer appeared in a very obscure part of 
the document) was they added the cost of a PC into the cost of a Unix
workstation as the user needed to perform routine office productivity 
actions usually assigned to PC's.  Of course, when you compare the 
cost of a PC to the cost a PC plus a Unix workstation, PC's are cheaper.
Anyone else see a flaw in that logic?

If you don't like my paper, at least look at the references.

For all of the Pro-Linux people out there, figure 25 is the one that
most people are interesting in.

George


> David Demland wrote:
> 
> I am working on a paper for Grad school. I need to list the Pros and
> Cons of Unix. Any ideas where I can get some information?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> David Demland