Subj : Microsoft vs. open-source
To   : Nightfox
From : art
Date : Sat Jan 30 2010 22:22:00

  Re: Microsoft vs. open-source
  By: Nightfox to art on Wed Jan 27 2010 17:36:43

Hi Nightfox,

 > In my experience, open-source technologies such as Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
 > Apache, etc. also seem to be fairly rock-solid, and I think such products
 > provide a good (and perhaps less expensive) alternative to Microsoft

No argument from me there. In fact, my MySQL server at home bodes better than
our production SQL Server 2008 cluster in terms of stability, albeit with way
less usage, but I agree that a lot of open source products are mature enough to
be used in the enterprise, for a lot less licensing fees than Microsoft.

 >  > There's also the legal departments who need a finger to point the blame
 > I hadn't really thought about that before, but I think that's a fairly good

Aye, one thing I've found that drives business is risk. Essentially everyone is
just paying for the other party to take the risk. Open source rarely provides
a way to offset risk in a way that satifies large enterprises.

 > open-source products can be trusted too.  Open-source products such as Linux
 > just require some form of administration/management to ensure good quality
 > control, so that people can't contribute bad/malicious code to the project.

Agreed. That's the risk of allowing open source communities to control the
software enterprises are running at a code level. While there are OS products
out there with good quality assurance, there are also those without any quality
assurance, testing, and and the end of the day, accountability!

 > reading source code - What it means is that the product is open to a very
 > community of people to work on, so that bugs and issues can be resolved
 > than they would be with a (comparatively) small group of people working on
 > it.

That's true in theory, but in practice, I think Microsoft would have more
people working on a kernel issue than Linux or BSD, for example? For instance
Microsoft issued a hotfix recently on the request of one of our clients. At the
same time, I've had some great "real-time" support from a lot of OS developers,
and I think that has a great advantage. But that's me personally, most
companies don't buy into that, which is unfortunate.

Kind regards,
  +------------------------------+
  | Art % fatcats.poorcoding.com |
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