Value of WinXP and RHPW [was re:User Linux]

[Richard Welty]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:03:27 +0100 David Jansen <jansen at strw.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
> Apart from price lists and just as much off-topic as most of this
> discussion], I have another observation here: Why is it people are ok
> with downloading and installing tons of additional software to turn
> windows into something which starts to resemble a decent operating
> system on the one hand, but on the other hand, this list is swamped with 
> requests like "why doesn't FC include nvidia/mp3/flash/java/your_favorite
> non_free_or_otherwise_unavailable_app_here" ?

i have one other observation to share, which will be my only contribution
to this discussion, seeing as it's increasinly offtopic:

it's not about the cost of a workstation seat for XP at all.

it's about the cost of Exchange, of M$ SQL Server, the cost of
all the things that M$ wants to suck customers into buying on top
of the basic windoze licenses. there is the cost of VB or C# to
support ASP and .NET applications.

i've run IT shops before, and i consult with IT shops now, and believe
me, the costs run up pretty fast in the M$ world. by comparison, i can
deploy web applications with much lower licensing costs in the open
source world, using php for small ones and java for ones that need to
scale. there are three decent open source RDBMS systems that are
viable candidates for a back end (PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Firebird),
there are two decent open source java IDEs (netbeans and eclipse),
and most of the good infrastructure bits for large scale Java deployments
can be had for no licensing costs.

i'm currently deploying a java/postgresql app for a budget minded
client and the whole thing is just working incredibly well (on rh 8,
we're just looking at what the issues are in going to production
with fedora core 1.) i have absolute confidence in being able to
go to production with this stuff, much more than if i were dealing
with VB->M$ SQL server on XP.

if you obsess over the per seat cost of XP vs the per seat cost of
redhat's workstation product, then you don't have a good grasp
of the overall picture that this all fits into.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security