OT: ISPs: Linux's role nowadays

[Don Quixote de la Mancha]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> Remember
> that staff are paid, and someone looking at a router issue is not doing
> something else. fact of life, when you get larger than "mom and pop" ISP
> operations Cisco or similar is cheaper than Linux.

That's the whole reason that Red Hat actually does good business by
charging such a collossal price for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

When a big company depends critically on the correct functioning of
some piece of infrastructure, whose downtime would bring the whole
business to a dead stop until it's fixed, all of a sudden it becomes a
priority to pay whatever is required to ensure that "It Just Works And
Always Works" and if it ever doesn't just work, there is a
knowledgeable, experienced expert on call 24/7/365 who will come right
down to the data center but quick and fix whatever is wrong.

Microsoft has just the same kind of business with some manner of
Enterprise Windows Server.  A typical Windows user would be OK paying
$150 or $200 for a copy of Windows 7, but would never pay tens of
thousands of dollars for a single copy of Windows 7 Server.  But there
are plenty of businesses for which paying all that money for
reliability is actually saving them money.

Don Quixote
-- 
Don Quixote de la Mancha
quixote at dulcineatech.com
http://www.dulcineatech.com

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