OT: ISPs: Linux's role nowadays

[birger]

On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 08:11 -0800, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> That's the whole reason that Red Hat actually does good business by
> charging such a collossal price for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

According to my boss the license costs for my RHEL servers are less than
the rounding errors in the other license costs. Mainly Microsoft and
Adobe. I wouldn't call RedHat licenses expensive.

If only linux had the collaboration features of LiveMeeting or the
upcoming Office 2010 suite... Apart from my inability to join
LiveMeeting meetings noone at the office would know that I am running
Linux.

Our annual license costs pr windows pc are 3 times the price of the PC
itself.

Have you seen the price tag on a fully redundant MS Exchange server? Not
only the price for the exchange software on the individual nodes, but to
run in a cluster configuration you *must* run the enterprise version of
the OS. And the enterprise version of windows server is *expensive*. Our
license guy chokes whenever someone claims they *must* have windows
enterprise on a server. You think SharePoint is cheap? Count in the
Client Access Licenses and you may change your mind. And then there is
Adobe software. Very expensive, and a hell to administer especially if
you use roaming profiles.

I am about to start 'upgrading' some of the servers doing automated PDF
processing using Adobe Indesign to CentOS servers running GraphicsMagic.
I expect the result to be faster, more stable, and a *lot* cheaper even
if we switch to RHEL.


birger