From: Hetz Ben Hamo (hetzbh_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Fri 20 Jan 2006 - 15:45:25 IST
Hi,
> Not any more biased than Red Hat's "White Papers" which showed the total
> cost of ownership for Linux was far less than Windows because the
> sysadmins were pimply faced kids who would work for next to nothing if
> you did not mind giving them the morning off to attend high school.
I hardly think so, read on why..
> The reality of life is that a good sysadmin, makes a decent salary, and
> UNIX (which in some markets includes Linux) sysadmins make a lot of
> money, no matter what operating system they support.
Depends. I've seen many sysadmins who admin Windows networks who get
pay around 6K-10K NIS Bruto!
Here's an example: at my work (TheMarker) I (alone) admin all the
Solaris and Linux servers, and there are around dozen Windows machine
which are administrated by 2 sysadmins. I administrate more machines
than the windows sysadmin guys do, and my salery is definately not
much bigger than theirs.
In the next few weeks, I'm going to add a dozen (or so) new HP servers
with RHEL 4 (hmm, am I the only guy who deploys RHEL 4 in
production?), and I'm setting them all by myself (using most machines
installations with kickstart). You can bet that according to my
calculations, setting them up with all the stuff I need to setup there
and administrate those machine will be way shorter with RHEL 4, and
these machines WILL generate revenue to my employer as soon as the
software is up and running.
I did a small calculation here, how much time it will take to install,
setup and configure the OS and the applications with Windows, and to
me it looks like it will take at least 1 more week, which means a week
less revenue for my employer if they would choose Windows instead of
Linux.
> TCO projections are useful for writing business plans and budgets, but
> technical descisions based upon cost are meaningless.
>
> If you spend $200 on a computer and $15 an hour for a sysadmin, the cost
> of the operating system is an important factor. If you pay $80k-$100k
> per sysadmin annual salary, which is what they make outside of Silicon
> Valley, have several sysadmins and buy decent server hardware, the cost
> of support is far more important.
I totally disagree. When was the last time did you actually check
RedHat prices?
I just bought a 10 pack license for RHEL 4 ES, and it costed me $3K,
including subscription for their RHN for a year. I could have get it
cheaper through other channels, but the purchase was approved by the
management. You might want to take a look here for some official MS
prices (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/pricing.mspx),
and judging by this page, I would have paid around $10K JUST for the
OS, which means I saved my employer $7K!
Of course, I could have cheated, buy a single RHEL 4, install a simple
YUM and spread the updates to the servers, but you get my point.
> Microsoft spends a lot more money on support and fixing security holes
> than all of the Linux "vendors" and support companies combined. It's a
> powerfull argument.
Give me a break! I have seen some records numbers when it took them
about 6 DAMN MONTHS to fix some serious security issues. Just few
weeks ago with their WMF security issues, MS was so slow, that it has
been advised to use some non official patch in order to prevent this
security issue, while MS took their time to release their security
update.
In the Linux case, if there's no official redhat RPM ready by the time
it's out (extremly rare situation), you can almost always find some
other distributor package, extract the SRPM, get the fixed patch,
change the SPEC file and rebuild it to your distribution, and I have
done this before (I suck at C/C++ programming, trust me on that!). It
wasn't that hard.
And then, there's another thing, DAMN REBOOTING. With Linux, at worst,
you stop the service, start it, and you're done (unless it's a kernel
issue, which is extremly rare). With windows, it will nag you to hell
and back to reboot the machine almost every time it replaces some
crappy central DLL or whatever, and in big corporations, rebooting
requires you to create a procedure, notifying, make backups etc..
> Just because something is open source, does not make it good.
> The Linux kernel is a great example. Linux was around since 1991 and it
> wasn't until 4 or 5 years later that it became reliable enough to run a
> server on it for real use.
In 1991 it was only the kernel, and no one thought that this would
become a full OS.
> Even then, Red Hat's policy, which everyone
> copied, of a major distribution every six months to keep the name in the
> press and after the IPO, the stock prices up, did more harm than good.
Yeah, go blame a company which had ZERO knowledge what to do with a so
fast developing OS. They had to listen to their customers, ISV and IHV
until they learned that putting a new distribution every 6 months
without any long life support will hurt them, so they divided it to
Fedora and RHEL, and added 5 years support and patch for each RHEL
they release (and then it was copied by SuSE and Mandriva, but thats
another issue).
> These are the real battles one has to fight convincing people to use
> open source software. The product not only has to work, but it has to work
> well and continue to work.
And in big corporations, a live demo version and a simple cost
analysis paper really helps a lot, I've been there few times already
:)
> I would not try to fight examples like this, IMHO it makes more sense
> to show what you are offering is well supported, reliable and works well,
> not that it's cheaper.
Sometimes cheaper works, even if the open source solution even if
doesn't have all the bells and whistles that the closed source
application has (look at Samba for example).
Thanks,
Hetz
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