inignoct wrote:
] ] Open-source users, however, aren't quite so overflowing
] ] with praise, he said. "We haven't talked to a single user
] ] who has said they're using [open source] because it's
] ] better."
]
] hm, thoughts on this?
]
] what products are actually better in OSS than their
] proprietary counterparts? does it all come down to
] price/performance?

Something that gets beaten into you in engineering is that there is no such thing as a situation that doesn't come down to price/performance. If you eliminate price from the picture, the conversation is silly. In the real world everything costs money. No square cows.

Linux is certainly better then Windows for running just about any network service other then printing and file sharing. The only reason the later two don't measure up is because the printing and filesharing protocols you are using (NBT) are controlled by Microsoft. Use NFS, webdav, LPR, or cups for any of these things and Linux wins again.

This is because UNIX is better in general for servers then Windows. Windows is designed with personal computers in mind. UNIX is designed with network services in mind. This is not a matter of features or performance. Often NT has better performance on the same hardware. This is a matter of adminiability. The GUI/VBScript "paradigm" just isn't very good for running critical systems on the other side of the planet.

What Microsoft has to learn from the open source community is that they need to build unix machines. If they build unix machines everyone would stop complaining. They need to have a very powerful command line interface. I hear its coming in longhorn. If they do it right, they may win some converts.

Now, is Linux the best UNIX platform for network sevices? It depends. Solaris is for some things (like high end webservers). For some things linux (via IBM or HP) is the answer (databases seem to be moving to it). But the thing is that you can't always afford Solaris (or IBM) and all the trappings. Things actually do cost money. Apache is the most popular web server platform in the world, because it doesn't suck as much as IIS and it doesn't cost as much as iPlanet. Thats all there is to it.

There is only one place where price is not a factor. (In the sense that with these applications being slow always costs more then whatever commerical price tag exists on the product.) That is scientific computing and huge cluster applications like Google. Guess what. Those guys use linux. Not because its cheap, or good, but because they can tweak it to do what they need. You can't mold windows to do your application.

RE: ZDNet UK - News - Microsoft: 'We should learn from open source'