On Dec 31 2008, 5:57 pm, "DFS" <nospam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> > The Free Software Movement and the Struggle for Freedom of Thought
> blah blah blah
> Why are you linking to Moglen, Spamowitz?
> You're a promoter and developer of proprietary systems who insists on being
> paid for his work, and whose commitment to open source and free software
> begins and ends at your wallet.
> Same for [H]ypocrite. Ballard. Linonut. JED. Rasker. 7. Hilliard.
> Kohlmann. chrisv. Dumb Willie Poaster. Marti. HPT. et al.
I work for GBS, I'm a consultant. Much of Websphere is based on Open
Source technology, however, the proprietary extensions and plug-ins
provide the wizards to generate code that would take my teams several
staff-weeks at around $100/hour to write by hand.
I often offer the customer both options. They can use WebSphere
Community Center Edition, or Apache/Tomcat/Jakarta/Struts and pay my
team $4-8 million to write custom code, or we can use WebSphere
Business Integrator which will save us a bunch of time, and cut the
TOTAL cost to about $2-4 million.
The clients don't really care whether it's Open Source, Proprietary,
or some combination of both. What they are looking for is good cost-
effective solutions to business problems. They are looking at ways to
generate or maintain $1 billion in revenue, to stay competitive, stay
compliant with regulations, and have a system that's reliable, secure,
and manageable. The royalties and support costs are a drop in the
bucket compared to the annual operations cost. They might spend $8
million on development of a project that will cost $100 million/year
to maintain and manage, because it generates $600 million/year in
revenues and they don't want the system going down in the middle of
the night, because that's the middle of the day in one of their major
markets. They might even want data centers in different parts of the
country, or even in different countries, so that they are less likely
to "shut down" due to a terrorist attack, a hurricane, or a massive
black-out.
What clients don't like is having to pay huge annual checks for now
increase in productivity, just because Microsoft thinks they should,
having to shut down their sites for hours because of a "mandatory
upgrade" that disables their system, and being told that the only way
to "fix" their server is to rebuild it. They don't like having to
depend on human beings to do the daily and weekly maintenance tasks
using GUI interfaces, because they are so prone to error and a step
might be skipped. They don't like having to reboot their servers
every time a security patch is applied simply because the operating
system won't let them update a library file while the system is
running.
Microsoft has made HUGE improvements in all of these areas since
Windows NT 4.0, but even with Windows Server 2008, all of the tools
and utilities and support functions leave you stuck in "Windows Only"
mode.
Using Java, Perl, and Unix/Linux programming tools, languages,
libraries, and APIs gives clients the ability to start with any
platform, including Windows, and scale up as large as they need to go,
even to large mainframes if that's what they need.
Windows applications are large monolithic executables. They call lots
of shared libraries (DLLs), some of which are kept in memory by
running executables that keep them loaded all the time. The problem
is that even the libraries are bundled together, so you end up with
95% of the code being kept in memory even though it might never get
executed (easter eggs, disaster recovery, help functions for common
tasks that the user already knows how to do). All of this because the
exe file loads up all of these libraries just to get started running,
and never lets go of the memory. The applications also have to do
everything, because Windows context switching is still relatively
slow, taking about 10-20 times longer per context switch than Linux or
Unix.
Again, Microsoft has been working on these issues for several years,
and the situation has improved - slightly, but Windows workstations,
even Vista and Windows 7 are still plagued with fundamental design
principles which limit the throughput available to the system.
Windows servers are slightly better, mostly because Windows servers
are normally used for very specialized server functions within the
overall IT infrastructure. For example, a SQL Server machine might be
used to do OLAP and Business.Intelligence by gathering from Oracle and
DB2 and other DB servers. Windows servers also make nice .net
gateways, feeding SQL requests to back-end systems running UNIX.
Again, there seems to be a pattern of more companies wanting to follow
industry standards rather than being "boxed in" to Microsoft's
exclusive technologies.
Microsoft has "force fed" XP and Vista to corporations, which has made
the corporations a bit more wary about committing to Windows 7.
Linux, on the other hand, has started showing up at cell phone stores
on sub-notebooks. Even my wife, who has never particularly liked
Linux, loves it on the little sub-notebooks.
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