On Thursday 02 Oct 2003 6:51 pm, William Hooper wrote: > David Holden said: > [snip] > > >> > As far as I know for version of Microsoft OS's your guaranteed >3 > >> > >> years > >> > >> > use of that OS and security updates are *free*. > >> > (Yes I know microsoft and security are words that really don't mix :)) > >> > >> Secondly, Microsoft has the volume to sustain security updates on a > >> $99-199 > >> product. Red Hat does not. > > > > Of course which is back to my original post, about the cost of doing > > this, > > assuming the WS edition (>3x179) again $99-199. > > Make sure you are comparing apples to apples. Microsoft's OSes in the > $99-199 range are desktop platforms, so they only thing they can compare > to is RHEL WS. Even that is a stretch because WS includes HTTPd and NFS > servers. And an office suite. And a full development environment. Do I > need to continue? > > If you want to compare anything to RHEL ES, then you need to start looking > at Microsoft's Server OSes. Of course ES includes a proxy server, a NNTP > server, an IMAP server, most likely a couple SQL servers, etc. > > In the end if you are trying to determine what to buy just based on price, > you have no real applications that require one or the other. As someone > else on the list pointed out the price of the OS in a number of cases is a > small part of the total cost. More often then not the applications > dictate the OS, not the cost. I agree with this, and personally there is no way I would use M$ product, but the point is that we are not comparing apples with apples, Microsoft has a great deal of inertia and mind share on its side with "non-techical" managers so to get them to move linux has to be a way better value proposition. After a great deal of debate I managed to persuade my bosses that the "old redhat" proposition ($60/year 2-3year security updates) was worth giving up the windows desktop (Office/Photoshop/IE/Outlook..all the things he knows well) for Linux. Then redhat suddenly says "no, its now $180/year and $345/year for a server version". So the cost has now tripled on the desktop and x6 on the server. This still might be comparable even somewhat better value that Windows but its blown a big hole in one of my arguments for moving to linux, I suspect that there are quite a few small businesses who have not already made the jump won't be on these prices. Dave. -- Dr. David Holden. (Systems Developer) Crystallography Journals Online: <http://journals.iucr.org> Thanks in advance:- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See: <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html> UK Privacy (R.I.P) : http://www.stand.org.uk/commentary.php3 Public GPG key available on request. -------------------------------------------------------------
