On Thu Mar 06, 2003 at 04:39:13AM +0800, Franki wrote: > my concern with all of this.. > > is that M$ is telling people that the lower cost of linux (ie they mean > free) is > not the full picture, and the extra training etc and so on should be taken > into account when working out TCO... > > with redhat and Mandrake server products.. the actual product price is > fairly high also.. > add the extra training and so on required.. and the M$ point will start > looking like it has validity
Well, anyone who told you that linux has a $0 TCO was obviously lying and likely should be taken out to pasture. I don't think anyone from MandrakeSoft ever indicated that the TCO was nill. Cheaper, sure. You seem to forget the software side of things. If, say, Corporate Server 2.1 is coming close to the TCO of a Win2k server, think about what you get with each OS. You want a mail server? How much is Exchange? Web server? How much is IIS? SQL server? How much is MS SQL? Add those figures up and then re-look at your TCO. And before you tell me you can use MySQL and Apache under Windows, remember part of your argument was training. How many Certified MS Monkeys have training with MySQL or Apache? They'll need some training as well, so add that to your TCO if you're going to use OSS software on windows. > so really, the one that looks most impressive on a server to people looking > at the cost of implimenting linux is debian..... I won't argue with that. But look at debian's development pace and lack of commercial support. A lot of companies will continue to use RH, SuSE, and Mandrake due to support offerings. IIRC, Debian doesn't provide this. For home users proficient in Linux, this may not be a big deal. For others, it is. I mean, the other argument is we can start giving everything away for free and be dead and buried in a year. Which would you rather see? People who think that they deserve everything for nothing should remove their rose-colored glasses and wake up. Why should MandrakeSoft provide everything to everybody? We can't, and we shouldn't. I appreciate the many ideas people have, but sometimes you have to sit down and think about things realistically. We're spread pretty thin right now as it is... if we go any thinner, quality starts to suffer. How many people are going to use Mandrake Linux, the "has-been" distro? No one will use a crappy distro, so why try to do everything and do it half-assed? I'd rather see us say "sorry, but no" and concentrate on areas where we excel so we can continue to provide a quality product and quality services. If people can't understand that, I guess there's no help for them. Maybe they should be using Debian then. -- MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/ Online Security Resource Book; http://linsec.ca/ "lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import" {FE6F2AFD : 88D8 0D23 8D4B 3407 5BD7 66F9 2043 D0E5 FE6F 2AFD}
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