On Feb 11, 2005, at 1:21 PM, Lan Barnes wrote:
-snip of a mudslide of FUD-
His fundamental assumption of "risk begins with patch posting" is just completely flawed. The only saving grace is that black hats are often so stupid that they give themselves away by beating on the machines of white hats. The downside is that the black hats are getting smarter about this.
However, while I'm far from being a Microsoft apologist, his numbers point out deficiencies in open source. There are some issues.
There is a time lag between external package maintainers and distributions. This is right on and needs to be improved.
The distributions *do* come with an insane pile of software with no choice which eliminates most of them. This is spot on. One of the reasons why I run FreeBSD on my servers is that I don't have to hunt down and turn off a whole bunch of stuff that I have never heard of. Linux has gotten *much* better about this in the last year or so, though.
In addition, most people who suddenly find themselves in need of a database are already likely to be running Microsoft to begin with. SQL server then becomes the logical quick fix.
His comments about MySQL are spot on, but MySQL *is* often good enough. However, if "good enough" isn't, there is PostgreSQL. Otherwise, step up to the big boys.
We use SAP at my work. My conclusion: Anyone brain dead enough to select
SAP as an enterprise SW solution would naturally conclude that M$ was
the safest, least expensive, most nutritious and best tasting SW in the
whole world, Auntie Em.
Well, okay, I won't argue with you much here. Let's just say that SAP is aptly named considering A) what it does to a company and B) how well it describes the people who buy it.
-a
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