My argument against MS software:
They force you to upgrade to more recent versions of their environment.
When you upgrade, it is not only money but you have also to update your
software because they don't maintain backward compatibility.
And they force you to upgrade when you hit a security vulnerability in
your existing environment, which they won't fix because it is already
obsolete and they don't maintain it. And this happens at the worst time
and situation - you have been hit by a security problem, and need to get
the system back up quickly BY UPGRADING IT, and not just when a volunteer
is available.
The worst - your system will be exposed to the Internet, because you want
to serve Web pages. So it will be certain that there will be plenty of
attacks.
On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My gliding club is going to write their own software, after years of being
> dependent on an ancient Magic software that no-one could update and did
> a fraction of the requirements.
>
> A club member who knows MS stuff valunteered to write it in VB+ASP+Access.
> Their argument for Access is that we won't reach the 1Gb limit in 20 years
> (which I think is false) and that it will be a single web server
> accessing the database
> directly, so no much concurrency problems (which I'll try to clarify in
> ameeting
> tommorow (Monday)). They also relay on the promise that it will be easy
> to move over
> the MS-SQL if required later.
>
> I'd like to stir them away from doing what I believe to be a mistake to
> be dependend on
> MS proprietary technology, but not being able to give the time to
> program myself I
> am a bit at loss as to how exactly can I convince them to see the
> dangers in that road.
>
> Can people help me find arguments against this setup?
>
> Currently I have:
>
> 1. Windows/IIS/ASP are insecure.
> 2. Not scalable in terms of size of database and number of users (but
> then it's not
> going to be a large number of users, only club members).
> 3. Expensive (but they might be willing to invest this).
> 4. Lots of "hand holding" for the server - crashes, bug fixes, anti-virus.
> 5. Lock-in in MS technology (but I suppose you can always export the
> data, don't you?).
>
> What else can I say? And how to say it?
>
> I need this for Monday evening.
--- Omer
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