I would like to re-iterate. I am not saying Linux is bad and Windows is good.
What I _am_ saying is that, for not-well-known use cases, Open Source solutions generally suck compared to their closed-source competition, simply because the Open Source developers don't have the depth of expertise, dollars, or both to architect a robust solution. Example: Operating System. This is a fairly well-known problem domain. So Linux does very, very well here. Same for Apache. Same for PHP. But get into something like cluster management. Linux-HA completely falls flat compared to say HP ServiceGuard, or Veritas Cluster, or Sun Cluster. Cluster management and load-balancing is a TOUGH job. Oracle's cluster solution (Oracle Cluster) is only second-tier in this market, behind the above-mentioned ones. What more a small-community Open Source project? Example: Database. We can go to town about the relative merits of MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, and Oracle, but the bottom-line is that if you really look into the functionality, the Open Source offerings are absolutely toylike in comparison to the enterprise offering. Let's not get into SAPDB -- sure it's "enterprise" (but look for a SAP installation running on SAPDB) -- but it also suffers from a tiny community (killer for Open Source software) and is riddled with bugs. Yes, I tried using it. Yes, I gave up. So... common use case with big community, Open Source == Good. All of the famous OSS projects fall in this category: Linux, *BSD, Sendmail, Postfix, Bind, Apache.... Less-common use case, or scaling on huge hardware, or ultra-stringent performance or availability requirements, Open Source == Falls Flat. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
