www.eolas.ie, www.droghedacu.ie, www.portlaoisecu.ie DEFACED script kiddies !

I'd rather you created a new thread if you're going to veer off like that.

Whether you think that bedlam's mirror site is a "reward" or not, saying it makes him as bad as a script kiddie is just taking the ****.

Apache is still beta, as you say, which would discourage lots of people from putting it in a production environment. Still, if ASP support was up the IISs level then it could take a lot of the market share perhaps. (I don't see that happening any time soon).

This is not how I have seen a lot of businesses think.

Microsoft offer a more attractive development platform for the typical sort of site that ASP/IIS/SQL Server are used for.

[This message has been edited by X_OR (edited 24-05-2001).]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by dahamsta:
I agree with you that that's how a lot of business think, but I honestly don't think they're right. I've built a reasonably successful business around Red Hat and other open source products. I've only ever had to pay for one single piece of software running on my servers - vBulletin, ironically - and I've always been able to solve my problems on web forums or using Google. The savings in licencing outlay far outweigh the cost of training myself.
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Unfortunately non hobbyist admins/developers who work a 40hr week and aren't too passionate about the work are hard to find. It's the kind of dilbert evil hr thing.

Companies can get Server Insurance for IIS servers. Companies can get MCSEs with Internet+ streams. Companies can *easily* get vb programmers and send them on a course to re-train as "Internet" developers with ASP/IIS/Interdev.

The *cost* isn't an issue to most big companies.

What's more important is the ability to *easily* get adequately trained people who will do the job adequately and go home, not hard to manage awkward techies.

That's why solaris is still a popular unix solution, and given improvements with solaris 8 and coupled with quality hardware it's going to stay a big player.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
I can see why some companies choose to use Microsoft software, if not on the server then certainly on the client. Linux is immature on the desktop, and the GUI is often messy and harder to work with, particularly after running in Windows for a while. But it's maturing rapidly, and with the release of Red Hat 7.1 and Mandrake 8.0, I think it's well on the road to becoming a serious competitor. I also think that Microsoft's greedy reorganisation of licencing is going to have a detrimental affect, since it's invariably the bean counters that make the decisions about software, and intelligent bean counters may just see though Microsoft's little ploy.
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Why use an immature free product with awkward employees who insist on working flexible hours when they can get insurance and trained employees for the MS solution?

As a former webdeveloper, given a choice, I'd go for a well set up asp environment anyday. PHP is far too messy. JSP is a bit too complex unless your talking N-Tier stuff and you can set up a decent ejb server.

If you can hire a decent security firm to put in place good secure coding guidelines, to set up, build, and maintain your iis servers, and to put a sparc/solaris firewall/ids solution together for a couple of hundred grand a year, coupled with 24/7 monitoring, quarterly audits and if you want, occasional penetration tests by responsible tiger teams why try and save some money by using linux?

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
On a related note, again ironically, this morning I was forced to solve a problem with visitors to a client's site not being able to POST a form via SSL. The problem lay with flawed handling of keepalives in the SSL protocol in a certain browser, and I found the solution in five minutes with a little work on Google.
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What if you don't want your employees wasting time on the net?
What if the msdn cds and monthly updates are a much better solution for you?

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The irony lies in the browser responsible for the problem. Can you guess which one it was?
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Probably mozilla :P


Ok, seriously, I'm trying to play devils advocate here.

Cost doesn't matter as much as mangeability and accountibility and insurance and audits and stuff to any company with more then a handful of employees.

They can't *afford* to let the company be too dependant on some sort of in house system cobbled together by an awkward tech who decides to leave the company after 5 years to set up a surf shop in clare

That's why documentation, another great *evil* bane of techies lifes is so important.

It really is like dilbert out there.

Free as in beer isn't important. Free as in we can snarf this, and slip it into our product with just a little credit saying portions of our code are dependant on work of the jpeg group or bsd is important.

Free as in GPL is a pain in the ass

spod

[This message has been edited by spod (edited 28-05-2001).]