We are building a large distributed system (about 200 processors over a
20 mile region) using Linux and Interbase only. Recently, a consultant
hired by our client popped up with the questions I have heard soooo much
about:
Do you really want to base your system on "freeware?"
There is no technical support, how will you get questions answered?
Who are you going to blame?
Fortunately, my (Government) customer has had such a bad time with NT
over the past couple of years, the questions were not even forwarded to
us for review. The customer was happy to provide the following answers
directly to the consultant:
You bet, the quality of code is too high to ignore. By the way it
isn't freeware, it's open source.
We have given up calling Microsoft for support. Their support people
seem to be incapable of answering technical questions that are deeper
than simple "how do I boot my computer" questions. As far as we are
concerned Microsoft does not support its product. The support we have
received for Linux has been the best we have ever experienced from any
vendor. (Except us, I hope, Steve)
Since Linux is very reliable, our trial systems were 100% operational
from day one, the issue of blame doesn't surface. However, our
experience with NT (SP4) gave us some insight into the "who to blame"
mentality.
The customer has really begun to despise Microsoft with their lack of
support and buggy operating systems. The customer's primary server is
operational and has a zero item bug list, except in the operating system
(NT). Since our overall strategy is to build the entire "second phase"
system from Linux, we have the task of porting the existing server code
to Linux, a task that ordinarily would take a low priority since a
working server already exists.
The customer has overridden our own prioritization and requested that
the Linux port be completed ASAP. Two reasons:
At least twice a week the NT machine crashes or starts to behave
strangely and a reboot is required.
Remote system administration cannot be performed on the NT box so we
have to talk the customer through troubleshooting instead of simply
logging into their boxes directly from our site.
Since this customer now has about 30 Linux machines working in remote,
hostile environments and those machines NEVER go down, one can
understand their desire to get the NT -> Linux upgrade completed soon.
One final point - if the Linux operating system cost $1,000 a seat, it
would still be the OS of choice. The decision was simply not driven by
dollars, reliability is the primary selection criteria. Sorry,
Microsoft.
