[ Thanks to Michael
S. Mimoso for this link. ]
“Charged with implementing an application server that ran on
both Linux and Windows 2000, webmaster Joe Sechman immediately
chose Linux. Unfortunately, Sechman, who works for a large
organization he preferred not to name, couldn’t persuade his
company’s executives to back his choice. Instead, they decided to
play it ‘safe’ with Windows 2000. Then Sechman and his
company–which remains anonymous in this Q&A
interview–suffered the consequences of making the wrong
choice.“Could you describe the specific instance in which you
pitched Linux and it was rejected?“Sechman: We had an opportunity to run a
proprietary application server to power our new J2EE time
management application. Fortunately, the app server was ‘certified’
to run on both Linux and Win2000 boxes. I had enormous reservations
[about] running a binary Apache port on Windows; but our support
contract included the Apache server. So upper management could
relax, but I’m still having trouble buying into it!“I motioned to run the entire application, minus the bloated app
server, on an open-source solution (Apache Web Server with J2EE
requests proxied to the Tomcat Servlet Container) that ran
extremely well on Linux. This made me feel better, since I could
build all of my applications from source code and knew exactly what
was going into each server. No bloat, nothing I didn’t need, and no
surprise dependencies that all of the sudden brought the system to
its knees…”