OSNews

In my present company there is a battalion of "admins" for windows servers, and clients. There are at least 50+ of them (managing things like domain servers, backup servers, etc etc etc, put-your-type-of-windows-server-here). If even half of this number were linux admins, they could manage a full linux server/client network much better. And the favourite line of all the admins I talk to for my problems is: Okay, let me install that software again for you? Why? What happens to my configurations? what happens to the time I've lost? Why must such a colossal "mature" OS and those zillions of apps have to be installed again and again ad nauseum?? I am yet to see anyone say: Get that Openoffice installed again and it will run!!!
My point here is that we are blinded by Microsoft's success and somehow don't want to come out of that comfort zone. Actually its because our employers are paying those hefty dollars to Microsoft and related leeches of money that we are able to post here in favour or Windows!
Given a chance to each one of the Windows supporting trolls here, I'll bet they'd switch to linux if they had to buy each and every piece of software themselves. Here's a list of what my employer pays for:
1. Windows 2000 Professional
2. MS Office 2003
3. Symantec Antivirus, that keep bugging me everyday without fail. And this in a network that is so secure that we all have those constantly changing password cards!!!
4. Lotus Notes
5. Reflection-X, for finally getting into a UNIX machine and feeling better ;-)
6. TOAD from Quest Software

Mind you, there are host of other software which I am not at a liberty to write due to privacy issues. All our paid for and the support costs a fortune as well, not to mention the upgrades.

Oh and by the way -- every year the hardware is rendered obsolete by the software and has to be upgraded. So, the costs just keep rising all the time.

And by the way again -- there are a few Linux machines around -- running Oracle databases as "test" databases -- but let me tell you that the load on them is far more than on actual production machines since all the DBAs and application developers attack them for testing. It does not matter what distribution runs on them. They just work. And there is one linux/unix sysadmin and i don't think he works overtime like the windows sysadmins.

Finally, as a resounding example of my statement above that under windows reinstallation seems to be the norm, my windows sysadmin wanted to reinstall the entire software on the backup server because he could not trace the fault!!!! Such a ghastly event is unheard of in UNIX/Linux circles.

Maybe this post is too long but just because the Windows camp is louder does not mean they are right!

:-)