[clug] Enterprise Linux use

Neill Cox neill.cox at ingenious.com.au
Mon Oct 11 23:48:32 MDT 2010


On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 4:18 PM, David Cottrill <cottrill.david at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thanks for all the answers, but I'm after something I can feed to insular
> public servants.
> Once again, I consider all my initial points pretty hollow.
> After discussing this with other AIX people, their principle belief is that
> all managers want a single entity to sue if something doesn't work. A
> business case Linux has trouble answering.
>

How many successful prosecutions of a software vendor are you aware of?  I
can think of one major software vendor that I am amazed is still in business
if suing them was a realistic option.

In 20+ years in government IT I never saw any hardware or software vendor
sued by any of the departments I worked in.  The closest it got was a threat
to cancel a contract, and that was with a much smaller company than the
likes of IBM/Oracle/Microsoft.

Oracle was in the news a few years ago (2007?) when a former employee filed
a suit on behalf of US government customers for overcharging, but that's
still different from "I want someone to sue when the software breaks"

Presumably if you had paid Red Hat or Novell for enterprise level support
you'd have the same chance of successfully suing them as you would IBM under
similar circumstances.

Sadly it sounds like the people you are dealing with have already made up
their minds, and it's unlikely that they will be swayed by logic :)
As for IBM, I can honestly say my work on their enterprise systems.has left

> me dumbfounded at the cost / benefit ratio. AIX is Unix for dummies and the
> ODM is an excellent case for staying with the text file configuration in
>
Linux.
>


I used to feel the same way about Solaris.  And Tru64. And Dynix. And ...
Cheers,
Neill



> On 12 Oct 2010 15:05, "Tony Breeds" <tony at bakeyournoodle.com> wrote:
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