why Linux?
An excellent question, although not closely related to debian-devel.
Bosses love buzzwords, analogies to business, and planning for the future.
Use that information when planning your response.
One quote from your post struck me, "which we've been developing on - the
fear of the technical unknown for them" That pretty much summarizes the
situation, NT has a vast array of security holes inside its closed source.
You should never trust closed source. Its a huge mistake to base your
business upon something you can't trust from a company you can't sue, when
there's an openly trustworthy alternative. Tell your boss that it's like
choosing between two chief financial officers, one that openly and
cheerfully lets you look at your books and works for free, and another
shady character who keeps your own books secret from you while overcharging
you. I bet you could work vendor lock-in into this comparison also.
You desparately need to test your app yourself on your hardware. There is
no such thing as the "one true measurement" of a server OS. The difference
in performance between NT and Linux is so small, that a few megs of ram
here or a different HD controller can tip the balance. Maybe even the
motherboard chipset or power supply line voltage could make the difference.
OK, so reiserFS is generally considered to be faster than NTFS, or NT
sometimes threads faster, whatever. People who pimp NT always tilt the
balance in their favor, and people who pimp Linux always tilt the balance
in their favor, by making extremely unusual hardware and test benchmark
choices. That's the reason you can't find any numbers, the numbers are
meaningless, so who cares what they are. Tell your boss that for all
practical concerns, there is no difference. Because of the rate of change
in HW and SW, whichever one is 0.01% slower today will probably be 0.01%
faster tomorrow, and vice versa. If you are planning more than 2 months
into the future, it really doesn't matter which you choose because noone
knows which will be faster in two months.
The point I'm trying to get across, is that in the process of boiling down
the productivity of a complicated system into one number, all the useful
information evaporates. (please quote me on that)
Note that in general, Linux will always be faster because it's newer,
higher tech, and better maintained.
Ask your boss if your company needs the hassle of MS's numerous legal
problems. Bosses hate being entangled in another companies legal problems.
Read a MS EULA to your boss, then read the GPL and/or DFSG to your boss,
and if your boss hasn't fallen asleep yet, point out that your legal
options are about the same, although the MS EULA is more complicated and
gives you less rights. Bosses don't like complicated contracts that are
stacked against them.
Tell your boss to leverage what you know, and use the OS of the future
instead of the OS of the past. Bosses love buzzwords like leverage. In
summary, use Debian GNU/Linux on the servers.
----- Forwarded by Vince Mulhollon/Brookfield/Norlight on 02/20/2001 01:08
PM -----
Drew Parsons
<Drew@place2t To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
rade.com> cc: (bcc: Vince Mulhollon/Brookfield/Norlight)
Fax to:
02/20/2001 Subject: why Linux?
02:12 AM
There don't seem to be any really good links, not on the Debian
webpages, not anywhere that I could find, which make a point-by-point
comparison of Linux against NT, except for
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/ which does seem to be a good piece of
writing.
For instance, there was the Mindcraft benchmark test where NT blew linux
2.2 out of the water, and then Dave Miller's response in the 2.4 kernel
bringing the upper hand back to linux, network-performance wise. Where
is all this documented?
There are plenty of Linux advocacy articles out there telling you how to
tell everyone else that Linux is Really Really Good without flaming
them, but where are the hard data? Not even the Linux International
site seems to have any links demonstrating *why* Linux is preferable to
NT.
The reason I bring this up is that where I'm working we're preparing to
deploy a Java-based web application using JSP technology, and my boss
asked me to convince him to deploy the system on Linux rather than NT
(which we've been developing on - the fear of the technical unknown for
them). He's most interesting in the cost side of things, but
performance issues are also important. So what am I supposed to tell
him? "Oh yeah, we should deploy on Linux cause I use it for my own stuff
and its Really Really Good honest" ?
So where are the hard data? Who says Linux performs better than NT as a
server? Wanting it to be true doesn't make it true, you know? Are
there any published comparisons of performance (especially for serving
jsps)?
If there are links out there, can they be put into the Linux FAQ?
Can Debian add them to http://www.debian.org/related_links ?
Sincerely,
Drew Parsons
dparsons@emerall.com
dparsons@debian.org
p.s. are there any open-source alternatives to Tomcat for serving jsps?
tomcat is reputed to be slow...
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: