From: paul@myrddin.isl.cf.ac.uk (Paul) Subject: Re: NT vs Linux (was: Re: truth or dare) Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1993 09:50:14 +0000
In article <1993Jul6.070952.20643@rcvie.co.at> cc_paul@rcvie.co.at (Wolf N. Paul) writes:
>In article <1993Jul4.204757.17842@muug.mb.ca> rgallen@muug.mb.ca (Rennie Allen) writes:
>>
>>Deployment, of a major mission critical system for our company, I can call
>>somebody up and have that bug fixed in 24 hours ? Who do I call ?
>>
>>This is the kind of support companies expect when they decide to go with
>>a particular OS for their business systems. I can guarantee you that if
>>there were no vendors willing to give this kind of support, most large
>>corporations would write their own operating system.
There are a few points to make on this.
First off, there are some companies that provide excellent support,
BSDI, I've been told will send out quick hack fix within 24hrs and
will follow that up with a fully worked out patch later. I'm not singing
their praises or anything just pointing out that support of that type
does exist even at the low end of the market.
The main point with companies that go for commercial products is one of
liability. If the product you buy does something nasty, like nuke your
hardware or just not do the job it's supposed to then your legal dept can
go take your supplier to the cleaners (assuming you got the contract
worked out properly). If linux sends your monitor up in smoke (which IS
a possibility when your playing with XFree86) then there are no
comebacks on anyone except yourself. No company will take on risks like
that which is why they're unlikely to adopt linux as their OS.
Now, you could of course provide all this support for linux if you wish,
provide 24hr support, guarantee safety of hardware etc. However and this
is what it really comes down to, linux at the moment is not stable
enough to provide such support for (HANG ON before you get on my back
about stability --- stability in this context means not changing very
much from day to day). You can't provide support on a moving target. You
can't guarantee that it will work with particular hardware unless
you know what source base is in use. To provide that sort of support you
HAVE to freeze system development and make an official release. You then
have to continue to maintain that released code base while you work on
your next release. It's no good some client phoning in with a bug report
and you not having their version of the source base around.
What I'm getting at is this. At the moment Linux is a rapidly changing
system and everyone really likes getting their hands dirty fixing bugs
and trying out new things. You just can't do that for a commercially
released system. There are all sorts of boring little things to do like
regression testing etc. In essence, in order for linux to be used
seriously by commercial enterprises it would have to be controlled by an
accountable group of people who do all these things and it basically
wouldn't be the linux that everyone enjoys hacking on now.
-- Paul Richards, University of Wales, College CardiffInternet: paul@isl.cf.ac.uk spedpr@thor.cf.ac.uk