Subj : Microsoft vs. open-source
To   : art
From : Nightfox
Date : Wed Jan 27 2010 17:36:00

  Re: Favorite *nix IDE
  By: art to Nightfox on Wed Jan 27 2010 20:07:08

 > couldn't imagine life without Microsoft SQL Server or Windows Server 2003 or
 > 2008...  

In my experience, open-source technologies such as Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Apache, etc. also seem to be fairly rock-solid, and I think such products would
provide a good (and perhaps less expensive) alternative to Microsoft products.

 > There's also the legal departments who need a finger to point the blame when
 > goes wrong; while you can get enterprise MySQL support, try to do the same f
 > a smaller open source project and you're basically up shit creek -paddle.

I hadn't really thought about that before, but I think that's a fairly good
point..  The open-source community can be fairly big, cloudy entity with no
easy way to pin blame to someone.

 > Microsoft is pretty much the only player with a long history and is on the e
 > of innovation (I'm probably opening up a huge can of worms by saying that...

hehe, yeah, I'd say that's quite a can of worms you're opening..  For a while,
Linux has been making a fairly strong presence in the IT industry, with big
companies like Red Hat and MySQL providing enterprise support, and there are
companies that have relied on Linux for quite some time now.  I used to work at
a company that used purely Linux and open-source products, and it all seemed to
work very well.

 >  > open-source, he thought that anyone could go into the Linux source code a
 >  > in a virus or otherwise malicious code.  It's attitudes like that that I

 > Yep. We've all heard that before. Although to a degree, I agree with that
 > philosophy. Why require someone to read source code before they can trust it

You don't have to read source code in order to trust it.  People trust
Microsoft (to some extent) and other closed-source products, so I think
open-source products can be trusted too.  Open-source products such as Linux
just require some form of administration/management to ensure good quality
control, so that people can't contribute bad/malicious code to the project.

 > In fact, why would anyone apart from a programmer want to read source code a
 > all? Non-geeks prefer binaries, in my experience.

I agree there.  In fact, that's an argument I used to bring up with a previous
employer who would add open-source as a benefit to our product.  However, I do
think that open-source does have a benefit for people who don't care about
reading source code - What it means is that the product is open to a very large
community of people to work on, so that bugs and issues can be resolved faster
than they would be with a (comparatively) small group of people working on it.

Nightfox

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