On Friday 03 November 2006 20:25, Geoffrey wrote:
Peter Van Lone wrote:
On 11/3/06, Matthew Stringer
wrote: Having both software vendors co-operating with each other can only be a benefit to myself and the customers.
exactly
You people are absolutely clueless. Look at Microsoft's history with 'partnering' with other companies. Only Microsoft wins in the end.
Nice attitude! Although I can understand your fears look at the bigger picture, I have several large clustered systems that consist of M$ and Linux boxes,if I ring up RH and say, my Windows web servers won't talk to my Linux storage, they say, well if you bin your Windows web servers and run RH/Apache you'll be OK. Which ignores why some of my customers specifically want a Windows web server. If I complain to M$ that my Linux LDAP server isn't talking to my Windows machines then they'll tell me to bin Linux and run Windows/Active Directory. This way I can have my cluster running SLES and 2K3 and have each vendor that I'm paying for recognise the need to use 2 OS'es and work through any problems, I can maintain support and SLA's to customers. OpenSUSE is regarded as SLES's beta program it'll always be bleeding edge and bound to have bugs in it therefore I cannot as easily offer solutions based on it. I know that I could switch to Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo and I'll be fine but I'd still struggle with selling it, I'll know that the software will work but without the Enterprise backing it makes it harder to sell solutions running that software (in addition I can buy M$ licenses cheaper than I can get RH licenses these days!) also jumping ship everytime your particular distro has a change of direction is pointless you'll end up with a dozen different Linuxes in your data centre and be sat wondering how you'll manage them all! I'm not a fan of M$, never have been but when my DC is full mainly of M$ powered machines I know Linux isn't doing as well as it should. If punters who only know M$ come to me for managed hosting for a service that can run off Linux, then I can pitch SUSE to them which hopefully they'd have heard of thanks to this partnership and I can offer them a better solution that'll save them money. It's admins that hate M$ as they have to make it work, punters renting services don't care how it works which is why Linux needs to raise its' profile to get into the game, this partnership although risky might prove to be what's required. It amazes me that some of the people on here switched to Linux in the first place they're so scared of change they start ranting before they see what the changes actually entail. Matthew