This apparently is the view of David M Williams of NSW in a recent article and he’s a Linux guy, surprise, surprise. There’s a lot of inaccuracies in his post which Susan has highlighted in her post about this article. I’m not really sure why I’m even wasting my time writing about it.
I don’t hate Linux, as a true Geek I respect good technology wherever it comes from. I know people/friends who are running successful Linux businesses and good luck to them. Having done both Linux and SBS for SMBs, I know which one customers are happier with and it’s not Linux. There isn’t a Linux distro/product on the market which rivals what SBS delivers out of the box. So what if SBS is easy to set-up (that old chestnut again except from Linux people). I love the wizards and the fact I can do stuff easily, I have a life and I don’t want to show my worth in low level configuration stuff and scripts that are totally unmaintainable.
The thing that Linux implementers for small businesses love to do is get their favourite Linux distro working on a P3/P4 - why? Because they can! Yep, that’s the height of my ambition to work on the most lowliest, shitiest hardware I can get my hands on. Believe me, I have worked on the most resource constrained devices out there like developing OSes for Smart Cards - never again!
You know there is a company who is making serious money out of Linux and that is Red Hat. It’s a smart company! Why? Because it along a go dumped desktop Linux and SMBs and went straight to Enterprise. Bingo!! They started charging serious money for the subscriptions, they built a great certification programme (RHCE) and provided paid for support. They’ve watched their business grow and grow, despite people using things like CentOS built from their codebase.
From what I can tell the Debian development process is a complete joke but oh yes we have Ubuntu now - except that it relies on Debian.
I nearly forgot, there is another company that is making a truckload of money from Open Source and that is Apple. It took a BSD distribution, customised the hell out of it, threw a big "V" sign at the FSF, and cashed in big time and let Microsoft take all the heat. Sorry Linux, the desktop (KDE/Gnome) sucks big time and Linus Torvalds thinks Gnome is for retards.
I had big hopes for Novell’s Suse Linux but they are mired in a declining business that is NetWare. I’m about the only living person on this planet that likes YasT, yes more GUI/Wizard configuration tools. Also go check out Microsoft’s Open Source strategy and let’s promote Interoperability.
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September 12th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Fire in the hole!
September 12th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Light blue touch paper and stand well back!
Technology shouldn’t be a religion. The truth is that Apple is the competition for Microsoft on the desktop. Canonical’s attempt are at best interesting but have no real business model behind them other than being bankrolled by Mark Suttleworth.
September 13th, 2008 at 4:22 am
Hi vijay,
Thanks for the robust feedback.
Fundamentally, I have a problem with using SBS over the fuller products. I figured the only reason someone would choose SBS over (say) Windows Server 2003 standard and Exchange Server 2007 standard is for pricing reasons.
So, if price was the issue why not dig deeper and use Linux tools which remove the software costs entirely and allow the hardware to be beefed up more. So, sure, you can run Linux on lower-spec’d hardware but that’s definitely not what I’m advocating. Actually, you kind of point out that Linux actually performs better on equivalent hardware than Windows.
Ironically, an SBS consultant - and MVP - gave me the real reason she advocates SBS, and it’s not due to technical reasons: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20619/1141/
All the best!
Regards,
David W
September 13th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Thanks for your comments and your article certainly made me think
We all know that small businesses are price conscious and SBS is a cost effective solution for what it delivers. Running it on most modern hardware is not really an issue. Comparing a base install of Linux to SBS is not a like for like comparison but I concede that Linux will take less resources overall and require less reboots. However, our customers are pleased with what they get for the price they get it at. At the end of the day Linux guys go in on price and say you can run this distro or that on your existing hardware. We’re all competing on price! Selling a solution to a small business is never just a purely technical decision becasuse we are normally talking to business owners who are non-technical. They don’t care about Software Freedom Rights even if we want them to.
Microsoft advocates SBS in the small business space even though in reality Windows Server 2003 far outsells SBS in the same space (something like 4:1). Microsoft makes more money off standard Windows Server 2003 than SBS, so with them advocating SBS they are trying to give businesses a solution that fits their budgets.
If a SBS Consultant installs SBS in a company with rapid growth and that is going to need to go beyond the limits of SBS, then that is the wrong thing.
I think you need to differeniate between commercial distros like Red Hat and Novell’s Suse Linux and other hundreds of free distros (each with their own way doing things like package management etc). You need to be clear about those issues as well to your customers.