Support (Score 1)

I work for a medium size company (+- 700 people.) We are now working on a project using Powerbuilder on PC and Oracle on Unix. 1. For the developpement machine, we use Oracle on Linux. The machine has been set up 200 days ago, 7 to 12 people are working dayly on it, and it works just fine !!! Not a single problem and performances are incredible.. --> we avoided the cost and hassles of a traditional NT Box. 2. For the production machine, our MIS insisted on having some SUN hardware. OK. but the C compiler (which we needed) costs a whole lot , as you might know... so we turned to egcs. The port of the C programs from the Linux box to the Sun was a child's play. 3. Furthermore, we had some serious problems with Solaris : we had to reboot after applying some patches demanded by Oracle. Normal. But after the reboot, two partitions of the disk were nuked !!!! And we never found the reason why ... The kind of problem you **NEVER** get with Linux. You may think that all of this is just some regular Linux advocacy . But Open Source soft helps me a whole lot on my NT box too ! I dayly use vim to edit xml, sql, C or whatever. It's over stable and hyper powerful ! I use gnu awk; it saves me TENS of HOURS of work, and works just FINE ! For me , open source software is stability and money savings. Dnd whatever your MIS may say, support is ***NEVER*** a problem. There are so many websites ... and the newsgroups, of course !!! I ALWAYS found a answer to my questions ! And all that for FREE ! By the way, our 32bits Linux box is twice as fast as the 64bits Sun machine, and it costed 5 times less. isn't that a clue ?