Look. Do you want to spend THOUSANDS(IIS, WINDOWS, DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE, DATABASES, etc....) on a system that is standard ONLY as long as you use M/S windows, and it may only be compatible with *****THIS****** version of windows.
Do you want one that MAY make behind the scene changes, and DOES encourage development that will limit clients to M/S WINDOWS! Do you want one where there is perhaps NO support? SURE, you can pay for "support" calls, but WHAT do they call SUPPORT? How much can they ACTUALLY help you? Do you want one that can be invasive, where attack methods are constantly revealed, and can take MONTHS to patch? Do you want one where the desires, and viability, of ONE company can send things CRASHING DOWN! Everything becomes GARBAGE? GREAT! If you want one or all of the above, The M/S suite of products is for YOU! Open Source products are inexpensive, and compatibility is often maintained even on some OBSCURE and expensive systems/hardware. Open source products generally do NOT encourage compatibility with only one client and, when they do, often provide a cheap means of supporting others. AHH, but there is no support, right? BZZZZZ. Wrong! M/S NBC THEMSELVES proved in actual tests that opensource software often has THIRD party support that is better and faster than M/S first party support! And it is usually FREE! This is true because MANY people are INTIMATE with the code. At M/S you probably won't find ANYONE on tech support that is intimate with the code. You are lucky if they even used it. Want tech support? Use dedicazted news groups, activestate, tek-tips, etc.... Open source software isn't attacked as frequently as M/S, and fixes are often done WITHIN days, sometimes MINUTES! If the author of a popular product dies, or goes bankrupt, it will likely be picked up by others. Look at python! There are at least 2 publishers. The author, that fully documented EVERYTHING, so NOBODY is left in the dark, and a corporation, for those that want an entity to handle any claims brought by people such as the original author. How can this happen? Because they have a RIGHT(OPEN source), and the ABILITY(open SOURCE). I asked one company why they would never consider paying NOTHING to get a package that acheived their goals 100%, but would pay $80 to a company that OPENLY advertised that they used that FREE product, and provided an interface that had to be worked around. The answer was "because if someone wants to sue for license/patent infringment, they will sue THAT company, not us". SO, some companies would PREFER to pay a company like activestate. In cases like M/S where the company goes bankrupt, or changes its focus, the products usually DIE! SURE, if it is popular, and someone is willing to pay an accepted price, it will survive, but you NEVER know. A lot of nice, and even popular products HAVE disappeared. BTW, a lot of OLD established companies have gone bankrupt with NO notice, and M/S HAS changed focus several times. Do they even support the Alpha, MAC, COBOL, FORTRAN anymore? Steve BTW, one last note: APACHE, (FREE WEBSERVER, and most popular. Directly related to NCSAs HTTP server, the FIRST EVER!) MOSAIC (FREE HTTP CLIENT, and basis of ALL that came after it. Look at the fine print in I.E., M/S gives MOSAIC credit) LINUX/BSD/UNIX (ALL UNIX VARIANTS. UNIX created the NETWORK! Without that, there IS no internet) What is unusual about the above? At one point, they were ALL open source/free.(LINUX, FREE BSD, AIX, SUN, HP are all based in some part on BSD UNIX code, which was derived from AT&T who wrote it) Most still are. Forget the M/S hype. UNIX built the internet! APACHE and MOSAIC BUILT the WWW! Oh yeah, FTP, TCP/IP, TELNET, SNMP, NFS, DNS, CGI are UNIX utilities and protocols. In short, M/S should have to prove ITS worth! BTW, ASP uses CGI. It has to, because CGI is THE standard. It just hides it. Steve "Michael B. Wright" wrote: > > I need to convince my co workers and erstwhile managers to build a > > production system in Python. > > Um.... Why? If there is no answer that doesn't equate to something "warm & > fuzzy," then your efforts may be misguided. > > -Mike > > > They're coming from a VB world > > and are fearful > > to detach from the Redmond mothership. I need hard facts, not warm and > > fuzzies about syntax but names of big companies using Python > > and things VB > > just *cannot* do ( threads, regular expressions.. ? ). > > > > Thanks, > > Stefan > > _______________________________________________ > > ActivePython mailing list > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs > > _______________________________________________ > ActivePython mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs _______________________________________________ ActivePython mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
