On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:59:57AM -0700, Henry Sieff wrote: > > Oh, absolutely - hence the proliferation of Linux and Solaris in our > solutions - the customer insists on oracle for the back-end db, they > get oracle. And as you say, that can be driven by the arbitrary > demands of the customer without basis in choosing the right tool for > the job.
I tended to end up with AIX and Linux solutions. Generally the OS decision has been appropriate, but the software running on the OS rarely has been appropriate. I worked for one chip design company where Solaris could have been an excellent solution, but the cost of moving the chip designs from IBM's fab to another company's fab killed that project very quickly. > > And it has its place I guess. But a lot of it is a question of > mindshare - in the situation I was in, OpenBSD was the absolute best > tool to do the job in the timeframe we needed it done by, but had I > not been around to provide that install cd and links to the man page > (plus the assurance that if he needed it, I could help - he didn't > need it) then they would have flailed around, used something less > ideal, or spent a ton of money to have a couple of turnkey load > balancers rushed over from another site. When I worked for one company where the network admin responsible for the PIX firewall left with the documentation, OpenBSD and NetBSD were the only choices sufficiently documented for me to create an equivalent firewall. OpenBSD was somewhat less painful to install and configure than NetBSD. > > There is a critical mass of usage where adoption of a technology > speeds up because the number of users is high enough to make it a more > comfortable choice. I am not at all saying I care about that or want > to see that happen with OpenBSD - its just another way that decisions > on which tool to use get driven by non-rational forces. Oh, two critical masses heading in opposite directions creates many headaches for me right now. > > > There have been periods of time where getting Linux installed and working > > on the newest cheaptastic hardware has been the easiest. > > Fortunately, for the first such period I had screwball hardware and > > had to go with one of the BSDs of the early 90s :-). > > Yeah - I guess I missed that phase :-) Ever since I have had need of > open-platform OS's, OpenBSD's has always been the easiest to get, say, > a DNS server AND NOTHING ELSE running on whatever hardware I had lying > around. Things were slightly different in the days of 386BSD and the pre 1.0 Linux kernels :-). -- Chris Dukes
