About That Linux Report

In the great Spanish novel (and yes there are more than one of them), Cervantes wrote about Don Quixote, a befuddled old man who believes in being chivalrous and takes to the road with his faithful servant Sancho Panza.

Quixote was written as the fool, the adventurer of a day that had passed. But is going up against the large and powerful foolhardy, or can it set the record straight? So here goes this week's attack against the Windmill.

The Yankee Group, the cornerstone of this industries market research, claims in a recent announcement that Linux is not a low-cost alternative to Unix or Windows.

Wow. Talk about spinning a web of intrigue. Common perception is that Linux, a derivative of Unix, saves the companies that use it large amounts of money, since the software is free, the hardware requirements are less and more and more Linux aware people are in the workforce.

But the Yankee Group disagrees. In an article appearing in Serverpipeline.com, "Yankee Group Disputes Linux' Claim To Lower Cost", the research firm claims that Server 2000 and Server 2003, regardless of the large number of patches, is as stable as Linux.The group further claims that a deployment of Linux servers would increase costs over a Windows deployment.

My retort is a snort. Have our friends at the Yankee Group ever really managed a deployment? At one client we just upgraded from a Windows NT server based system to a Windows 2000 Active Server network. It required every single system to be upgraded, and to have every single desktop recreated. Talk about lots of work.

To deploy the Mac and the Linux box that was set up, it required about 15 minutes to figure it out, and another 3 minutes per machine as we mapped a drive.

Of course, as in any good (or should I say insufficient) argument, the Yankee Group added that because of the economy and the fact that there will be a three-year cycle before the next major Windows release, the market might change in favor of Linux.

Give me a break. Either you are neutral, you are for something, or you are against it. Your reports shouldn't be all over the place!0