On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Chris Dukes <pak...@pr.neotoma.org> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 09:15:39AM -0700, Henry Sieff wrote: [SNIP]
> Unfortunately, for many of us the end goal is to get a pile of crap, > as dictated by management, working well enough that we get another paycheck. > Unfortunately, for many of us what management dictates is something they > have heard of, has a sales dweeb that provided a good meal or golf game, > and has a support contract so the blame can be passed on to those > servicing the support contract. 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. 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. 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. > 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.
