[snip] I've basically got a month to do research and get my guns loaded for what I'm sure will be a heated debate about the Open Source Solution vs the Micro$oft .NET solution. So what I am looking for is personal and professional opinions about both solutions (specifically PHP etc), any and all links to good articles about both solutions giving the pros and cons of both technologies. Any other mailing lists I can get on to get more opinions about the two technologies. Are their any links to show the cost benifits of using Open Source vs Micro$oft .NET? (I know Open Source is free but I have no clue where to find how much .NET is). [/snip]
The cost of licensing and support aside there is a fundamental difference that was mentioned today that applies here. .Net is a platform PHP is a language One of the single largest advantages to PHP is that it will run on the servers serving .Net. You can have an IIS server running PHP side by side with VBScript on ASP pages, an Apache server running on a Windoze box with PHP, heck...PHP will work almost anywhere. It (PHP) has a small footprint and consumes very little overhead. If they take your Linux or BSD box away (a mistake IMHO) you can place your PHP powered web-apps on the Windoze server, install a version of PHP ported for same, and off you go. Try doing that the other way around. It sounds like an over-simplification, but really it is not. I have been in your position. The great thing was that we were allowed to keep one 'open-source' box while all of the other change-over was going on. We migrated all of the other stuff from other 'open-source' servers to the one to give over the boxes for reconfiguration. That single server was running Apache, PHP, MySQL and other popular open-source technologies for the entire company during the absorbtion period. It handled, without flaw, all of the tasks that had been (we did get to beef up the RAM and HD space) previously handled over 7 boxes. It took their people (who were familiar with M$ technology) several weeks to reconfigure the 6 servers given to them and incorporate them into a M$-centric network with 5 other servers (2 servers to specifically handle MSSQL databases). As far as I know the single BSD box is still running, while the M$ network has tumbled enough times to float a battleship, therefore costing more in man-hours and support. In the end it comes down to a cost issue. And I'll beg to differ on hardware costs. Yes, M$ software will run on same hardware that open-source software runs on...but the open-source machine will run much more efficiently. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
