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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Ummm... what?
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I'm catching up on my trade rag reading today, and I just ran across this article in eweek. The article details "reverse migrations" from Linux back to Windows. Now, I'm not saying that such migrations are silly; in many cases, they are probably sensible (I still don't think that Linux is ready for most desktop office users, for instance). However, one of the assertions in the article astonished me:
Combe was initially wary about its sites running on Linux, but it moved to offset that risk by making sure its provider contract had built-in service-level agreements. Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
What? He hasn't heard of Sybase, DB/2, MySQL or PostgreSQL? As I said above, there are situations where using Linux instead of Windows may not make sense - but this most assuredly isn't a reasonable rationale. I'm kind of surprised that the author of the piece (Peter Galli of eweek) let that comment through unchallenged. The only major DBMS that isn't supported on Linux is SQLServer (for obvious reasons). I'm not sure I buy the TCO arguments either (current uptime of my XP box: 1 day, since the last Windows Update required a reboot. Current uptime of the Linux server running this blog: 314 days). Either way though, that db argument is deeply silly.
I've had qualms about the skills of reporters for quite some time now - the CBS memogate thing is an example of suspect reporting in politics, and this thing looks like suspect reporting in the tech world. Do reporters just not know how to do basic research? Have they even heard of Google? I mean, seriously:
Is it just too hard to spend a minute or two looking things up before letting a blatantly silly claim appear in a story? Heck, later in the same story comes this:
Three years ago, the resort implemented an e-commerce system that used Red Hat Inc. Linux, The Apache Software Foundation's Apache Web servers and MySQL AB's MySQL database; the system was programmed in PHP.
So, there is another db available for Linux, eh? I don't suppose that might have been useful to point out on page 1? It gets worse. The next "don't use Linux" argument came here:
Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system. System failures and escalating costs had the resort reconsidering its Linux decision when, over a weekend in late-summer 2002, in the midst of its season-pass sale - accounting for the sale of about 5,000 passes 14the system went down. The e-commerce component stopped working for about a day.
"There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
What, so now a programmer error is a flaw in Linux? Who wrote this story, the Microsoft marketing department? If I were Peter Galli, I'd be embarrassed to have my name associated with this slop - it's a 2 page wet kiss to Microsoft filled with shoddy assertions - and it somehow found its way into the News and Analysis section of the magazine! Sheesh.
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