Reg -
How much are the off the shelf server side apps for Red hat (commerce,
What's commerce (not a snide question, I'm just not sure what you mean).
html authoring such as Front Page
Free, although only someone in a serious state of confusion would consider html authoring a server side app.
scripting
Free, and vastly superior to any on NT, just ask your favorite (unbiased) sysadmin.
server side product apps such as Office 97
Anyone that's willing to run an office suite on a intranet server is really asking for trouble, IMNSHO.
As for the database and development tools offered, are they really of the same caliber as Visual Studio and SQL 6.5?
Define caliber. They have better access times, more throughput, more simultaneous connections, bigger filesizes, and faster bugfixes than the things you mentioned, but they don't have lots of neat buttons and pulldowns and stuff. They're usually free as well.
I have a strong feeling that you can drive the cost up significantly if you add in these tools.
Not really. By and large, these things are free, or close to it.
How can the company offer customer support and service for all of this at a price fo $60?
I'm not sure. One way may be that there are more people working on Linux than on any other OS, worldwide. This group includes some of the most talented OS people I've ever seen, met, talked to, or heard of.
Problems usually get fixed within hours. Remember the recent x86 bug where user level code caused a hardware interrupt that didn't set a flag for the OS to catch? It was fixed in Linux in less than 8 hours.
RedHat didn't have to do it, Linus did.
-justinb |
