How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb) [LWN.net]

This TechWeb article follows a once-loyal Microsoft user as he switches to open source. "Meanwhile, the open-source community was making products that were growing more stable by the day and at a fraction of the costs offered by Microsoft. Most of the products were running on Linux, using Apache as their Web server. By 2001-2002, they had grown mature enough to be considered enterprise-grade. I decided enough was enough, and it was time to move on over to the open-source world."

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How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 9, 2003 15:43 UTC (Fri) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link] (10 responses)

Unfortunately the guy is relatively clueless... he downgraded from MS SQL Server to MySQL, while he should have upgraded to PostgreSQL or something the like; and he chose Red Hat for its "superior automatic update capabilities", which are actually inferior and costlier than Debian's.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 9, 2003 16:36 UTC (Fri) by Xanadu (guest, #1215) [Link] (4 responses)

(I can't comment on the SQL stuff, I've never really used any of them (M$'s or *NIX's))

"superior automatic update capabilities", which are actually inferior and costlier than Debian's.

While I will not (or ever) disagree with the fact RPM Hell is exactly that, and I will not disagree that apt is a very wonderful thing. I have to say:

You seem to be rather out of touch. I've only played with Debian a few times. I never had a "real" machine running Debian. Nothing against the project AT ALL, I've just never done it.

Currently, I use Gentoo. "emerge -u world" is not terribly hard. Nor is the syntax for MDK's urpmi, or RH's (and trust me brother, I don't care for RH, personally...) up2date. They are all like apt (I used apt for a long time back when I used MDK).

I'm sorry, leandro, but your comments are rather dated.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 9, 2003 19:31 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (2 responses)

While I will not (or ever) disagree with the fact RPM Hell is exactly that, and I will not disagree that apt is a very wonderful thing.

Yes, apt is a wonderful thing, but dpkg has room for improvement. If you're a Debian user, don't get caught without a recent backup of /var/lib/dpkg, espacially /var/lib/dpkg/status. As far as I can tell there's no way to reconstruct a corrupted dpkg database, unless you have the time to manually recreate it from info in /usr/share/doc.

What would be really fine is database style undo/redo logging for recovery, with the option of putting the log file on a seperate physical disk.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 9, 2003 21:56 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] (1 responses)

tjc wrote:

I used to worry about this a lot, and would do things like copying /var/lib/dpkg/status to /var/lib/dpkg/status-2003-05-09. (Please note that Debian automatically keeps a recent version as status-old.) But then, a couple of things dawned on me:

1. The status file just wasn't getting corrupted. The parsing of its plain-text format seems pretty robust, which is part of the compensating gain for the package-handling system's lack of indexing (and the consequent sluggishness that has developed as available package count passed 10,000 and kept going). Back around 1999, when the Debian-unstable branch was a bit wild, once or twice I did find it easiest to solve problem situations by snipping entire package stanzas out of /var/lib/dpkg/status with a text editor: Again, the use of simple ASCII makes that feasible.

2. There are actually ways to rebuild /var/lib/dpkg/status, even if something has totally munched it. One was documented by Nick Petreley, at http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2003/0113.petreley_p.html . And then my friend Karsten Self posted an improved version of that method, which I have archived at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/debian-package-database-rebuild .

Nothing else in /var/lib/dpkg/ is indispensible or particularly vital: The same methods will rebuild those.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 10, 2003 4:02 UTC (Sat) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Thanks for the link! I read Nick's article a couple weeks ago, but I hadn't seen Karsten's script before.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 15, 2003 23:50 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

If his comments are dated, yours are uninformed. The tools make much less of a difference than the packages.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 9, 2003 21:14 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] (1 responses)

Leandro wrote:

Both MySQL and PostgreSQL are now quite respectable up to medium sizes of datasets. (MySQL has for quite some time been properly transactional, with atomic commits, rollbacks, etc.) If you don't need stored procedures / triggers, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with MySQL, and the somewhat better developed tools and documentation are quite nice. And I'd hardly call either one a "downgrade" from MS SQL Server: No lock-in, choice of platforms, high performance, excellent compatibility with middleware and front-end tools.

Similarly, though I happen to use Debian by preference, but would certainly never call anyone "clueless" for picking Red Hat Linux: It's quite likely that RH, Inc.'s single-system gratis subscription to RHN, possibly supplemented by Conectiva's RPM port of apt, adequately meets the author's needs.

So, to the contrary, I'd like to warmly welcome the author to the open-source world, and compliment him not only on his quick mastery of the technology, but also on his excellent write-up.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted Aug 7, 2003 20:59 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

> Both MySQL and PostgreSQL are now quite respectable up to medium sizes of datasets.

MySQL people still haven't grokked DBs. They still think ACID is nice-to-have but not essential, they haven't committed to full ISO SQL compliance, their data types are still substandard. I won't repeat the whole shebang here, do your own homework.

> I'd hardly call either one a "downgrade" from MS SQL Server

MS SQL Server, while having severe problems, has less of them than MySQL in the technical side. Obviously I'd rather run a defective program than a proprietary one, but technically it is a downgrade.

> never call anyone "clueless" for picking Red Hat Linux

Not for having chosen RH, but for the reason he gave for it: it was obvious he went with the crowd and then presented an excuse for it.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 10, 2003 17:22 UTC (Sat) by microlhk (guest, #7619) [Link] (1 responses)

Sir,

The choice of SQL is a detail.

Ever tried to perform the eqivalent of rpm -V package for office?

Ever tried to update or set an environment string in the ME edition?

Ever tried to recover a file from whatever edition (never mind the registry)?

Have you ever had to learn that the generaly best way to recover your system is to unzip a file containing its entire system and application installation, which you furtunately zipped up before it got too sick.

Experienced an email with something like (-html-) (-head-) !(-input- tag your-box-is-dead-now) (/-head-) (/-html-).

Have one steal your identity by something like (your-login sendto thiefs-email).

Really?

You seem to be slightly spoilt and too far removed from the suffering endured by those hooked into <expletetive ommited>.

I find it really respectable to get up and taking on a new challenge instead of just drooling ones life away.

On your behalf, I apologize and welcome a new member to this community.

Michael Frank

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted Aug 7, 2003 21:02 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

> The choice of SQL is a detail

Unless you care for data, elegance and sanity.

> I find it really respectable to get up and taking on a new challenge

So do I. It seems you're blowing my criticising out of proportion.

How One Microsoft User Made The Switch To Open Source (TechWeb)

Posted May 15, 2003 20:32 UTC (Thu) by tcabot (subscriber, #6656) [Link]

Unfortunately the guy is relatively clueless...

Fortunately the guy is relatively clueless! If he can upgrade as easily as he did, then LAMP has the power to be really dangerous.