Mysticalfruit's Journal: Hey! It's all about the buck

I find it utterly amazing how money plays into the decisions of everything. I try to pretend that I'm one of those high minded people who tries not to make decision purely on the basis of cost, but I find working in the tech world it goes that way. A year ago, if you even whispered the "L" word near my boss he'd give you that "Yeah Son, but see were an NT shop and that's the way it is" look. Today he pops into my office and is like, "You know those mail thingy-a-bobs we've got in the lab, what-da think about putting them on linux?" I'm not complaining I just think it's cool. I know that the thingy-a-bob reference just made him sound dumb, but he's not. He's one of those bosses that holds the reins enough that you stay on task, but not so tightly you feel like he's standing on your head or has a key logger attached to your machine. If you want my personal opinion, which your going to get anyway, but I think SUN is fucked like whore at a brothel frequented by the many members of the US Navy. Mainly I say this because my company's (which will remain nameless) IS department has set forth a policy of purging all of our SUN equipment. Now your probably saying, "Yeah So, just cause you are doesn't mean everybody else is" The problem is , well maybe I was a bit harsh on the whore comment, they'll still exist, but at a reduced size. In enviroments like mine I see two things happening, you either jump ship or stick with SUN. The problem I think is that we jumped ship (to HP) and are happier for it, so out goes SUN. So all those sun boxes that were doing unix type jobs (like our internal webserver) are now finding themselves collecting dust. The other problem is the expense of supporting sun hardware from a recuring maintance point of view. Some of the highend old sun hardware can run you into the thousands of dollars a month in maintaince cost. It's pretty hard to justify that when you can have a 4 way linux box do the same thing and the hardware is an 1/8 of the cost. It'a all about the buck...