TransACT says Hello to Microsoft

And possibly highly influenced by the actual IT knowledge of TransACT personnel.

Sounds a bit suss. TransACT isn’t really such a large organisation, so it would be really surprising if there weren’t off-the-shelf open source packages for handling billing. At an educated guess, this is another instance of Micro$oft offering a deal that would be commercially hard to reject, to draw agencies away from open source. The UK IT website ‘The Register’ regularly carries reports of local government agencies in the UK that carry out feasibility studies of moving to open source software, only to suddenly find themselves being offered M$-based deals at a fraction of M$’s standard commercial pricing.

when you scale out to large numbers of servers the TCO goes through the roof.

Paypal do alright.

The headline seemed unprofessionally one-sided until I noticed the line “Source: Microsoft”.

On a side note if they really had trouble finding people to support Oracle-on-RedHat they should have given KAZ a call.

> Especially when you scale out to large numbers of servers the TCO goes through the roof.

Really? Someone better warn Google then – I’m sure they’ll be falling over themselves to switch to the cost savings afforded by moving their 450,000 (I think that’s “large”, don’t you?) servers from Linux to Windows 😉

Seriously, I can’t speak for the whole of ActewAGL, but their ISP, Grapevine, seem to lack even the most basic of technical ability. When you send a mail from their mail servers, for example, it doesn’t try to deliver it to the server identified in the target domain’s MX record, it just uses the first A record it finds and gives up if that host happens to reject mail. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just trust me that it’s fricking appalling behaviour, and we’ve observed it with two different targets from two different Grapevine users).

> Especially when you scale out to large numbers of servers the TCO goes through the roof.

Funny, that statement is usually reserved for Windows…the most expensive piece of crap you could possibly run anything on. Note: I’m no big Linux fan either, I’m a REAL Unix admin. 😉

Not a MS hater – actually like Windows. Way back when I was in the industry and promoting/selling systems loaded with Windows 3.0 then 3.1, all my mates were going “you’ll never replace DOS for “proper” users.”
Wish I’d backed up my confidence by buying shares…

That said, our website http://www.gcc.asn.au is hosted on Linux, built on the open source Joomla CMS, with open source templates and add-on components.
It all works quite well, and was relatively straightforward for me to learn (never having had anything to do with website design or HTML).

Importantly for a community group, it means we are not tied to one person’s copy of a proprietory software package, and can move web responsibility from person to person, hoster to hoster, as needs dictate.

In the same way, requiring incoming executive members to run all GCC email through a Gmail account means when the inevitable happens and that person moves on, they only need to hand over the Gmail logon details and the incoming person inherits the entire history of the position instead of starting over from scratch.

Likewise, we are playing with an open source wiki in which to gradually build a “user manual” for the association. (Looking at a wiki for our Section at work too for program guidelines – corporate knowledge protection.)

I guess Transact, like many other businesses are finding Linux still lacks some of the maturity of other operating systems. Especially when you scale out to large numbers of servers the TCO goes through the roof.

That’s all I’m saying – otherwise we’ll start huge s**tfight.

Its a sad day for the fish arse’s