Just sharing some of my inconsequential lunch conversations with you... RSS  

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Paradox: are closed options the best options?

I'm currently in the process of shutting down my personal datacenter. It has served me well, but it is too costly on power and ecologically unacceptable. Oh, and it also a bit noisy.

I had a bunch of servers with a bunch of virtual machines serving a bunch of my personal sites, through an expensive domain I was paying to NetworkSolutions served by ZoneEdit dynamic DNS free service. I'm moving all of this to GoDaddy Deluxe hosting. Not as fun to administer nor flexible, but dam cheaper.

One of the decisions I had to make was for the OS. I chose Windows, and let me explain why.

I'd like to keep my old Mambo/Joomla sites, and a bunch of little projects I've done when there was no match for PHP to an old C++ programmer, but still wanted to experiment serving personal ASP.NET sites (ASP.NET sites are my way of living, but I've never did it with my personal sites for lack of licenses).

So the obvious answer was Windows, because of Microsoft's closed model. I can run PHP and mySQL on Windows, but I can't run (decent) ASP.NET on Linux.

It isn't the only example of closed option as the best one. Look at the Apple closed model: we can run Windows and OS X on Apple hardware, but cannot run OS X on non Apple machines. Again the closed model has the upper hand.

I know, this isn't fair, but that the way it is.

[update] I've just found out that the Windows account at GoDaddy doesn't support PHP - only mySQL. Due to the Metropolis low Microsoft support, and because I travel with some project baggage, I'm now trying to change my account back to Linux. The world may not be as unfair to Linux as I supposed... Only unfair to those who refuse to choose to stay only on one side of the fence...

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