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-----------> This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWS list. <-----------

Michael S. Garber wrote:
> 
> -----------> This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWS list. <-----------
> 
> The following article by Josh McHugh in Forbes on-line
> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0810/6209094a.htm
> is a must read for anybody who is looking at applying on-line
> technology. It answers a little asked question; Why do the Internet
> sites with the heaviest traffic use freeware?

I think the folks that run a lot of heavy traffic sites that rely a lot
on freeware (Yahoo, Dejanews, IMDb, Hotwired, etc.) come from
startup-type backgrounds where they were necessarily more concerned with
what a product could do than what the marketing literature said it could
do.

These site infrastructures were not designed by people with umpteen
years of experience with VM/CMS or multimillion dollar budgets. They
were designed by people who know more than the "tech support" people
that they would have to deal with at most commercial software vendors.
They were designed by people who are mostly incompatible with
presentations from "sales engineers" (I love that title). They were
designed by people for whom performance is the bottom line. 


> Although it concentrates
> on the Linux OS and fails to mention the FreeBSD OS (that YAHOO,
> Hotmail, and many others use) it is very informative.

Are you sure Hotmail uses FreeBSD? Sun had a big story (whose URL, of
course, I can't find now) a while ago on their website about how it was
all about Solaris, and even after Microsoft bought Hotmail, it was too
difficult to port to NT.


-dave

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