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Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 10:03:20 -0500
From: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com>
To: Darren Reed <avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@jenolan.rutgers.edu>, fullermd@narcissus.ml.org,
        jkh@time.cdrom.com, terry@lambert.org, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Another Linux Religious war (was Re: Commercial vendors registry)
References: <199704150400.AAA01046@jenolan.caipgeneral> <199704151338.GAA09651@freefall.freebsd.org>
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In-Reply-To: <199704151338.GAA09651@freefall.freebsd.org>; from Darren Reed on Apr 04, 1997 at 11:30:17PM +1000
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On Apr 04, 1997 at 11:30:17PM +1000, Darren Reed wrote:
> 
> I can't see any upper management person ever taking a liking to anything
> that is available "freely" on the 'net for mission critical stuff.  And
> I don't mean your < 100 people small companies, but big organisations
> with real budgets.

Then maybe you need an enlightened upper management person.  :-)

The business I work for uses Oracle databases on Sequent machines for our
'mission critical' point of sale support.  However, almost all database 
reporting and manipulation; ie: 'critical' things like daily profit
statements, bi-weekly salary & commission payments, and sales tracking is
done in perl.

We moved our salary/commission history records (which we are required
to maintain for about 5 years) from microfiche onto a FreeBSD machine 
(v2.1.0R), running a free sql-like database, accessed via perl.

I would say that this is an example of using "free", "non-supported" tools
in a mission-critical environment.

However, as the company has about 3000 employees, you may very well consider
them to be "small".
--
Jonathan