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From: Darren Reed <avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Another Linux Religious war (was Re: Commercial vendors registry)
To: jlemon@americantv.com (Jonathan Lemon)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 09:58:51 +1000 (EST)
Cc: avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au, davem@jenolan.rutgers.edu,
        fullermd@narcissus.ml.org, jkh@time.cdrom.com, terry@lambert.org,
        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <19970415100320.12729@right.PCS> from "Jonathan Lemon" at Apr 15, 97 10:03:20 am
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In some mail from Jonathan Lemon, sie said:
> 
> 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.  :-)

I think they're more interested in political games personally ;)

> 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".

Well, maybe times are changing.