In message <Pine.NEB.4.02A.9809290945130.12498-100000@behemoth.e33.dreo.dnd.ca>
, Marinier, M. Claude, G. writes:
>Being a government agency means that we have tight budget constraints,
>i.e. we are not likely to purchase any new SPARC systems. The SPARC
>systems we have are old. I can blow the doors off those old systems with
>the PC (Intel Pentium II, 233 MHz, 128 MB RAM) and it is a proper server
>box. So the answer to the first question is that this gives us cheap
>reliable performance.

Make sure you get ECC memory.  :)

>The second question is harder to answer. Solaris is a standard commercial
>operating system. It has an air of respectability and it is supported
>commercially. How do I answer that? Is there a standard "Why you should
>use a free OS" paper out there?

Well, the support for Solaris is, IMHO, not as good.  If there were sufficient
interest to turn it into a full-time job, I'd offer support contracts for
NetBSD, as is, I'll do incident support.

>The third question is tricky. Most people have heard of Linux; it has
>earned some respect and is supported commercially. Some people have heard
>of FreeBSD but few have heard of NetBSD. I think that NetBSD is solid and
>very well supported. How can I convince management?

You might just point out that NetBSD is more similar to BSD/OS, which is
commercially supported.  :)  I dunno; you may just be able to convince them
that, since they know nothing about either of them, they should trust you.

-s