On 15 Jan 2004, at 5:39 am, Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
Jimmy Wales schrieb:
First, we are committed for internal ideological/political reasons to run Wikipedia on all free software. Perhaps if it could be shown that every element of Xserve that's actually in use by Wikipedia is open source (of course the OS X kernel is, and apache/php/etc would be, but I really don't know what else), this objection could be met.
OS X is neither Open Source nor free, but there's a Linux distribution for Power Mac called Yellow Dog which is based on Red Hat Linux. Xserve is fine technology on the paper, but IMHO there's too little know-how with us about this technology. However it's never worth 10-30% more money for our purposes - unless Apple would donate or discount them ;)
Regards, -asb
I think what Mr. Wales meant was that Darwin, the core of OSX, is open source and free. I believe this would be sufficient to run Apache, etc, but of course the Linux solution could possibly be better.
As for the 10-30% extra cost, wouldn't it really depend on its performance? Suppose such a server could manage 50% more connections/load than the AMD? That would be like having 1.5 AMD machines, so it could well be "worth it". Unfortunately I have no idea whether this is in fact the case, though presumably somebody, somewhere does know. As for know-how, that's easy to come by. For a start you can simply use your favourite Unix (or Linux if you go that route) standard command line to set it up and run it, the rest will follow. I never felt that "the unknown" was ever much of an argument against doing something - how did mankind ever progress with that attitude?
Anyway, I read the rest of Mr. Wales' response with interest. I have no strong opinion, so I remain neutral on the subject - but I do feel all options should be given serious consideration and that appears to be the case.
--Graham