On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 02:20 -0500, Eddie Bachle wrote:

In general, I am generally an simply an observer on most of these mailing lists, however my concerns with a switch are far less technical and far more practical. I work currently for a college in Michigan which utilizes almost solely Windows servers simply because it is what the IT staff here knows. As a student here, I was brought in to assist with the web server administration, and as time went by because I have a degree of Linux knowledge, I was given permission to put together a Ubuntu LAMP server to serve a couple of interested parties on campus who wanted simply to demo several small scale web apps that were Linux exclusive. This server would serve as an exception to the general rule of our server architecture. However as time has went by and my knowledge looks more like it will be a fixture here after graduation, along with the simple instability of PHP and Apache on the Windows platform, my boss is giving far more consideration to moving to Linux.

As Linux gains more public recognition, more and more Windows-only organizations will consider using it as an alternative, especially for their web servers. This is especially true because of the fact that each of the necessarily main components of a web server exist in Linux in the same form as the do on Windows and often run much better. Then, the only piece one would need to learn would be the new operating system, not the database, HTTP server, or PHP scripting language software. However, this is going to be a more difficult proposition if the aforementioned advantage is somewhat eliminated. Were I to have to tell my boss that we could switch to Ubuntu but it would mean that would need to use a "MySQL compatible" database if we want to use the native database (which we likely would because it's tested to be stable and it is supported by the developers), then she would be much more hesitant.

If you prefer MySQL, you'll still be able to manually install it MySQL on Ubuntu and Debian, much like you manually install it on Windows.

There simply is a much greater sense of trepidation for those who are not significantly Linux savvy if there exists a possibility that they would have to make something work in an unfamiliar environment, especially if it were to happen unexpectedly. If we ported our www website server over to Ubuntu and then 6 months down the road we were to upgrade our Joomla version and there became an issue with MariaDB because it lacks some MySQL feature that it needs, or even that Joomla would fail to recognize Maria as being equivalent to MySQL at some point, then that would be a huge detraction against switching.

I predict it will be the opposite. Once distros and people start switching to MariaDB, other projects will be testing on MariaDB by default, and compatibility with MySQL will then become problematic. Marc.