HN Explorer

Ask HN: Open source vs. proprietary technology for our project?

4 points by vorbby ↗ HN
Hey guys,

Myself and two partners are beginning work on a new project, but we've hit our first obstacle early on; what language/framework are we doing it in? I am strongly leaning towards PHP, one is strongly pushing for ASP.net, and one is impartial.

Does anyone have any ideas why using ASP instead of an open source technology like PHP would be a good and/or bad options? All developers on the team have experience with PHP and ASP.net.

4 comments

[ 48.7 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] thread
jaddison
Two things:

a) PHP has multiple platform support (ie. Windows, OSX, FreeBSD, Linux) so you can more easily transition when necessary and

b) the OS licenses required when you scale out horizontally are cheap (free!) for Linux, FreeBSD, which are the de-facto PHP platforms. (ie. think multiple database servers with multiple web servers with multiple load balancers, etc.)

Assuming you see yourself succeeding with your projects, always think 2 or 3 years down the road to what your system uptime & maintenance costs are going to be.

As an aside - when it comes to hiring developers, I'm guessing that PHP developers are cheaper and more plentiful as well.

cincinnatus
Wrong question. Build it in what you can build it fastest in. You need concept validation before anything else, scale and cost don't matter if the idea fails to get traction.

And incidentally, there is open source asp.net, Mono, which you can run on linux.

benologist
Whichever one you have to Google the least is the best solution. Proprietary-or-not at the web server level is not even worth thinking about - the only part of MS you have to be cautious about is if you accidentally an SQL Server farm and that's easy to avoid in this day and age.

If you go with .NET then make sure you check out BizSpark, you can get free Visual Studio, Windows and everything else they make for 3 years:

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark

beatpanda
Whatever you do, avoid licensing costs. Licensing is Microsoft's core business, so...