People seem to forget that the software you write has to run somewhere, on a machine, maintained by someone.
It's not that it's overly expensive to buy the Microsoft software, it's not free, but it's also not completely unreasonable. However, if you're able to find a good .Net developer, very often that same person isn't a good Windows Server administrator. Developers who know their way around languages like PHP, Perl or Python are also often more than capable of deploying the servers that are required to run the code later on.
A good Windows administrator cost money, a lot of money. A decent Linux administrator often comes bundled with the developer.
Of cause this isn't always the case that .Net developers are not qualified to run the servers, but I do run into them rather often. I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.
That being said, culture might be the biggest factor of them all.
I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.
Almost all PHP devs are webdevs. Only a small subset of .NET devs are webdevs. It's probably better to compare ASP.NET devs to PHP devs. And most ASP.NET devs can configure IIS.
Okay, I see your point, but the article seemed to imply that the topic was web development.
I'm glad that you found that most ASP.NET developers can configure IIS, but that's not my experience. Getting a site running is something that most can do, but there's a large cap between: "Hey it runs" and "I trust that this will perform and be secure in production and should any issue arise I can debug it and solve the problem".
But yes, I should have written that I was talking about ASP.NET developers.
It's not that it's overly expensive to buy the Microsoft software, it's not free, but it's also not completely unreasonable. However, if you're able to find a good .Net developer, very often that same person isn't a good Windows Server administrator. Developers who know their way around languages like PHP, Perl or Python are also often more than capable of deploying the servers that are required to run the code later on.
A good Windows administrator cost money, a lot of money. A decent Linux administrator often comes bundled with the developer.
Of cause this isn't always the case that .Net developers are not qualified to run the servers, but I do run into them rather often. I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.
That being said, culture might be the biggest factor of them all.