Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Remember that story about the city of Munich choosing Linux to power 14,000 desktop computers? One aspect of this story that most people don't know about is that up to 80 percent of those Linux desktops will be equipped with VMWare, a virtual machine emulator, under which they will run Windows and Windows applications. That's right, folks: The majority of those 'Linux desktops' will be used to run ... Windows." This Gartner report from early June seems to be the one mentioned in the article, though I'm not sure exactly where Thurrott gets the 80% figure.

Call Me Black Cloud writes "NewsFactor Network has an overview of the $95.00 Gartner report titled, "Myths of Linux on the Desktop". It's a good look at several points from the perspective of a corporate user, not a home user."

jsse points to this Gartner article which says "that on 28 December 2001, the Beijing municipal government selected among seven vendors to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs. Beijing selected six bidders, including Red Flag, but rejected the seventh bidder, Microsoft -- the only one that was not selected. Gartner listed several reasons why Microsoft lost the bid, but missed out the famous rumor that Microsoft has built a bad relationship with China since the first Chinese Windows 95, which was written by Taiwan programmers, contains Easter eggs carrying anti-communist messages."

Slashback brings you some follow-ups tonight about Gartner's recommendation to dump IIS, Charles Connell vs. Eric S. Raymond on Open Source project management, xStore and the GPL, and (yes) the results of Deep Space 1's latest Final Mission.

Microsoft is just as secure as the competition, says Microsoft. Jon_E writes: "According to this article Microsoft is responding to the Gartner Report which recommends that enterprises drop IIS by claiming unfair targeting due to their popularity."

Whether because of better-trained or more vigilant administrators, or some other factors, the Apache servers running many web sites certainly haven't seen the devastating outages in the past month (Code Red, Nimda) as certain large IIS installations have.

If animated, this might make a really good Saturday cartoon. cconnell writes "Last September, slashdot published my critique of Eric Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. There was a lively (and sometimes scorching) discussion that followed. Here is Eric's reply to my critique, which Slashdot readers might enjoy. And here is my reply to Eric."

This was not faked in the same studio as the "lunar landings." mrsmalkav writes "Deep Space 1 has passed by Comet Borrelly within 1400 miles and took some very pretty pictures of the comet's core, all while collecting lots of data about said comet. NASA's press release discusses some of the details and findings of the flyby.

This is actually really impressive given that there was very little hope for this mission. From the Mission Logs on DS1's site, '[T]o be honest, DS1's visit with the comet simply is unlikely to work as well as we hope. Many mission logs have described the difficulty of keeping this aged and wounded bird aloft, and the encounter with Borrelly will present Deep Space 1 with the greatest challenge yet in its historic trek through the solar system.'"

Saint Aardvark writes "Space.com has an article about the images taken by DS-1, and they're stunning." And eldurbarn points to the NASA Images of comet Borrelly online at JPL.

How to satisfy customers with license objections, Part II brtb writes: "Soon after Slashdot posted my DiscZerver-GPL writeup last week, xStore added a link in their Download section for information about the use of GPL software in their products. Below is the e-mail I received in response (address changed to protect the spamless). Congratulations to xStore for supporting Free Software and bringing the DiscZervers into compliance with the GPL.

From: "Support" [support@xstoreonline.com]
To: "brtb" [slashdot@brtb.org]
Subject: "RE: GPL SOURCE CODE"

xStore is committed to complying to the full letter and spirit of the GPL. We are currently investigating the allegations of non-GPL compliance and communicating with the GNU.ORG and Free Software Foundation on this issue. We will produce a response to your request that is mutually acceptable to the copyright holders of the programs we have used that fall under the GPL and xStore itself. Due to the recent acquisition of this product, we are still in the process of preparing the required source code for distribution. xStore is commited to bring the DiscZerver product into GPL compliance, if it is indeed found to be not in compliance.

In the meantime, please provide xStore with information so that we can send you, the user of this product, the package that you are entitled to. Please provide the serial number of your DiscZerver product and the 'system page' with your response. The 'system page' is located at [http://your_Zerver_name_or_IP_address/admin-cgi/s ystem]. In addition, please send us a self addressed stamped envelope suitable for mailing a CD-ROM along with $14.95 to:

xStore, Inc.
Federal Highway Center
1200 North Federal Highway
Suite 200
Boca Raton, FL 33432

After we receive your written request along with the above items, we will process it and promptly send you the disc when it becomes available.

This thanks to the mostly behind-the-scenes work of people at the FSF. Congratulations to xStore for respecting the intent of the programmers whose work they're consolidating and packaging.

sachmet is one of the many readers who contributed news that "Gartner Group is now recommending that IIS be replaced in corporate environments. This is based on the fact that TCO for IIS is rising due to the almost-weekly patches sent out by MS, and even then, it's nearly impossible to get patched quickly enough. Best part: 'Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS,' which they say has an 80% chance of happening by the end of next year." Gartner hasn't always said favorable things about Linux systems in the workplace, but the businesses that rely on this type of analysis to justify purchasing decisions may find this one interesting. Update: 09/24 22:04 GMT by T :As several people have pointed out, the 80% figure appears to be Gartner's odds that IIS won't be rewritten that soon, rather than the other way around (.673334 probability).

Icebox writes: "Cnet is offering up this bit from GartnerGroup that includes their predictions for the next few years in the OS market. Their predictions are aimed stricly at the business side of this but it is interesting to see how their ideas stack up against what Slashdot's readership expects. Pay particular attention to Factor #9."

FolkWolf sent us a link to CNET which as an article on Red Hat Backlash speculated on by the The Gartner Group. Basically revolves around the recent investment announcements. They talk about RH walking a line between boasting their successes, and alienating themselves from the community.

Doug Moreen wrote in to tell us of this Gartner Group Howto: How and When to Adopt Linux in MSEs. While Linux support has been announced by major corporations, Gartner Group does not consider it sincere. Indeed they believe that real commercial Unix support levels for Linux will not be available before 2000 with a 0.8 probability. Furthermore they warn people away from Linux by stating that vendor interest is primarily opportunistic, support via the web/0800 numbers does not work for critical responses, etc. Kragen, are you ready to take them on ? ;-)

Chris Tyler has written an excellent piece examining the recent Gartner Group article we mentioned yesterday, and discussing what Linux needs to do in order to achieve Linus' vision of Total World Domination. It's an excellent piece worth your time. Competing: Pushing Our Products Towards Total World Domination Chris Tyler, Global Proximity Corporation, June 4, 1998

I recently read a Gartner Group report on free operating system software which was mentioned on Slashdot. It was interesting reading, and although I bristled at some of the assumptions and conclusions, it contained a number of valid points.

Many of us recognize the value of the free/open source model and would prefer to see it become a prominent model for software development and distribution. Our reasons vary widely, but among other things, it's simply more pleasant to work with open source products-- if I have to administer a system, I'd rather administer one that works well and that I can fix myself if something breaks.

So let's take some ownership here. We have the license to the source code, the rights to distribute the software, we've contributed code and documentation and tech support. Let's call open source operating systems "our products" and view the open source community as an entity that is in competition with the proprietary OS vendors.

If we want the open source model to prevail outside of its existing domain (mentioned in the report as "academia, application development, Web servers"-- that is, technical areas and the Internet), and assuming that the paper is valid, then we need to address the issues present in the paper. Here I am primarily addressing the Linux space, because it appears to be the free OS with the largest installed base, but the comments could be applied to our other OS products as well.

Most of the issues raised stem from this paragraph:

"Unix systems at free or minimal charge will lack the performance tuning, scalability and hardware platform support to make them suitable for large commercial applications through 2002 (0.9 probability)."

This statement surprised me in part. Linux appears to be a leader in scalability (from Itsy to Beowolf), has solid hardware support ( in many cases, least as strong as NT), and matches or outperforms other operating systems without tuning (e.g., SAMBA serving).

Looking closer at the report's arguments, though, is revealing. The authors suggest that Linux is weak in the areas of:

1. driver support (for newer or proprietary devices, this is undisputable true);
2. SMP beyond 4-way support (this is debatable);
3. NUMA support (none);
4. distributed systems and network management (e.g., OpenView, TME, Unicenter);
5. applications development;
6. performance tuning for high levels of scalability (">500 concurre OLTP users").

Items (a) and (e), driver and application development, are somewhat beyond the control of the development community, especially if these are taken to mean proprietary hardware driver support and proprietary commercial package application support.

However, to paraphrase a line from the movie Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come"-- if we take care of the other issues, the commercial vendors will add support. We have a couple of vendors porting their products to our OS's now, and this will snowball-- as commercial applications appear, more of our systems will appear in commercial settings, and more vendors will recognize the expanding market. All of the major DBMS vendors have said that they have at least an experimental Linux port in-house; it's just a matter of breaking the dam for the commercial-software-on-free-OS market to explode.

(Please realize: I'm not advocating proprietary vs. open source applications here, just recognizing that there is room in the world for both... but let's at least get them to work together on systems based on open source).

There are a number of things that we can do to address the other issues. Putting SMP and NUMA support aside for the moment (Linus is working hard on the SMP implementation and I think that it's moving well), we should concentrate on items (d) and (f).

Distributed Systems and Network Management: Our products are weak in this area. We don't plug into UniCenter (or TME or OpenView or anything else) and those systems can't be consoled on Linux. We can approach this problem in one of two ways: (i) we can write a network / distributed systems management tool; or (ii) we can write UniCenter plug-ins. I think that we should pursue both.

What if we offered to write the UniCenter plug-ins for CA in return for having them port the UniCenter console to Linux? Would they go for it? We won't know until we ask.

High Levels of Scalability: What a wretched phrase! Let's try "Scalabili ty to Very Large systems". If we can create Beowolf/Extreme Linux systems running into the gigaflops, surely we can come up with some amazing tpC figures.

Novell's UnixWare (back when it was Novell's and not SCO's) captured the attention of many IS managers when Oracle and Novell demonstrated record-breaking tpC and $/tpC figures. We should be able to do the same. There are some pieces we need to put together to make this fly:

• raw partition support for DBs would be good (these were used in the UW benchmarks);
• a commercial DBMS would be good (hey, Informix, here's your chance), or we can tweak PostgreSQL and friends into the stratosphere; and
• we'll need a hardware supplier, because the benchmarks should be on a standard system configuration (could be a mainstream vendor like Compaq or a Linux HW vendor like Paralogic).

  Conclusion: Our products in general and Linux in particular have got what it will take to beat the Gartner Group's predictions. However, we need to get our collective act together to push the envelope a bit in certain directions and then to prove to the world that open source OS's are competitive.

  David Cutler, director of Windows NT development at Microsoft (and architect of both VMS and NT) used to say somewhat rudely to his NT development team: "If you break the build, your ass is grass, and I'm the lawnmower."

  In a bigger sense, open source is a ride-'em mower being driven by a penguin, a gnu, and a little red guy wearing sneakers. Let's start the engine...

Justin asked me to post a link to The Gnomemaker Page. Perfect for you windowmaker users interested in Gnome. Anand wrote in to tell us that "Tim Johnson has created an alternate, and possibly easier to navigate, interface to the Linux HOWTOs.." DX sent us a link to a Wired column on what it means to be a geek. Is wired the right place for this sort of forum? I suspect reading a weeks worth of comments here will answer questions better than a years worth there *smile* Lastly Jeff Davis wrote in to send us a link to The Gartner Group on Open Source. It's actually not a bad summary, but I question some of those probabilities.

Damien Miller writes "This article States that NT's popularity is partly due to unrealistic user expectations (driven by MS Marketing), that Unix is not declining and that 14% of coporate shops already have Linux installed."

Christopher Smith writes "The article itself isn't a big deal, but this is the first time I've ever seen the GartnerGroup acknowledge Linux in any significant way. They aren't exactly overwhelmed by it, but hopefully it's a taste of things to come."

Christopher Smith writes "The article itself isn't a big deal, but this is the first time I've ever seen the GartnerGroup acknowledge Linux in any significant way. They aren't exactly overwhelmed by it, but hopefully it's a taste of things to come."