Linuxcare Responds To Tim O'Reilly's Article

Dave Sifry writes: "I wanted to let you guys know that my response to Tim O'Reilly's recent column about Linuxcare. Things really aren't as bad as some in the press have made it appear. I feel it is important to get a dose of facts into the conversation -- now that we're out of our quiet period and we can talk about what's going on, and all of the neat stuff we've been working on." After all that's been said about LinuxCare, it's good to hear info straight from the top, and that Tim O'Reilly is an active listener. Just remember who's speaking.

Comments

Help Our User Services

[grahamkg]

We now have managers buying laptops for the express purpose of using Linux to take ported Unix tools on the proverbial road. They haven't a clue as to how to do it, and our user services won't even touch it. Geez, as an example they support Netscape for Windoze and Macintosh only; Netscape for Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, and especially Linux) is unsupported.

So, who supports these managers with the dual boot laptops?

The geeks do that. Yet, that doesn't work very well when the managers won't give us the tools or the time we need.

I recently made two new laptops dual boot. One of them returned to its former single boot state because I didn't have the time or the resouces to make the thing work reliably. I had other work to do. C'est la vie.

To anyone interested, consider this an opportunity for business development and growth.

Graham

Support is why my school won't do Linux.

[steveargonman]

Linux is not a known word at my school. I think one of the big reasons is, it's free. Usually, free things suck. The free gifts you get for calling those 800 #'s, ya know ... those shitty ones. They don't understand that in this case, free IS better, free IS free, free in this case == stability, something we don't have now. Currently for the whole district, we pay about $90 for each copy of Windows, which totals to over $50,000 for the whole district. We have a site license for a security program, Fortress which is about $10 a copy, Norton Antivirus, $15 a copy, MS Works and MS Office, MS Office is $50 for each machine. When you total that up (which isn't all of it either..) you easily get probably $500,000+ in SOFTWARE ALONE. The machines are pos E-Machines, at $600 a peice. Times that by a whole school district, we won't go there. So why don't they do Linux when it's free? Star Office, when it's free? Security wise, you don't need outside programs...

It's all because of support. There is no support, according to my school. They want to be able to phone someone up, unless they BUY RH or some varient, they don't get that. It's all really just a support issue.

I'm glad to hear it

[SweenyTod]

High profile sites like Linuxcare are important for those of us pushing to get linux into our companies. Suits don't care a small pile of fetid dingo kidneys about how technically capable an OS is.

What they want to know is "will my email go through?" Cost isn't the issue. But support is. Having high profile support organisations you can point the bean counters at is very important.

Tim O'Reilley == TOR

[Shaheen]

It's obvious that Tim O'Reilley needs to be simplified to TOR. We talk about him too much on this site for everyone to spell that last name, and everyone loves TLA's, right?

Rare public acknowledgement

[Jburkholder]

> I've already apologized to Dave for not talking with him before publishing my article, so that I could have gotten more of an inside view of how they now view their business.

Well, that's kind of reassuring that O'Reilly appears to be taking some personal accountability for this. Marks him up in my book as having the integrity munch a little crow in public.

reply from a teacher's perspective

[Windjammer]

OK, I tend to agree with you on most of those points, however I want to play devils advocate here. (and not for free bsd either)....When you are talking about public schools you have several other issues at hand as well. One of the first things you would need to keep in mind ESPECIALLY for public schools, is the KISS concept. Many teachers as it is are extremely skittish about using computers as it is, and if you make it any harder than necessary to use a computer, they will back away from them. The next thing you need to keep in mind is compatibility. After working with staroffice as well as word perfect, I found that neither of them had the "feel" of word or claris works. In addition there is another problem the minute you start thinking linux--it is the compatibility issue. I'm not referring to the server side of things, in fact linux was absolutely perfect for use as a netatalk server for a lab of 35 cranky mac classics. The compatibility issue I'm referring to comes from the fact that when you have an entire classroom full of students, who are using a lab to finish up a report, you NEED them to be able to pop their disk in from home, and bring the report up within a minute or two after sitting at their computer. Now think of the following scenario--you are running linux with staroffice as the main office suite. As far as I know SO doesn't have good built in support for either clarisworks, or word. (the office suites of choice in most schools) You have 30 kids in a class, 10 of which did part of the work at home. 5 of them did their work on clarisworks, the other 5 on word. As it is, there is going to be a problem when you attempt to do cross platform disk reads. Now take in to consideration that you are throwing in an alternative OS that I know first hand is VERY cranky about reading floppy disks (unless you build in some sort of automount autoformatread feature.... Here is the final thing...save off at the end of the period...Sammy, Joe, and Eric all need to finish their work at home. They save off, and when they go to bring the information up, UH OH...it is in whatever format SO or WP defaults to... Most teachers I know do not have the technical expertise to deal with situations like that. I also know firsthand, that if faced with something that proves to be EXTREMELY difficult to go around, most teachers look for alternatives esp if it deals with technology. Now computer science labs are a different beast linux would be my first choice for a CS lab...esp if they are PCs....

Aw shit!

[fluxrad]

Does anyone remember when we all started using linux cause it was cool?? It was this REALLY GOOD operating system. Now linux is getting into a framework where everyone talks about the "business model" and the "value added" components, and the blah and the blah and the blah.

And the winner of the worst, or most cliched, term involving linux is....(drum roll)

Tim O'Reilly for "Thinking Outside the Box"

(we watch as Tim goes up to accept his award and i'm in the back puking my guts out - i shout from my station at the porcelain cubicle "I'm fucking switching to BSD")

I posted in another article that one of the large downfalls of the internet is going to be "ownership." Everyone wants to own a piece of the HUGE economic pie that is the internet. Nearly the same could be said for linux...only it's eventual downfall will be one of two things. Either a better OS comes along (probably not, as evidinced by the perennial domination of that "other" graphical based operating system), or it will sink into the myre of business based applications and corporate double-plus-unspeak. The scariest thing i see about the articles we all just read...is that the second looks like it's going to happen sooner than we think.

That's not to say that linux is going to be around forever, or die in the next two years. Linux is going to be a BIG player in the next decade....but i'm afraid that corporate big wigs are going to kill it. I'm afraid that corporate greed is going to usurp the freedom that everyone went to linux for in the first place. Why would a business open source a product that IS their cash cow? Look at Microsoft. Look at Apple. Sorenson, Real. Proprietary business looking to make a buck off linux eventually challenge the GPL and make proprietary changes (which have a frighteningly strong chance of holding up against at relatively weak GPL). They'll demand that everyone in their company use it, fuck compatibility! And they'll start using terms to describe linux, and linux based companies, that refer to "thinking outside the box" - of course, we'll need to make sure that they're "value added" (I just actually understood what the fuck that meant like a month ago).

Eventually, hackers (not the ones you saw defined in Webster's) will get sick of all the bloat that linux has become, and they'll switch to the next "linux" - (probably invented by some bolivian hacker named Binuso Torvales or something). Why? Because quick changes stoped being made, code wasn't as good as it should have been. Proprietary software wasn't just common, it was the norm. And linux turned into what it was supposed to kill. You may not like it...but if linux IS the best operating system available today (just nod, cause it is)...then we've seen it's fate in another OS. (hint, it's founder's name starts with B, and ends in "ill Gates")

I'm not saying I'm abandoning linux. That's not going to happen for a LONG time to come. I'm just saying let's watch it. Let's never forget the ethic that made most of us switch to it in the first place, not the relative bloat of Windows, but the absolute freedom of linux.


FluX
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