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IBM, HP, Intel, NEC Announce Open Source Lab
cmuncey writes: "Salon has an Associated Press article that IBM, HP, Intel, NEC have announced an 'Open Source Testing Lab' for testing Linux for large corporate systems that will open by the end of the year in Portland, OR. The main four sponsors are putting up a couple of million and Red Hat, Turbolinux, Linuxcare, VA Linux, Dell and SGI are also kicking in. The lab itself will be run by a nonprofit corporation that will be neutral in picking the projects to be tested. Sounds a bit better Mindcraft, doesn't it?"
In case you were wondering, the article tell us that "Linux is seen as an alternative to proprietary operating systems like Microsoft's Windows and Apple [sic] OS." Certifications, labs like this, and Official Stamps of Approval mean perhaps more than they ought (corporate decision making being what it is) but that's hard to get around. And it sounds like they'll get to play with cool toys! ;)
To show it, here's output from fdisk on /dev/ida/c0d0:
/dev/ida/c0d0p1 * 10 138 526320 83 Linux
/dev/ida/c0d0p2 139 2176 8315040 5 Extended
/dev/ida/c0d0p3 1 9 36704 12 Compaq diagnostics
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I dunno about this, but if you're looking for Linux work in Portland, check out WireX. We're hiring, and it's a pretty good place to work.
Wil
--
Wil
wiki
RM101 should read the ipchains howto and stop writing about himself in the third person.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Each distro has its own way of customizing programs and directories -- would you want to see that standardized?
/etc/XYZ is in /etc/XYZ, period. Ok, doing a find / -name XYZ isn't all that hard, but depending how big the disk is (and how full), that can take a long time. Even just moving between different distros of RedHat can be confusing, because things aren't always in the same place.
/etc/rc.d, in other distros they're elsewhere). Same goes with where you put the kernel. For the things that are essential to the system, there should be a standard place for them.
.sig
When it comes to directories? YES. I want to know, no matter what distribution I'm using, that
This especially applies to things like initrc scripts that IMHO should be in the same place, no matter what (In RedHat they're in
Not reading
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
The fact that Linus has not been too authoritarian in the development of the kernel has lent the aspect that all projects are in a "will of the people" manner constructed. But who didn't understand that enlightenment was Rasteman's baby. Most of these projects are carefully controlled by a few individuals. Once some of these apps begin to mature, to catch up with some of their Windows counterparts, we will see some truly phenominal work. How old are some of these projects started by single individuals?? Kde is maybe 3 years old and is coming close to getting the desktop to the mark set by Microsoft in 7.
Produced on a budget that would make Microsoft shudder, patched by home users and sysadmins, refined in the afterprocess, and freely available. When we have truly caught Microsoft and KDE4 is on a 3 year program schedule, not a 1 year one, we're going to see some really revolutionary ideas come out of open source projects.
For these companies, they can see that Linux will soon be on more equal footing with Microsoft. Would XFree benefit form this dandy testing lab?? You bet. Wanna write drivers for our hardware?? Here, try it. Let's face it, Linux is no longer the towel boy, it is now officially a contender.
My boss was braggin' to his boss today that we run our company intranet on Linux when all he used to do is beg me to move it to NT. I was one of those guys who always craved a *nix box when I has back in the 8086 days. Our generation grew up with computers and has learned to expect more from them.
Most of these companies have already announced that Linux is going to play a major role in the future of their companies, this effort is their way of heling Linux spring into prime time. We still have alot of gaps to fill before we can go toe to toe with the champ.
A hearty huzzah(!) to all the folks involved. Now I'm craving an SGI box with Linux.... Blender... And a big mehonchin' Raid box for my MP3's and porn.
Thank you and goodnight.
~Hammy
Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible?
Well, I don't think so. First, there are known standards for freedom and openness - take Debian's guidelines, for example, or the Open Source Initiative you mentioned. The License Wars have left most people a little shell shocked though, so I suspect most people just want stuff to be under one of the well known licenses.
More interesting is the idea of assuring the quality of open source software.
Certainly, nothing's stopping them from taking some particular distribution(s) and doing really extensive testing with them. They can audit the source code, just like the OpenBSD people have. They can publish MD5 checksums of "approved" binaries, together with the sources. That will let users ensure they have the "approved" software, if that's what they want.
Then they can state with confidence that their hardware and software works with it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but hopefully they will be "open" enough to work with several significant distributions, including Debian. If they do a good job, and are seen to be helping the community (finding and fixing bugs and contributing the fixes back to the maintainers of the projects) I'm sure that they will earn the respect of the Linux community (such as it is).
This will be useful for big companies - and that's probably the target audience of this effort. Also, they could produce a Posix-compliant distribution of Linux, which might be helpful for government work. From what I hear this is mostly a matter of applying a bunch of patches (and then testing, of course).
At the very least, this will help deal with the style of FUD that "open source is dangerous because anyone could modify it! You wouldn't know what's running on your computer!"
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Each time I hear about this and that and the other company forms an agenda to make a common effort ot achive something, it never happens.
But sometimes it spins off neat projects afterwards (like Multics -> UNIX)
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Take 1 Large Room.
Add some open sourced software.
Add 5 tons of computer equipement.
Stir in a number of different techs over a number of months
Add caffine, pizza and other assorted junk food.
Bring to boil
Serves large corporations
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Yahoo has an article about it as well. You can find it here.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
There's also a NYTimes article about this here.
blah blah free registration required blah blah
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
CNet is also carrying a version of this story here. Unliks some of the others, this isn't just a copy of the Reuters story.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
ITYM, "IANAP" (I am not a programmer). As anyone with even a small grounding in language design will tell you, Syntactic errors are bloody easy to detect. Just look at all the typos that your compiler will spit out. Semantic errors, however, are another story. Bloody things are almost impossible to detect at the machine level.
Just about any monkey (or a Turing Machine, whichever) can find that something is syntactically amiss. Tools like lex and yacc make it rather simple to build even the most complicated of configuration scripts. However, validating for semantic correctness in even a moderately complex configuration script is another matter; it is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult and computationally intensive to verify this (and for some languages, like English, whose synctactic definitions certainly do exist, the technology for verifying semantic correctness doesn't yet exist).
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You're forgetting that both IBM and HP are rather large companies with rather large support services divisions. Take, for example, IBM. IBM Global Services, their consultancy group, will support anything from CP/M to IBM SP2 (and probably Sun E10k) to OS/390 and AS/400 mainframes. Same with HP. They tout themselves as a one-stop support center for everything. Large companies pay huge amounts of money to these organisations for support.
So why are they bulling ahead with this certification lab? It makes supporting these applications (yes, they support applications too) easier if they know the ins and outs of the app. They'll of course find this out while they "certify" the piece of software.
Currently, because of the lack of certification, they will support any app, even the ones that I built at home while drinking wine, and is this unmaintainable clusterf*ck, if it made them some dough. Suppose they certify someone else's OSS project, which does essentially the same thing, except missing features x and y. Will they support my app for the company? Hell no. They will tell them to move to the someone else's app, because it's actually possible to maintain the bloody thing.
See Caldera? See IBM? See HP? See SCO? Hell, see MS? They're all trying to move to a constant revenue model that comes from providing a service, not maintaining the one-time revenue of a product.
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The reason these big companies are starting to back Linux is mainly a GREATLY reduction in R&D costs. Plus Linux has a lot of hype going for it whether it deserves it or not. Many commercial UNIX are technically superior to Linux but why would Company F dish out the money for some HP-RISC with HP-UX licenses when they could get some cheaper x86 with Linux on it?
Whats on the compaq partition is the diagnostic utilities. Hit F10 or F12 when you see the block in the upper right corner.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
For instance, you can use an old windows driver or old windows code (or even dos) under all different versions of Windoze. This may not always work perfectly and sometimes will hang the system but at least in 80% of all cases you can. Now try to do the same thing with a device driver you got for linux 2.2.12 and use it with 2.2.16 (I'm not even talking about major releases). In about 80% of all cases it will hang the system or not even load since lots of the interfaces changed.
You may suggest to recompile the drivers. Good idea, unless you've got a binary only driver from a company that got sued into oblivion as happened with Aureal (they won the lawsuit but went broke on expenses for their attorneys).
In other words, what open source needs now are open standards and with that I mean standards that are documented and that do not change whenever someone decides he wants to add on yet another feature. Or at least keep them backwards compatible.
Two of these companies already have their own version of UNIX. Why don't they just open-source AIX and/or HP-UX? I mean, not to say anything bad about the linux team, I use it all the time. But is it really that technologically ahead of the commercial unices? The whole thing sounds more a product of the marketing departments than R&D.
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Why is using a disk-based config program "proprietary" and why does hinder Unix installs? The reason that Compaq does it that way is to make the configuration OS-independent because they've always supported things like SCO UNIX (although there's a copy of Windows 95 in that system partition).
My suspicion is that the reason that Compaq, Dell, and IBM write their own BIOSes is that they feel that the generic Phoenix sorts aren't very good. Since there really isn't a PC BIOS spec to speak of, of course there will be small proprietary differences and different bugs.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Comments, anyone?
RM101 grumbles that he hopes that Linux will finally get some professional testing, and the security holes in his up-to-date version of Linux will finally be fixed, so his system won't be broken into again (and he still doesn't know exactly how it was done, which is what really scares him).
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Part of what makes working with Linux so exciting is that everybody's free to do with what they will. Each distro has its own way of customizing programs and directories -- would you want to see that standardized? IBM, Intel, and the other companies involved here are all hardware manufacturers; what's to prevent them from refusing to certify programs by competitors or that favor competitors? Sure, you don't have to use "Linux Certified" software... but let's face it, as soon as a bunch of big corporations start pushing a standard, it catches on whether it's a good standard or not -- just look at the Kerberos fiasco! I doubt very many of the PHBs in the world are going to pay much attention to the alternatives when there's a "Certified" option out there.
Linux may remain an open source project forever, but the freedom to change it doesn't matter much if no one will use those changes. And that's exactly what will happen when you adopt standards as to what's "Linux Certified" and what's not.
Certifications, labs like this, and Official Stamps of Approval mean perhaps more than they ought (corporate decision making being what it is) but that's hard to get around.
Very, very true. I wonder how long it will be before a company like CompTIA begins to offer "standard" Linux software technician certifications? Are we going to start seeing John Doe, CLE?
Or is this already going on and I'm a day late, dollar short as usual?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible? I mean, by its nature, open source holds no associations to any governing bodies that carry sway. There's the argument that accepted standards organizations for open source just don't exist, but that's not even true...it's more a case of public trust being a fickle thing.
Industries that market tangible products have no problems creating standardization bureaus and bodies, usually because these sorts of things can be governed in turn by governments, by qualified authorities, by laws. Could the FCC have been created without respected, universally trusted leadership? Doubtful. Who then will take on the challenge of developing an overseer for open-source?
It has been tried...there are any number of open-source websites that act as collectives for development. There have been attempts to create instituions of authority as well, notably the group led by Eric S. Raymond, the Open Source Initiative, which has had undetermined effectiveness, as far as i can tell. Still, i can't help but think that, currently, excellent open source becomes accepted by reputation, and reputation alone.
I wonder if this lab will have the power to start the responsible monitoring of open source...just an interesting idea. Really, do we even need such a system, or can the open Freshmeat bazaar and word of mouth serve as adequate testing grounds? Sometimes i think it would take an organization with direct influence over the net, like the IETF or ISOC to get the ball rolling...from innovators to watchdogs.
If anyone else knows of any other certitification programs for open source, i'd like to hear about them.
-j
Potentially, it could be a very Good Thing if these companies are all working together, and as the contributor points out, the current plan beats the heck out of Mindcraft (the more you pay, the better your benchmark). It will also, if it doesn't go up in smoke, provide for a lot more portability of applications between various Unix flavours. (I've seen a few Unix apps that didn't work quite the same depending on what flavour you had running.) Or at least, that's the theory...
Now, the article seems to indicate that this will be a seperate company with backing from various larger interests: Anyone know if this is true or will this end up as some kind of 'holding company'? Also, if it is a seperate company, any word on an IPO?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
man, due diligence is SUCH a binding term.
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."