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eWeek on Linux
alexhmit01 writes "One of the better articles that I've read covering Linux in real deployments, eWeek has an article entitled, The state of Linux: Live free or die?, gives coverage of where Linux has improved in 2.4 and what it needs. It covers Linux's success as a web server, where it comes up short against other Unices, etc. It's a good read for the non-programmers in the Open Source Movement... for it focuses upon market adoption, not just technical capacity." Nothing exciting and new here, but its a nice little article, especially talking about whats new and wacky in the 2.4 kernel.
My definition of "mission critical" is that the expense of down-time far outways the expense of the technology. Obviously we're thinking more in terms of money, but in some situations we're talking about lives too.
I once worked on a flight planning system for an airline. It's not the same as air-traffic control, we weren't responsible for preventing accidents, but without their flight plan the planes couldn't take off. The flight plans were prepared about 3 hours in advance. If there was ever an outage of more than three hours any planes currently on the ground would not be able to take off again. Gradually the entire fleet would be grounded and business would stop entirely after 15 hours or so.
The cost of that downtime was astronomical: salaries, ticket refunds, hotels for passengers, lost goodwill. We're talking millions of dollars per minute.
Needless to say, they weren't very price-sensitive when building their new flight planning system. A few million extra for added security wasn't considered a bad deal. That pretty much defines "mission critical" for me.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I'm sure they have a good point -- I wouldn't want to be putting Linux 2.4.x on a mission-critical system at the moment, though I wouldn't wait two years.
But do people really follow this? I mean, that stops you deploying Windows 2000 now. You could only just deploy Windows 98. It seems to me that it is silly to wait quite that long.
I mean, come on. Point-zero releases may not be stable enough for you but after a few bug fixes, why not evaluate the software for yourself? See if you find it stable enough. Chances are, there's a lot more useful technology integrated over the last two years.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
And here I thought it was an operating system!
Funny, my company has been using Linux (and other free software) for mission-critical application in the enterprise for years. That includes all the stuff they mentioned - database, financial, CRM, and more. Linux does have a journaling filesystem as of 2.4.1, and it's actually had them for quite a while if you don't mind doing some kernel patching.
In fact, I would say that the only other platform that is as capable (and probably more so) that Linux in this regard is Solaris on Sparc hardware. Solaris has its own set of problems (mostly that it feels like an "old" UNIX to me, making it hard to develop on), but certainly is quite capable.
I guess these journalists (and the people they interview) just insist on handing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over to Sun and Oracle. That's fine, since the products they sell are good. But for young companies with a limited cashflow (as we were just a few short years ago), that's not an option.
In that case, Linux (or one of the free *BSDs) is your only choice.
It says what every single article about linux says every time, say, a new kernel comes out?
1) Linux is much more stable than comparable Windows solution for insert something you want a computer(s) to do.
2) However, it still doesn't have all of the security features that Sun or *BSD has.
3)There are assorted problems with kernel x.x, which will be fixed soon with the release of the next kernel.
And before you say, "It's moving up to mission critical!" Tell me what the heck does mission critical mean, anyway? I for one think that the artificially imposed heirarchy over what is "mission critical" or not causes the problems that both the producers of computer services and the consumers of those services feel. For instance, it is very mission critical to keep the cookies rolling in, so you can incessantly market to a new stream of hapless email addresses, but it is NOT mission critical to respond to the angry email from these same addresses when a user encounters a compatibility problem or has damaged equipment, etc.
The mission is profit, or at least survival, keeping that cash flowing. THAT is what is mission critical.
I would think that some journalism which steps outside the boilerplate model mentioned above, something that would actually relate these firms' ACTUAL priorities to their choice of operating systems, software, hardware, etc., all of these debates we have here at
Goat sex free since 2001
Linux comming to the masses is something that the community has yet to address, currently the community (excluding companies) develops Linux kind of on its own time frame and for its own purposes. Like someone once said in a post - Programmer A releases a program that works for him. Programmer B tries it out and adds 50%, Programmer C uses it and C patches it another 10%.
People so far or at least hobbyists usually do things for their own reasons. (i.e. rarely go the extra mile)
However much more is starting to be expected. The article states: "Beyond the 2.4 kernel, Linux developers are asking for the incorporation of a journaling file system, more work on Linux clusters and on the scheduler, additional scalability, high availability, internationalization, and printing and systems management." - Linux developers want more... and they may not be willing to work for it.
Given that the Linux community is well organized and making significant progress, currently I think that their be no problem meeting demands of users and the masses, more people will simply join in and help out. One thing to watch though is what the opposition does... generally the more dangerous a threat is to a company the tougher the resistance.
If Mr. Ballmer was serious about his statement perhaps the coders/linux hobbyists of the kenrel and whatnot should sit back and examine if they're in it for themselves or the masses and a long haul...
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Sure, Redhat and the other commercial distros...
But this is an operating system, not a popularity contest.
Unavoidable questions - questions for Linus and gang:
- Do you think Linux is ready for the enterprise?
- When are you going to start the new development branch?
- Do you think a kernel branch could affect negatively?
- Do you agree in that Linux is still not ready for supporting workloads required by applications like ERP...?
- What are your goals going forward?
- Do you think that those performance issues have been/will be resolved?
- Do you think Linux caoul be a Windows competitor in the desktop war?
- What do you mean with "World Domination"?
...
Unavoidable Expert/Journalist Comments in a Linux article.- Linux 2.4 in big leap in the field of a enterprise class OS.
- It's still lacks of security featurs as entreprise class Unices.
- It's still lacks, but improvements can be seen in every release, of the performance figures as enterprise class OSes for loaded web servers and multiples interfaces.
- There is still a way to go before it becomes a true mission-critical, enterprise-class...
- It's enterprise ready for certain applications.
- We welcome the developers efforts to make Linux more robust and scalable.
- It's still needed the support for journaling file system
- While a few IT managers are beginning to move critical applications... other don't dude...
- Linux, in its last reincarnation, has got a better support for SMP, storage and huge RAM demanded by enterprise class databases.
- With the open-source kernel, you can make changes to it so that it fit your needs.
- ...
--ricardosgis ddo ekil t'nod i