Slashdot Mirror
Linux Is Going Down
villoks writes "Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies is trying desperately to find arguments against Linux." Many really good points, and many other equally bad ones.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
""There really isn't much value in free," said Miller..."
...as opposed to paying $100 for the latest and greatest bug fixes?
Or maybe Doogie was referring to the value in paying hundreds of dollars per machine for a halfway stable OS (Win 2000).
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Yes, but business is about the money. And with the exception of individuals who're independently wealthy or have someone paying all their expenses, most of us have to work in some sort of business.
As the viability of Linux in a business environment increases, so does my ability to deploy it where I work. The more Linux boxes and less Windows boxes I have to worry about supporting, the more my job becomes less "work" and more "fun". It's true that there'll always be a degree of work involved, but to get paid to do stuff you enjoy doing on your own time is a lot better than getting paid to do stuff you don't enjoy at all.
I'm a fan (and occasional practicioner) of the noble art of trolling, and this one is amazing.
The second paragraph is the best:
These are three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001: a static growth rate, lessening mainstream interest in the open source operating system, and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value, said Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies.
This is beautiful. It's irrefutable.
Obviously linux growth will slow, you can only grow at an exponential rate for so long before you run out of servers and people to run them.
Similarly with "reduced mainstream press." At linux ceases to be a novelty, the mainstream press will start giving it normal coverage.
Finally, the bankruptcy of linux companies will be a side effect of the venture capital spending spree having caused some linux companies to get funding without a solid buisness plan. With the bursting of the internet bubble, they'll have trouble making that second round of financing.
All three trends are clearly in evidence and obvious.
The clever thing is to use them as proof that linux is doomed.
Doug Miller, I salute you. You have a gift for inciteful comments that appear logically sound at first glance.
If you ever want to start trolling slashdot, let me know. We can hook you up with a low user id account with plenty of karma.
--Shoeboy
The DNS servers where not running Linux before the crash. Why they are running it now is because Microsoft outsourced the DNS handling to Akamai (you know, the distributed content serving network) to prevent this mistake from happening again. Akamai is one of VA Linux's biggest customers and run virtually all of their servers on Linux.
Funny, I think "free and it runs pretty well on an old PII-450" is pretty good value compared with the costs of four Athlon-class servers and four Win2000 server licenses, a MSexChange license, and another $500 per user for Orifice, $200 per user for the OS, when all I need to do is give my developers to send email to each other.
But let's take a closer look at his points:
Think about the pointiest-haired boss you ever worked for.
Now imagine him as CTO of your favorite bank or brokerage, and running into a board meeting, hollering "Oh my God! SUNW and ORCL are down more than MSFT from their 1999 dot-com-hype highs! Throw out that obsolete Sun E10K server running Oracle and get me a farm of Quad-Xeons, we need .NET, M$Exchange and M$Access!"
OK, maybe there are some PHBs dumb enough to base technology decisions on today's stock quotes, but not many. Evolution in action, and all that.
"...recent security problems". Compare NT vs Linux intrusions here.
If you want to make a convincing argument against something, first make sure that the reasons can't be turned against you...
Richy C.
Actually, they're using NT servers. They just forgot to remove the linux identifiers from the stolen code. I'm surprised it doesn't say "Stacker".
Over to you, Bob . . .
I'm much more worried about MS tying up the hardware. They can spread all the FUD they want. FUD worked on OS/2, but it won't work on Linux. But if they start making it impossible to drive the new hardware, we'll be in trouble.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm shocked that people that high up in Microsoft and other "consultancy" firms completely miss what Linux is about. It's not ABOUT money. It never WAS about money, and frankly, redhat, VA Linux, and everything in between can go tits-up tomorrow and it won't make a lick of difference to me. I'm sure there'd be a lot of unhappy investors - but let me say it again, Linux is not about money.
Linus Torvalds did not write linux because he wanted to be rich - although a nice side effect - he wrote it because he wanted to do something; he wanted an operating system that just sucked a little less than all of the other ones out there. That's the beauty of the GPL. That's why I give code away - It did what I wanted, and if someone thinks that it sucks less, then all the power to them!
I use linux because it does what I want, and so do a lot of other people. Linux won't lose because a bunch of ill concieved business models go up in smoke - all that GPL'd code will be there, waiting for the next Linus Torvalds to hack on it and make it suck less. Those drivers weren't written by people who wanted money; they were written by people that just wanted their hardware to work. There's no rocket science in there - just a pile of time.
Unless microsoft is proposing that they ban free development - free as in speech - then there's a segment of the market that they'll never, ever get - and that's the real linux mainstream, the core of people that use it because it sucks less and makes their lives easier. Does anything else really matter? If you're happy with MS, fine. Enjoy. I'm not.
..don't panic
So if Microsoft is so against this horrid O/S because of security problems.. why are they using some Linux DNS Services?
Look Here For The Info
Let's see which name servers Microsoft is using right now: microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS4.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS5.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS7.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS6.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z1.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z2.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z6.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z7.msft.akadns.COM.
Let's do a queso on the last four.
$ sudo queso z1.msft.akadns.COM:53
216.32.118.104:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z2.msft.akadns.COM:53
32.96.80.17:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z6.msft.akadns.COM:53
207.229.152.20:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z7.msft.akadns.COM:53
213.161.66.158:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
It's Linux, all right.
That is hinted at is that in the free software world it is often much harder to get "big" features implemented in a timely fashion. (In the article they are specifically talking about enterprise features but those are just one particular kind.) I mean, take a look at how quickly commercial operating systems like BeOS and Windows NT supported journalling file systems. Then take a look at how widespread it is among free operating systems. How many clustering solutions are there for linux? Now compare that to the number of mp3 playing front ends. The easy stuff gets done over and over again while the hard stuff gets done once. If it gets done at all.
With free OSes there is often little in the way of financial backing for more ambitious undertakings. Look at who extraordinary the recent support of the perl hacker is. I mean, it makes front page news that some guy gets to spend 100% of his time working on improving the product. When was the last time you saw Microsoft trumpeting the fact that they had hired a person to work full time on Visual Basic?
Of course, it's not IMPOSSIBLE to get good funding to implement more difficult features in free software. IBM and SGI are both doing so, more or less. However, the article does mention that many/most linux based companies are suffering from financial difficulties, which in turn will make it harder for people to get the kind of funding they need to do more ambitious work.
So let's see where we're at:
- "The Linux kernel lacks key enterprise elements
.."
- "You wouldn't want to install Linux on a laptop
.."
- "Free does not sustain a business
.."
- "Linux growth is leveling off
.."
I think the CEO of LinuxCare said it the best: the significant thing here is the degree to which Linux is registering on Microsoft's public radar. We must be doing something right, folksReeeeeeaaalllly. What "key enterprise elements" are those? With the latest Linux developments, we've got everything from a journalling filesystem to enhanced multi-processor support. Sure, it's tough to make the claim that Linux is going to be superior to Solaris or other "big-iron" Unices for "big-iron" applications, but IMHO it's tough to make that claim about Windows, as well.
This, of course, conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of Linux installations (just like the vast majority of Windows installations) do not require these "key enterprise elements" that Ballmer is bleating about. And what are these elements, anyway? Mindlessly throwing out buzzwords might make "PC Magazine" swoon, but people who are interested in specifics are going to yawn and be on their merry way.
Is that so? Funny; I just installed Mandrake 7.1 on a Dell laptop last week. The installation went flawlessly. I was up and running and connected to the Internet, reading Slashdot, within two minutes of finishing the installation. As a matter of fact, the PCMCIA modem that I'm using with the laptop was not recognized by Windows. Linux didn't have any problems with it. What was this nonsense about lack of drivers again?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the business. But the real issue here is the one that they missed; if every Linux-based business goes belly-up, that does nothing to hamper the continued development and release of the Linux system itself. Sure, companies such as Red Hat have got people working on value-added software such as RPM, but if Red Hat were to vanish from the face of the earth, it would not prevent the Linux kernel from evolving and undergoing continual development.
I think we can chalk this up to simple ignorance; people just don't get that there is no single, controlling corporation behind Linux. They look at Microsoft and see them as the source of the software that runs their computer(s). They don't understand the Linux development model (or if they do understand it, they don't like it because it is so far removed from their expectations.)
Show me the numbers, baby. At my workplace, we've got Linux replacing Windows NT on many of our development workstations. We've got Linux servers coming in the door to handle many specialized data applications. We're putting together Beowulf clusters to do distributed data processing. We're getting rid of clunky Oracle Forms-based user interfaces and replacing them with ones developed using Troll Tech's Qt toolkit. In short, we've seen a Linux explosion over the past year or so, and I know that the same is true of several other places.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Microsoft didn't subcontract to Akamai to manage their DNS servers.
They subcontracted cached content delivery to Akamai, basically as a means to reduce the effects of DoS attacks by distributing their content across multiple Akamai servers across the globe, thus preventing an attack against one machine from taking everything offline.
So now when you contact the microsoft web site to grab something, instead of going to Seattle it may be routed to a Akamai server in Chicago which has the content cached.
Obviously in order to do this, Akamai has to be able to manipulate DNS entries for Microsoft's web servers, thus you now have Akamai DNS servers listed as authorative for Microsoft.com.
This was all discussed in numerous news articles this week, which you apparently missed.
I'm probably a typical Windows > Linux convertee. Up until about 18 months ago I used Windows and Windows alone. A few months before I switched to Linux I started a private FTP server (for legal files, mind you) on my computer that was in my dorm. Well I got tired of rebooting every day, so I made the Big Leap. I started off dual booting, then moved to a Linux-only system about a year later. I recently got a laptop that dual boots, but only because I have to use certain Windows applications for school.
So I'm a Linux user. But I don't think Microsoft cares. The reason is simple: both of my copies of Windows (one 95 and one 98) are licensed, as they came with my computers (both Dell). Microsoft is getting paid even if I don't use their software. Most of you probably know the name this has been given: the Microsoft tax.
So I really don't think Microsoft gives a damn about the desktop market, for the most part; they've got it locked up. Server market is a different story. The article makes some good points. I don't think there's much of a market for "Linux companies," perhaps with the exception of the well-knowns like Red Hat. But does Microsoft really have to fear Red Hat? I don't think so.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear