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Linux During The .Com Crash
freakboy303 writes "ZDNet has a short article that can be found here , It basically talks about what the last couple of year of gloom and doom mean for the linux world in general. It seems to me it would make it more appealing to .coms to use the free software but..."
ZDNet was owned by M$ anyway. That would give them some bias.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Linux part of the .com crash?
really, the hype of linux was one branch from the same new economy craziness tree. Now that the shakeout has come, I don't expect Linux to revolutionize anything. They might make some nice gains here and there, but things won't change because of it.
... it was the FUD.
So the bust doesn't seem to fundamentally change the use of Linux in the enterprise, either way. Or maybe the two effects balance each other out.
What the article seems to push at (albiet around the bush) is that there are less companies willing to stake their future on the sales of service for Open Source work. Although RedHat and a few others are posting profits, the overall tech downturn is probably preventing any speculation in o.s. based companies.
I think the point is missed however, if this article is taken as a view of an overall decline in open source work. If anything, now is the time for developers to be able to work at a less pressured pace, since they aren't worried about advancing the project so that Company X doesn't go out of business before it can put together a viable distribution/product/release.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
I think this is quite an understatement.
Both the German and French governments have warmly endorsed the use of Linux and free software in general on the governmental level and (IIRC) cities in Finland are switching to Linux.
Hmmm. Slowing economy, doesn't that have something to do with less money or something. Gee if we have less money wouldn't that better encourage us to use a free alternative, hmm something like, i don't know, Linux. w007! Not to mention that if people had half a brain out there they'd be using it in the first place. ;)
lnxslak.
Fighting for Peace, is like Fucking for Virginity.
The VCs controlled to .com's every move, and they liked to see names like Oracle and Sun. Besides, the whole idea of the .com was to spend $.
In reality, these ".com's" should have taken off the shelf hardware from CompUSA, fdisked the harddrive, popped in a floppy and FTP installed Linux or BSD. Once they realized that the load was more than the servers could handle then they could have thrown money at the big iron or betting yet, just add on more Linux/BSD servers and scaled up.
Its no wonder that Sun is on the skids right now. You can get barely used, high end Sun servers for pennies on the dollar in the 2nd hand market. I just saw Sun E250s being sold for $1750 today that were $15,000 a year and half ago. Not a bad deal for the user, a major disaster for Sun.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"It seems to me it would make it more appealing to .coms to use the free software but..."
You forget how many big hardware/software companies were FUNDING the dotcoms. Microsoft, Netscape/AOL, Sun, Novell, Oracle, and plenty of other companies with reason to push commercial software were giving the dotcoms quite a lot of their startup capital, much of the capital often came on the agreement to use/promote/develop a capital provider's product(s). Using Free/Open-Source software was seen as ingrateful by much of the industry, and for many of the dotcoms software costs were just a tiny part of their overall insane operating costs.
Here is the big thing with Microsoft, capitalize on the failures of the Dot Coms and try to associate it with Linux and the free software movement. One might argue that the "business model" of many dot coms was to give away their service to entice enough users, hoping to charge them in end for premium services. The fundamental difference is that Linux and other OSS is given away not to get more users (though it is nice) but to give freedom to its users. BIG difference, there is no long term desire to start sticking it to consumers. In the end there is no Linux business model that can be put out of business like the dot coms
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
Seems like there are many people who associate the Linux madness with the dot-com madness just because they happened at about the same time. The article says:
Nevertheless, much of what got Linux talked about was directly related to Internet hysteria...
...without explaining what that relation is.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
You can buy Windows server licenses and cheap, back-breaking chairs, or use Linux and get Herman Miller Aerons. What do you do?
It's a real conundrum, because you'd want your tech people to have comfortable chairs while stuck at the office for hours downloading and applying Windows service packs and updating virus definitions or repairing virus/worm damage.
Kind of like how office politics works-- the people who are never in the office have the largest offices (with windows!) and the fastest computer.
Usability was and still is the achilles heel of Linux for the desktop. Unusable desktops, productivity software lacking, and non-trivial un-install methodology are shortcomings Linux have.
I think that Linux desktop development should be watching Apple OSX, and use their GUI framework for something Linux could learn from.
I hate it when people intentionally fudge facts on stuff.
"About 65 percent of executives polled by Goldman Sachs said they have no plans to use Linux at their company next year."
Well of course they don't, becuase 99% of them have no idea what is going on in the NOC. If you were to ask the CEO of my company if we were going to run linux, after spending three days explaining to him what it was, He would say no. The fact is that we ARE running linux in my NOC. No one has told the CEO because frankly he has no need to know. If he did know it would not change anything.
It just shows the danger of trusting a survey when you have no idea if it has been implimented correctly. What is Goldman Sachs next major revelation? That 99% of corporate CEO's do not think the change from a 85:1 to a 475:1 pay discrepency between CEO and line workers is anything to worry about?
Papa Legba come and open the gate
if you finished the sentence they stated it fairly clearly:
... hysteria, beginning in 1999, with the sky-high initial public stock offerings of Linux distributor Red Hat and server manufacturer VA Linux Systems--now VA Software. As a result of those IPOs, anything with "Linux" in its name could soon find large amounts of funding, and scores of Linux companies sprang up out of the woodwork.
-- john
There seems to be all this concern about whether people will write software if they derive no obvious benefits from it. This is all based on the misconception that people dislike writing software. Many of the same people who don't understand will play solitaire when they don't have to (and even when they're not supposed to). They derive no obvious benefit from it, nobody cares how they do, nobody pays them, and the damn thing doesn't even stay solved.
Writing OSS is like playing solitaire, in that it is fun (you're solving little puzzles which are non-trivial, but not impossible), but when you've done it, you end up with a program that does what you like, and you can give it to people and they'll be impressed. Some people might even pay you. Of course, at some point they start expecting you do what they want rather than just what you feel like.
People get paid a huge amount of money to play basketball. Other people don't even get reimbursed for buying a ball and a net, but they play anyway. The same thing is true of writing software.
(A .com in my building "moved out" just before Xmas - 100s of Herman Millers went into the rent-a-truck. Glad I wasn't an investor.)
sulli
RTFJ.
However, the .com crash probably does signal some changes in the commercial aspects on Linux, namely that it seems unlikely the market will support as many Linux-distribution and Linux-misc companies as it once did.
This part of the "Linux shakeout" has already started of course, but I doubt it has ended.
What's VA's stockprice at again?
I don't think Linux has been particulary hit by the .com crasch. I'd rather say that Microsoft IIS servers are less then popular now after all security issues, including Code Red attacks last summer.
.com companies that went down had really stupid employees that hardly could code a page without visual BASIC-like ASP. This resulted in thousands of really bad webpages that prevented anyone not using Internet Exploder from entering.
:-P
I also firmly believe that many
As a result lots of people stayed away from those sites, and the company didn't make any money.
Ciryon
And I thought Trolls were dead!
First, the desktop.
I don't really use linux for desktop applications much. I have spent quite a bit of time dabbling with various desktop and window managers. However, I still use fvwm95 for mine. Why? Takes about 1/2 the ram of something more complex, like KDE or GNOME, is significantly faster, and doesn't offer much more than I need.
Install Gnome with the default wm of elightenment. E is a very slick looking window manager. Beautiful eyecandy. However, the second I try to maximise the window, I practicaly have to go searchign through documentation. And I'm an experienced user. I pride myself that I can sit down at pretty much ANY application program and figure it out in a matter of minutes. And yet, E baffles me. Of course, if I spent 15 minutes reading up on it, and playing with all the buttons, I'll probably be just as efficient with it as with anything else.
But I'm hesitant to do so. And If *I* am, then you can damn well bet that your average "my cupholder is broken" user isn't going to find it any easier. Do we WANT to make it easy? Do we want to have a linux desktop on every computer in the world? You get proponents either way.
Maintaining linux based desktops is MUCH nicer. Not only can I generally fix almost any problem over a modem, but its highly unlikely the user will be able to screw something up anyways, especially if I don't give them the root password. Make a copy of the configuration file once you have everything the way they want it. Then if they start playing and end up with a font size thats too tiny to read, 20 seconds later, the problem's fixed and I don't even have to leave my chair.
And if you catch the users before they've been exposed to a microsoft or mac product, then the window design will be entirely new to them, and they'll pretty much learn it the way you tell it to them. I'll teach ANYONE who's willing to learn. And people will gladly learn one system. Unfortunately, most people have been faithful users of microsoft products for the desktop. They've already got the idea of how its supposed to work/look and will resist any design that differs from that.
What potentially hurt linux with the bust is a new lack of unlimited funds which could be used for marketing. Since pretty much any business based soley on selling products you're giving away for free, you COULD make money, but chances are good, its not going to be enough to fund a microsoft marketing machine.
The current companies are entrenched with microsoft. Even if they never spent another cent upgrading, moving to linux would require significant costs in retraining and software porting. Sure, it would save money in the long run, but since the company already expects to spend that money on microsoft upgrades, they don't really consider the alternatives.
However, hit the new companies. Startups, and mom&pop buisinesses where the owners are already working at minimum wage just to keep things afloat. An extra $100 license makes a difference there. They could very easily consider free software to be a worthwhile investment of their time. This would force the entire computer infrastructure of their business to utilize it from the ground up. Microsoft may never get a foothold there.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Of course, if you had done a little bit of research, you would've found out that GCC 3.0x is not production quality and that 2.95.2 or 2.95.3 are considered the stable versions.
I'm actually a bit surprised that you got everything to compile cleanly under gcc 3 - but I'm not surprised that you got random crashes after doing so.
. . .about surveys of Linux usage in business, is that they are all to frequently based on "spending priorities for executives" and "new license revenue shipments". At least this article mentions that linux being available for free will skew the results in the proprietary offering's favor.
I am trying to sell my boss on bringing linux into our educational institution, both on the desktop and on our servers. When I show him and our CFO that upgrading all of our desktops to Windows 2000 will cost us $100,000 up front while Linux is free they get excited. But when they see reports that only 2% of shipping desktops come with Linux they get understandably (seeing it from their POV) concerned.
It would be nice to see a metric like "Six of the most popular linux distributions report sales of 100 million units, and downloads 500 million units for fiscal year 2001" from organizations like IDC and Gartner Group. That would help account for sales AND downloads and hopefully skew the numbers back to a more correct figure.
Of course there is still the problem of counting installations after the initial purchase or download. Any number you get will be much fuzzier than the "sales and downloads" figure. The solution is to survery the engineers and not the executives. Ask the engineers how many machines they installed their copy of linux on and you will get a much more reliable figure.
The most interesting thing about this article is the problem of linux competing with pirated Microsoft software in third world countries and southeast asia. In these places Windows is effectively as "free" as Linux in monetary terms. When all you care about is price parity, why not choose the more popular of the free solutions?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
This was a seminar poster...
I've seen this post almost verbatim several times on slashdot, and on several sites as well. This "form letter" posting is obviously an attempt to spread more FUD and nothing more. I wonder if someone is underwriting these attempts?
Linux is not part of .com economy boom. Both growth occured simultaneous, but not attached to each other.
Internet helped with Linux popularity, it's much more easy to learn about linux with internet than it was before. But, the .com economy has nothing with linux, besides it's linux user, as many others industries are.
Maybe now it's the linux comunity chance to show that .com != linux. All the comunity must do is keep working without worrying about .com crash. Why does the comunity must care about this?
IMHO linux IS much more than apache, php, perl, etc. It can be a wonderful server with lots of wonderful functionalities, compabilities. And also be a great desktop for those who can understand what's happening behind X.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Maybe this is from the Sun & Linux 'insiders' we heard about yesterday...
It's easy for a dotcom to go bankrupt, but you can't have an online community go bankrupt, unless every developer invested in webvan, Enron, and dogdoo.com.
On the other hand, Linux is far from dead in the water, and is in fact giving Microsoft a run for its money in the Web server market, where it is the second most popular OS after Windows.
Windows is the most popular OS in the web server market? wtf? This has long been Unix's claim, no? I just checked netcraft but I could only find stats for the server application, not the OS.
-------------------------------------------------
charlton heston is more of a man than yo
Feh. What questions? The source is still open and still out there. Sure some
The thing if anything that's been keeping Joe User (who doesn't work in the computer industry) from using Linux is the lack of ease of getting at the entertainment. It doesn't have anything at all to do with the
If User X wants to play CounterStrike, he or she doesn't want to fiddle with Linux until he can get it working, he wants to double-click on the icon. If User X wants to see the latest porn in AVI, all they want to do is double click. It's really just that simple.
KDE's helping alternative OSes get close, but it's not quite there yet. Not to say it won't very soon.
There's almost nothing more reactionary than a computer journalist. They'll cry the end of time just because the batteries on thier digital watch dies. These are the people that brought us Y2K.
-- The unsig...
Linux will not survive because of the people who are backing it. I'm not going to bash RMS or Torvalds, I'm talking about the hardcore hackers and coders out there who make Linux work. These people are all going to graduate from college, get married, find Jesus, or do something that will take the place of their current coding obsession. I know, because I was once an open-source programmer for a log parsing program (making it easier to grep through those huge logfiles). But then, I graduated college and had to make money for a living, and suddenly my open-source project fell by the wayside.
Face it: Linux is free. The Linux economy (i.e., getting people to work for free) is based off of the concept that deep down, people are generally good. The Linux community is based upon the ideal that money is not the only motivation, and I agree; there are plenty of other human motivators other than money. However, I don't think that any motivator comes close to good 'ole greenbacks. People want money. People want PS2s. People want Final Fantasy X. People want a house. People want MONEY. The Linux community, with the exceptions of the major distributions (RedHat, Slackware, etc) cannot keep people monetarily satisfied.
Once this generation of coders falls away (and they will) then Linux will lose its support in the forms of coders. Once the Linux source becomes obsolete, Linux is dead. The only reason these .bombs were so popular is because it allowed the coders to write Linux programs and earn money. Now that it's over, so is Linux.
I can already hear the moderators giving me "Flamebait" and "Troll" for this post, but I don't care. My Karma can take the hit. But it's true; Linux's price model (free) is what is dooming it to a slow and painful death.
That's the problem. I'll happily write software for free, and used to do exactly that. However, none of what I'll write for free has anything whatsoever to do with the drudge code for dull business tasks that is so essential in the commercial world.
I'm a commerical programmer, and write a large amount of code from which I derive zero pleasure. I also write a tiny fraction of code from which I derive some small satisfaction. Left to my own, open source devices I'd cut out the dull stuff and stick with the interesting. However, the bank I'm contracting at rather prefers me to do more of the former, because it happens to be essential to their business. And I write what they ask, or otherwise I don't get paid...Cheers,
Ian
During good times, companies are more willing to take risks than they are during a recession. All along, converting mission critical systems to Linux has been perceived (rightly or otherwise) as a risky move--you're moving from a known OS and infrastructure, whether it's Windows, Unix, or whatever, to Something Else. Businesses tend to be very cautious about taking such gambles, and tight economic times, as many are experiencing now, make them even less able to recover from a bad move.
In other news, 75% of Fortune 1000 executives polled claimed to have turned a computer on last year. Many thought that MS was a subsidiary of IBM that made new and improved typewriters and file cabinets. "Servers?", said one darting accross a hel-o-pad, "We've got the best stinking servers in the business. I have three personal assistants, two drivers, a pilot, as well as the usual secretarial compliment. We don't need anything from this Linux company we keep hearing about. Now go away, you bother me.!" Most found the concept of email good and had their assistants print duplicates for them and their files.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I would describe you has a stupid Microsoft TROLL.
sounds like an editor said 'hey we need a dot com crash and linux filler article'.
Can't they just use the almanic of stock news journalism to recycle an article appropriate for this time of year?
up 8 cents. high of $2.75, low of $2.60 (that's all today's trading). Volume of 143,500.
52-week high of $11.50
52-week low of $0.76
http://qs.cnnfn.com/tq/stockquote?symbols=lnux
So you did kernel level programming in VB. Eh yea go away Microsoft TROLL.
While I generally agree with your idea that open source programmers will eventually move on to other things, I think you underestimate Linux's impact. There are also more and more CS students who dabble in open source projects. Most of the newer CS grads I know are aware of what Linux is, what it does, and appreciate the mindset of its continual evolution. These kids are getting in the guts of Linux too. I think that as long as Linux exists at all in open source form, there will be those who will use it and further develop it.
Of course that doesn't mean that Linux will be the desktop of choice, but its not now either.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Business thinking has succesfully slayed the cult of IT. Computers and software are now simply assets of production and utility just like a welding machine or a printing press. Treating technology as cool for its own sake put a great many companies in trouble, both by overextending IT spending and by giving people like sysadmins and engineers disproportionate power in the organization. The heydeys of tech are over.
While I won't agree with ALL of your points, I will say that I agree with you, at least in the broad sense.
However, you fail to make an important distinction, and that is the difference between the advancement of Linux and open source as a software alternative, and the commercial viability of Linux and open source.
Open source itself has been present since before Microsoft, and Linux was doing well (at least among old hat hackers and the like) before it ever appeared on the public radar. The advancement of the community as a whole has grown exponentially in part due to the distaste of Microsoft, however, I believe the multitudes flocking to program for open source software are doing so now because they finally knew it existed in some tangible and reachable form.
The commercial viability of Linux and o.s., however, is VERY linked to the perception of Microsoft at a given moment. This is a phenomena that affects ALL industries when an upstart is going against an entrenched industry leader. If there is no particular distate against said leader, then the demand for an alternative is much less. Linux may obviously offer more on the server front (and hopefully eventually on the desktop), however, that success is based upon the amount of people actually looking for an alternative.
So in effect, o.s. and Linux (as the two are at this point inexorably linked together) need to find a way to fufill commercial viability. The developer core and attraction will always be there, IMHO.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
I know why I love Linux!!! Because I can watch porn AVI in just one click, and I need two clicks in windows! Therefore windows gets in the way of my porn and I can not stand that. I just hope that Linux does not have to remove this innovative feature because of the Amazon.com patent on single clicks.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Why are we still entertaining "Is Linux Any Good?"-style articles? We know it's good! This is all part of someone's FUD machine, and I don't like it one bit. We need more optimistic articles like: "How Linux Survived the .com Crash".
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Mandrake just released an earnings reports.
That little company is some SERIOUS trouble. They lost the equivalent of 13 million Euros last year. Mandrake only managed 3.5 million in revenue for the entire year!
What more is there to say about this report other than there is little or no money to be made from selling a 30 dollar Linux boxes at retail? Good lord even lowly Caldera has more revenue than Mandrake!
How can what is arguably the most popular Linux distribution be on the verge of economic melt down?
OSS not being hidden is something of an injection of honesty into an industry that has built a reputation for being dishonest. (anyone who wants to argue this I'll just point them to MS and how everybody that likes money as a primary goal wants to be them)
Of course those who don't like that Honesty of OSS is going to do what they do best, be dishonest about it.
Very true. But isn't that what the article's about? .com's? That would seem commercial to me... there is a difference between that and some CS student finding a new unix-like OS that is cool for him to tinker around with...
By the way, I have to give credit for parts of that to Eric H. (see the link in my sig) ... I found his essays one day and found them to be extremely insightful. Maybe if everyone took a read....
.. does the "dot-com crash" have to do with Linux? Only a small fraction of the poorly-run and financed "dot-com" companies that went bust were in any way related to Linux. When I think of the failed "dot-coms", I think of silly sock puppets and Internet grocery delivery services. I think of all those ridiculous television commercials we used to see for (insert now-defunct online vendor here.) None of these are even remotely related to Linux. You may as well ask how Linux is going to survive the September 11th attacks .. as a question, it makes an equal amount of sense.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
You obviously work for Micro$oft, troll somewhere else!
People like you make me wish there is a score of -2
It may be wishful thinking, but I'm hopeful that IBM can make Linux take off in the corporate world.
:)
I think mid-to-large size companies are under internal pressures to stick with Microsoft despite the price, security issues, and dreaded EULA's. I think that over the years, most of us have heard expressions like "Nobody's ever been fired for buying IBM machines" or Cisco routers, etc. In other words, the typical "Cover My Ass" mentality as an IT exec is to buy the most popular, widespread IT infrastructure and if something goes wrong then he/she can more easily assuage the PHB.
The reason I think IBM would be the company to make inroads with Linux is due to it's simple "label value". Corporations are at least more likely listen to a Linux pitch from IBM than some guy like me saying how wonderful my Debian workstation is at home.
I'm not trying to put down RedHat, VA, or other Linux companies, but it's hard for me to believe that the herd wouldn't be most influenced by Big Blue.
BTW, I graduated from college 24 years ago and I'm still contributing to several open source projects. So, don't underestimate the greybeards :-)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Part of the problem with revolutionary ideas is that there will forever be people who just don't understand; who cannot grasp the new concept, and who will attempt to recast it in terms they _do_ understand - only to miss the whole point all over again.
Such is Linux and Windows.
Windows is a PRODUCT. It is for sale, complete with sales reps, marketing budgets, and an army of lawyers to try and enforce the alien concept of "product scarcity" on a digital entity.
As a "product", it is subject to the rules of the market; the ebb and tide of economics.
Linux is NOT A PRODUCT, it is something else entirely. It's part common property, part social movement, part fun little hobby, and part irresistable juggernaut. In fact, I don't yet think there exists an English word that adequately expresses what Linux is. What do you call a tool that is owned by nobody, is constructed and maintained by many, and freely availible to all?
There are companies that produce products BASED on Linux, and these companies often subsidize contributions back to the greater whole, but these companies are no more "Linux" than Frito Lay or Doritos are "corn".
As long as the source code remains availible, and as long as it continues to function on existing hardware. Linux cannot "fail".
This is what the article author does not understand, and why Linux is so dangerous to Microsoft's monopoly. Linux, in some form, will _always_ be there. It will _never_ go away. It cannot be bought, swept under the rug, supressed, or otherwise made to go away.
The best you can do is to write code that does the same job, better - but we're seeing that Linux can develop every bit as fast (and oftentimes faster) as any proprietary product. No company, no matter how big, can muster a workforce as large as that actively working on Linux. Given enough time, Linux will eventually catch you and beat you on quality.
Bill Gates is often given credit for "inventing" the concept of software-for-sale, where previously, software was shared amongst users and developers free of cost. Well then, Bill has made his own bed. Linux is the ultimate competitor; the anti-Microsoft incarnate.
And a welcome CORRECTION, bringing software back from the artificial world of "product", to the real world of "service" where it originated and BELONGS.
.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Also, Linux and the dot-coms were two big items in IT media coverage in 2000... because the coverage has passed, some will associate Linux with the dot-com boom and bust (grit your teeth and prepare to hear "Linux? Wasn't that just a fad?" from the PHBs).
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I'd hardly say Windows is getting better at an exponential rate. I was pretty disappointed by XP. It was supposed to be so great, but really its what the finished version of Win2K was supposed to be.
Microsoft has and does release products that are not up to par, and we get to wait for the Service Packs to play catch up. And, since users are getting wise to the whole Service Pack thing, MS released thier unfinished work as Win2K, and finished its development as XP. At least thats what I feel has happened.
Also, consider that Microsoft has had an OS for 20 some years. Linux (the OS) is just to the point where its stable and has support for current hardware. From an OS standpoint, I feel that both Linux and XP have about the same merits. Linux has done well in 10 years to catch up to present MS fare (in terms of hardware compatibility and such, I mean).
Microsoft has had much more time to develop their desktop system (Office Suites and such), while the Linux crowd is quickly catching up with offerings from KDE and Gnome. I don't think you understand how productive the Linux camp is. One popular development philosophy related to open source software is to release early, and release often. Cuts down on major bugs, and the necessity of a 20MB service pack every few months. Linux as a distribution is made up by a lot of GPL software, which pretty well disclaims that the software might not work for shit, and thats how it goes. I find that a lot of the GPL software is very functional. Some Linux vendors do provide various levels of support, which is something they are not required to do at all. Some amount of the money from support contracts finds its way back into development.
Personally, I think the service from Microsoft sucks balls. They charge you to fix thier own mistakes, when I can download all the Linux upgrades and documentation that I could possibly want, for FREE. I find Microsoft's service worthless (for the price), while any Linux support tends to be a better buy for the price. Ditto as far as software goes.
Sure, a multi-million dollar company might not have qualms with giving Microsoft lump sums of money, but as an individual, I DO. Why in god's name would I want to give MS $200-500 worth of my hard-earned money, when I can get the same thing from SuSE at Best Buy for $30, or off the net for free? When Microsoft can give me a good answer to that question, I'll think about abandoning Linux. I don't suppose that will happen in my lifetime.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
It's a crying shame when people who work for the same company can't even talk to each other. Just another in a long, winding list of the internal problems with the "corporate culture"
Anyone catch this gem on the right side panel:
"stall long enough and the arguments become mute"
sigh... on second thought, let's *start* with the school system and fix business later.
My father-in-law is learning to use a computer for the first time in his life (at age 70). He practices on Windows at the senior center, and on a Gnome desktop at my home. Coming without any prejudice, he finds both systems equally friendly. Overall, he would prefer Linux because he can run multiple apps at once without worrying that it might trigger a bug and crash the system . . .
I'm not familiar with the crash-report feature, but knowing Microsoft support (and I've talked to them several times at ~$300 per incident) any non-MS app involved will be blamed.
While the Linux community does not seem concerned with money
Personally, I think that's one of the main reasons Linux is doing so well. There are no stockholders pusing for a new release so they can charge $100+ for an upgrade. Instead, code is released when its READY to be released, instead of finding out about HUGE security holes in its most secure version of Windows ever
Linux is directly dependent on the failures/success of Microsoft
Care to back that up with anything at all?
You might get better service from Microsoft, but I never have. I've asked the open source community for help with several problems over the years by posting to various newsgroups or forums, and always gotten detailed helpful information. When we had a problem with an NT4 server crashing, they asked me to resize the pagefile, which didn't change anything. That was their only advice.
Microsoft has never released any software that is as unusable as Linux
Go try Microsoft BOB, or the first version of MS FrontPage. The new installs of RedHat (the distro I use) is far simpler than either of the above mentioned products.
Linux is not yet ready to compete with Windows
Linux IS competing with windows. Check out web server statistics, or the infamous Halloween Papers. If Linux was not competeing, Microsoft wouldn't be worried about it.
Nobody can predict whether it[Linux] will be ready in six months or five years
Yet you can say that Linux will not survive. I can't follow that logic.
I would describe the Linux community as naive, unrealistic, and disorganized. So far they have been giving us inferior service and inferior software
And that's fair, you can describe it any way you like, but the fact remains that Linux is still growing faster in the server market that MS is. Who knows if that trend will continue.
because they charge per disk - winxp fits on one disk but linux takes up a cd-rack...
One thing the dotcom crash may show is that it's getting harder and harder to build a business based on hoarding software (unless you're Microsoft, and maybe even then).
The dotcom slump has been hard on shrinkwrapped software producers, from educational software to media players (Realnetworks). The venture capital that used to back companies hoping to produce another software blockbuster has all but dried up. Up until now, free software has faced an onslaught of marketing and development dollars from the proprietary software producers. But the market is starting to learn that the proprietary software market is saturated. We're past the speculative boom phase, and free software will increasingly fill the needs of users.
I am concerning myself basically with the desktop. Personally, I dont think linux is doing badly on the server now(but see down), though I question the need for 5 not-so-heavily-differentiated distributions.
I wrote an essay on this late last year; its at
http://3pointo.nareau.com/stories/storyReader$5
One question worth asking is after the 3 years of VC 98-2000, why do we still not have a decent set of true type fonts, free.
The point is, the desktop was abandoned by existing companies for the server. Seems to have been a sensible notion by the companies?
NYET! History has shown that dominance on the desktop today leads to a dominance on the server tomorrow. Unix already dropped the ball in the early 90's. We are doing it again.
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
You are assuming he is employed, or even employable.
HAHA not dead so much as turned into a "Star Baby" and meandering around the universe with the traveler.
-- I am baseball in Minnesota.
If only the OSS community could harness all those man-hours spent on solitaire... Holy shit.
We now know the true means Microsoft is using to counter Linux. It's not MS Office, or proprietary file formats, or embrace-and-extend, or FUD... It's solitaire!
Quick, somebody call the justice department, MS is bundling Solitaire with the OS! Alas, I fear the folks at the DoJ will not be able to intervene; they're too busy playing Solitaire.
Damn you Bill Gates!!
Because we know the bias up front, and can account for it in making decisions. Just try to get any news organization that they are biased in one direction or another. They will claim impartiality. At least on /., I know the bias first.
Writing OSS is like playing solitaire, in that it is fun (you're solving little puzzles which are non-trivial, but not impossible), but when you've done it, you end up with a program that does what you like, and you can give it to people and they'll be impressed.
Given the collaborative nature of open-sourcing a project, wouldn't that be more like networked role-playing?
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
All VP/CxO types are all about "strategy" (ie, going to meetings, drinking lots of Starbucks, and so on). "Tactics", or what OS to run in the data center, they could care less about unless it costs them money or gets their boss pissed off.
We know it's good!
WTF!? Linux tends to work marginally better than Windows in few areas, but otherwise it sucks.
the '.com crash' could more accurately be stated as: the FraUDuleNT wall street bankers' windfall. the 'effect' on linux would be more appropriately termed: a few greedy/fast buck FraUDs ride high/live large, on the coattails of the tux, making the genuine article look bad.
also, all the references in the 'mainstream' media to 'hackers' as being the root cause of the 'net's misdeeds, would be more like: vandals/criminals, doing what they always do.
You never see accurate headlines such as: convicted felons ride rough shod over entire I.T. industry. do you?
happy happy gnu year from all of US. wake up J., get your headers out of your .a$p.
Considering that the extension .COM is more common on MS-DOS executables than in Linux, I think we're safe.
When I went into my credit union an hour ago to deposit my paycheck, their entire computer system crashed. Whatever, so the manager comes out and tells the employees to go ahead and restart their computers. As they loaded I saw the friendly windows 98 startup screen appear. Restarting failed to fix the problem, as they couldn't log into the machines.
My point is that most, almost all, people out there would have no idea what to do if they were given a linux machine to work off of. The teller had a hard enough time writing my "offline receipt" and I hate to see her in front of a completely new OS. So for most smaller start-up companies, they will use a version of windows because of its familiarity. And because everyone and their dog knows a little bit about windows, initial productivity is greater than if they were forced to learn something brand new.
Software is currently the most important industry in the world! Of course the EU has a huge stake in what platforms it runs, for the sake of its own independence. Spending 15 - 20 million euros a year to help ensure this would be more than worth the money! A gentle migration of all governmental computer systems off MS and onto the EU-backed Mandrake Linux platform would be the next step, and you can bet that the annual cost of subsidizing Mandrake would be less than what is spent currently on MS software licenses!
-toranaga
If you're using a commercial distro and can afford to pay the measly bucks, pay them. They're doing a lot of work for you in configuration and such. If you're a rock hard geek, use Debian which is volunteer based.
Oh - and maybe those that make money on their linux-based business should start donating a slice of the profit to the non-corporate organizations? It's free speech, but you don't speak very loudly if you're starved and thirsty.
Stop the brainwash
1. Famed Linux advocate, Nick P (I forget his last name) had a
column in InfoWeek where he claimed that Linux was a victim of its
own success and would fade into the background, taken for granted,
like electricity.
2. The sparse to non-existent turnout at this last LinuxWorld
compared to the previous one at Atlanta had everyone shaking their
heads and saying "too bad Linux is dying". Linux is just not front
page Wall Street Journal news anymore. This goes along with point 1
about not being new anymore.
3. As the publicity fades, people turn to comfort food, the tried
and true commercial operating systems like Solaris or the market
leader Microsoft Windows and the time-proven long-lasting innovator,
BSD Unix(tm).
I think the original poster was thinking more about desktops than servers when he was speaking of usability, although the point holds somewhat with servers as well.
Let's face the ugly truth: to a non-tech head, Linux is hard to use, hard to install, full of meaningless technobabble and developer speak, and easy to totally screw up. The Linux community seems to be composed of one part technical people (who are usually unable to phrase things in layman's terms) one part evangelical (who immediately stomp and -1 Troll/Flamebait anyone who dares speak out against their god Linux) and one part helpful, useful people who are trying to move Linux along in an inclusive fashion.
Linux is an awesome server. I can say that because servers generally are (or should be) run by people who actually know something about computers. Those of us in the know realize that the fine-grained structure of Linux, its endless configurability and extendability, are plusses. To newbies, this is a minus, because more confusing choices is not a better thing. This is, IMHO, a primary reason why Linux has not and probably will not succeed in the desktop space. Something called "Linux" may one day dominate desktops, but it will not be resemble the thing we call "Linux" today.
As for service differences between Redmond and newsgroups, I have to say I've had good and bad from both. MS has been good at doggedly staying with me until a problem is solved, they've also been stupid by suggesting fixes that clearly have no impact on the problem (reference your "swap file" call).
Linux responses have been good in that there is usually no shortage of help, but the help quality is a HUGE variable. I'll say this: if Linux zealots would get a goddam chip off their shoulder and quit bashing "newbies" as clueless fools, they'd get a lot more converts to the "cause". And spewing technospeak about makefiles, kernel recompilation, and obscure jargon does not help. Just because you find it easy does not mean everyone else will. Until the Linux community understands that and compensates for it, Linux will remain in the server world forever. Some would like it to stay that way; I am not one of those people, because as long as MS controls the desktop, they will use it to bludgeon Linux out of existence. Witness what they did to Novell, which at its height controlled the server market with much more of an iron hand than Linux ever has or can ever hope to. Linux folk who say that could never happen are deluding themselves.
Given time, MS will steamroller ANYONE, regardless of merit. The only way to fight them is to steamroller them first, and living in a world of geeks and server closets is NOT going to accomplish this. Linux must grow to accept non-technical people, and more importantly, so must the Linux community. Think about that next time you see a struggling newbie ask what a command line is.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
HA!
Find any /. thread dealing with Linux security bugs (Yes, they do exist!) then compare those to threads dealing with Windows security bugs. Or, are geeks automatically considered unbiased?
The dotcoms didn't fail because of or in spite of Linux. They failed because they were pre-destined to fail. Dotcoms were setup not to survive, but to make quick money. The future? Who cares... Just make sure you spend that funding well and to the hell with the company. Expensive furniture, expensive office, expensive computers, killer monitors, incredible perks, wondrous stock options and what about profit? Well, who cares? As long as certain people can buy shares at $20 and sell them a month later at $100, everything should be fine.
Naturally, they forgot the business plans and down the drain they went.
Now you tell me, what the hell does Linux have to do with all this?
Nothing.
Whatever they used, whatever they didn't. That's not going to change a dime in the future of Linux. There will always be people that are afraid of change or just want to protect their arses. These are the managers that stick to the "bad but well known". These guys will use Windows forever.
There are also those who believe they can use their wits to pay less money and get better service. Those will use Linux in places they fell appropriate and Windows whenever necessary.
There are all kinds of companies. There will always be a market for any OS that has critical mass in the market, as it is the case of Linux and Windows.
Why do we need anymore Linux articles at all?
Windows is getting better at an exponential rate.
Hint. The exponent is imaginary.
What's my userid? 277xxxx? Should be LT 40000. Why is everyone's UID 277xxxx?
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Oh, that's the post #. Duh.
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
"It seems to me it would make it more appealing to .coms to use the free software but..."
Well, no, it wouldn't. The classic manager response to a money drought would not be "how can we be more efficient", it would be to squeeze out any experimentation with "trendy new stuff" and stick to what's already there and operational.
This approach is, actually, pretty sane. There are plenty of costs associated with the muddle and uncertainty of changing across to the new-and-efficient from the tried-and-true-but-clunky.
Obviously bogus.
wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool.
What? Why? How? Think about it. You might use Linux servers, or have a pool of Linux servers, but integrating Linux into a pool of (MVS|VMS|MTS|*BSD|NT3.5) servers in nonsense.
kernel-level programming in VB for 8 years
COBOL would be a bit more plausible.
I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch
By re-writing the init scripts?
Probably possible to make system thrash by sufficiently bad misconfiguration.
optimised version of gcc 3.1
What on earth is that? Optimised for what?
"server" based operating system
How can you base an operating system on a server?
kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing
Total misunderstanding. You can possibly get kernel panics from Bind or Apache not crashing, if you work hard enough at it.
Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc
ext3 now standard for RedHat 7.2
I doubt that Linux has ever NOT had separation of address space for different running processes.
RedHat 6.2 had SMP support, so that has been there for a while and getting better.
Enough buzz words so a fast reading looks like he might know something. Closer analysis reveals that it has negative information content.
Let's all go read ZDNet!
Yay!
Those were the days, weren't they?
LDA $D20A
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
Certainly; there's plenty of important code that wouldn't get written if the authors weren't paid for it (although I find code not to be boring if it has to be clever or well-designed; not to say that there isn't code which is basically data-entry [ejb]).
On the other hand, there's a lot of code that gets written mostly for fun by people who find the strangest things interesting. There's also a lot of code written by people who need to write it before they can get the interesting code to work.
The thing to realize about the software is that there's some software that's fun for the people who do it, and that will get written and improved so long as the people who are interested have time to write it. There's other software that is boring, and that will only get written if people get paid to do it. When trying to guess about the future of some software, it is important to determine which sort of software it is.
Funny,
I've had to hack around at least
one bug in Solaris 8 that has been present
at least as far back as Solaris 2.5.1 ( that
I can verify ) but has never been fixed.
That would be the line length bug in 'sed'.
Solaris's version of sed simply pukes with
command lines that are two long. This in
turn trips up libtool, and thus a whole
lot of other software. I have had to install
the gnu version of sed because of this for
YEARS, and no one at Sun seems to care.
As far as I can tell Sun has decided that some
bugs are simply acceptable and will not be
fixed, and somehow the market translates this
into a notion of stability.
Don't get me wrong, there are some applications
for which I would pick Sun over linux, serving
NFS in a serious way would be one. Another would
be for running on Sun's really big hardware if
I had an application that needed that kind of
juice in a central place. Yet another would
be if I was looking at running a cache bound
application ( Sun has MUCH nicer cache than
you will find in PC hardware ).
But PC hardware is catching up fast.
In any senario in which Linux + x86 hardware
will do the job it will almost always do it
cheaper, and frequently better ( although not
always, see previous examples ).
first of all, let me state that i agree with the gist of your post. that said, though, there are a couple factors you overlook:
1. the availability of software written by enthusiasts suffers because they have day jobs and bills to pay; most simply don't have 8-12 hours a day to devote to writing software; whether they enjoy it or not is irrelevant.
2. you say, "Other people don't even get reimbursed for buying a ball and a net, but they play anyway." that's a good analogy, but consider the extension of it: the guy shooting hoops in his driveway doesn't have the same game as a pro.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
I know this is probably worthless to post, But I would like to let everyone know I am sick and tired of M$ and am converting now to Linux. Damn you and your dirty Apes Mr. Gates!
We as voters have given up essential liberty. We hoped to purchase a little temporary safety. We in fact deserve neither
http://www.bryanpatrick.com
IPO forthcoming (in my dreams).