Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux During The .Com Crash

Posted by Hemos on from the following-the-path dept.

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..."

2 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Not really. by supabeast! · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.

  2. Re:Why Linux Will Not Survive... by Nos. · · Score: 3, Informative
    Windows is not "getting better at an exponential rate". Its getting better, don't get me wrong, 2000 is a huge improvement over the 9x series, but it still has a long way to go.
    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.