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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..."
... 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
. . .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
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
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.
I don't think the fear was bankruptcy (at least not initially). But, since Europe may be allowing software patents in the future, bankruptcy may become a concern for os developers and a concern for the os community in general.
The problem with mom&pop shops adopting linux is that they have the least amount of time to learn a new technology, let alone be interested in implementing one. They want something off the shelf that works immediately to fit their needs. Not something they need to tinker with and install a half-dozen software patches to ensure their video card works properly.
Until Linux has the application support and ease-of-use of Windows, there won't be a large flock of users knocking on its door. Linux is still a developer-oriented system. Its perks are that it allows the tech-savvy user to customize every nook and cranny of the environment, and to even recode and compile if desired. Windows is much easier to use, and will always have the AOL-crowd as customers until Linux matures on the ease-of-use front.