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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..."
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 work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
thank you.
"About 65 percent of executives polled by Goldman Sachs said they have no plans to use Linux at their company next year."
Actually this statement is probably true, and I would not blame it on the executives either. The fact of the matter is that companies that have mission critical applications will almost always prefer Sun over Linux because SunOS is much more robust and has matured way beyond where Linux is at today. You know how many bugs there were in Solaris 8? Last time I looked there were less than 20. Can you say that about any Red Hat version?
Another issue with Linux is compatability. I have had my teeth kicked in by Linux several times the past few years. Once with Oracle, and another with Sybase. I installed Oracle 8.1.7 on RH 6.2 with no problems. On 7.2 it was a totally different issue. Because of the basic design of the architecture, I actually had to downgrade binutils and gcc to install a pretty damn recent build of Oracle. Why? I have no idea, but any OS that has dependencies that change with every release has issues. If I were an M$ guy (which I am not - I use RH 7.2) I would not have any issues upgrading the OS. Oracle will work if I run NT4, Win2k, or XP. No modifications are needed on the system. On Sun it is the same. Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, or 9. Oracle will run happily.
One could theoretically say it was Oracle's support for building the application to a dependency like that, but when you think of it, an OS is just a layer between apps and hardware. It should not really even have any features of its own. The OS should be accomodating. Applications drive business, not the OS
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, a lot. It is my main development environment as well as my main desktop. It is just my opinion thatg being zealous or fanatical about anything is not good. Just because some of us really like it and it works for us does not mean that we are more right then those who do not use it. It just means that this is our tool of choice. Different tools are for different tasks.
--Jon
Linux is, at best, a toy operating system. At worst it is the kind of subversive force in America that Stalin only dreamed of creating.
There are "cells" reporting to unknown leaders that only go by names like "L33t_Kernal_Hax0r" that cannot be located - after all, "living in my momma's basement cause I have no real world skills to speak of" is not a true street address.
There is the Marxist concept of "give what you can, take what you need." Only, none of these people can give anything, excepting the few heroes of the revolution that have their own roach filled apartments and must give blow jobs in parks monthly to meet their rent. Yet, they all feel the need to take, take, take. MP3s? "We must have them! It is about freedom for the artists!!" Software? "We must have it for free! It will be good then!!" Movies? "Yes, we must have them for free!!!" Of course, the dirty secret all of these "give it to me free!!!" people are trying to hide is that they have no resources to actually acquire anything legitimate, due to their pathetic skill set and the fact that society has no use for them.
Society, in fact, had no use for them even during their formative years. That's why their lunch money was stolen. Darwin's law was trying to assert itself, but overprotectively indulgent parenting prevented such a thing from happening.
HAHA not dead so much as turned into a "Star Baby" and meandering around the universe with the traveler.
-- I am baseball in Minnesota.