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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
... 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.
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.
Uh, no. It still costs a fortune to migrate to a new OS and platform.
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
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.
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
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
. . .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
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!?
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...
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
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.
with the sky-high initial public stock offerings of Linux distributor Red Hat and server manufacturer VA Linux Systems
I don't really see that as any kind of link with "internet hysteria," which is what I considered to be the "dot-com" madness.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that for most people, "dot-com" combined both Linux and internet (well, ALL things high-tech, really), although there's technically very little to associate the two.
The only link I can think of is that Linux is popular for use in web servers. A rather tenuous link, IMHO.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
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.
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
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?
.. 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
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
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.
If I hear that word migrate again... I'm a goin to puke.
Up front costs maybe... long term costs would be down though... seeing as you wouldn't have costly upgrades to software from Microsoft all the time.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
You're right, thiis niether troll or flambait.
It should be moderated -1 unthinking and ego centric.
there will be other people who will be in college after you.
there are many people who contribute that also have 'day jobs' today.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Interesting point, but not realistic.
A few things..
There will be another generation of college coders. You're not that special. :)
Dot-bombs didn't only run on Linux and you can do more than just run a webserver with it.
There's a *HUGE* user base familiar with Linux
There's lots of apps.
HW companies have written drivers for Linux so that they can sell their products to Linux users.
Many gov'ts are/will be using Linux.
A lot of contributions to the Linux source code came out of someone(s) just wanting Linux to do a specific task.
The Mighty Tux of Karma will cast spells of guilt upon shops that don't buy at least one or two distros. :)
...and so on. (Hey! Add your own!)
At the end of the day, (IMHO) software is not just about making money, it's about making things work. Linux works in lot's of places and I don't see it going away. Practicality will overcome the money issue.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
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!!
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.
Hmmm. There should be a -1 moderation for "Just Plain Wrong".
The proof that Linux won't 'die' for the reasons you state already exists. I started using Linux as a teenage college student. The kernel was 0.12. Pretty much everyone who was a student when I was graduated about five years ago. But Linux is many orders of magnitude stronger and useful than it was five years ago!
Your comment is a bit like saying the human race will die off because people get old and die; neglecting that at the same time new people are born and replace the old ones who croak. There is a new generation of teenage first years at college who are doing what I was doing. The difference is that they are starting with RedHat or Debian and a 2.4.17 kernel, where I started with a 0.12 kernel, a copy of 'rawrite' and a root disk image. And there's a lot more Linux enthusiasts in the new generation of first-years than there was when I was a first year: many orders of magnitude more.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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
My bank uses an end to end IBM solution, OS2 on the front end with I can only assume AIX systems on the backend. None of the tellers had much of a problem learning to use the new systems when they got them in. If I was the manager I wouldn't expect them to because they're fucking professionals. If your credit union is such a piece of shit the managers don't offer training for new employyes on the system then I wouldn't be putting my money in there. If you were to put Linux or anything else on the front end systems you wouldn't give someone a damn command line or fire up X and twm and let them go to work. People aren't as stupid as you assume, down at my town's city hall most records are stored on a really old and very large Sun mainframe. Walking around the offices you see a whole bunch of xterms with phosphors a glowin. Sure alot of people have Windows machines on or under their desks but most of these are used for Office and such. The sort of stuff it'd be dumb to stick on a mainframe for everyone to use. Nobody I know has any trouble working with any of it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.