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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..."
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.
"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.
That's why we come to Slashdot, because we know they're not biased!
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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.
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
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...
I don't think it was the stupid employees who only knew ASP that made all of those companies go bankrupt... I think it had more to do with the fact that their companies had no business plan and were giving their wares away for next to free.
asp or not, if you don't have a good product, you're going to go under.
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.
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