Wall Street Embraces Linux

Brian Stretch was among several who sent in this story about Merrill Lynch switching to Linux, this is interesting because it's actually companywide. Talks about Red Hat, Linux threatening Unix and so on.

Comments

Damn

[kko]

slashdotted already?

I still haven't seen the answers I am looking for.

[SlashChick]

What is interesting about this article is that it mentions Linux encroaching on UNIX (read: Sun's) territory, but it doesn't mention Microsoft at all. I have to assume that this means an external (web, application) server migration to Linux. If not, I'd like to know the answers to the following questions:

1) How do you work around the complete lack of server-side productivity software on Linux servers? By deploying Exchange, you can make scheduling a meeting as easy as sending an email with a time and having everyone click to confirm the meeting, which is then added to everyone's calendar. There is no solution like this without using Exchange (and I've looked.)

2) How do you work around the lack of group policy controls in SAMBA? By this I mean forcing a computer to have the most up-to-date anti-virus software when it logs on to the domain; mapping network drives automatically; downloading OS patches automatically through a local server. AFAIK, Samba can't do any of this as well as a Windows 2000 Server can. And what about Active Directory? LDAP isn't as cohesive a solution if you are running Windows clients.

From this article, I have to think that Merrill Lynch and others are changing their external server infrastructure, not their internal IT infrastructure.

The other conclusion I must draw is that the companies that are migrating to Linux as a workgroup server (i.e. replacing Windows NT/2000 Server with Linux) did not have a cohesive Windows network in the first place. Unfortunately, Linux is nowhere near a solution to Exchange, and it's perhaps 25% of the way to replacing a Windows 2000 primary domain controller's capabilities.

So what servers is Merrill Lynch migrating? Linux does have its core competencies -- web servers; application servers; network storage to some degree -- but they didn't mention what part of the infrastructure they were replacing. I would thus take the words "companywide" with a grain of salt in this case.

Re:Linux not really "free"?

[swillden]

This is definitely weird. Okay, so Linux is not free as in zero cost, because everything has a cost of ownership. Even with closed source software, license fees are only the beginning.

But, the column explicitly mentions "large-scale licensing agreements". Huh? Support agreements, sure, but licensing? The software is already available under a very large-scale licensing agreement: the GNU General Public License.

I'm confused.