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'Unbreakable Linux'
Zadig writes "It appears as if Dell, Oracle, and Red Hat CEOs have decided to make 'Unbreakable Linux'. Could a giant arise amidst today's insecure and constantly patched linux world that could hold the title of Unbreakable Linux? I doubt it, but it will be fun to try, what are your thoughts?" There's a similar article on CNet.
To quote Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
Taking on IBM? Taking on IBM mainframes? That is truly a serious statement.
If nobody ever gets (got?) fired for buying IBM, what does this mean?
Is it me or is all of this "United Linux" & "Unbreakable Linux" crap completely forgetting the point of Linux in the first place? I'm not saying its bad, or its good, but its definetly not GNU.
Hey, I'm a BSD user anyways, but I think that the last month has shaped the way that Linux will be seen to the business consumer.
Is that related to that "unbreakable" Oracle database they sold the state of California?
However, if they are really trying to make a hack-proof version of linux, I maintain that a really good way to do this would be to get rid of C in the implementation of security-critical components (network servers, suid programs, etc.). If these components were written in a type-safe language (like O'Caml, SML, or Java), we'd instantly have a more sercure system. The code would also be a lot nicer to write and maintain!
One only needs to subscribe to Bugtraq for a while to realize that buffer-overflow style holes are not going to go away by sheer willpower. Machine-checked safety is an easy way around this, and it stuns me that people who want secure software don't simply use secure languages.
Okay, I used to be a Dell server support technician. Time and time again I would see these big pushes for Linux on servers and they were NEVER backed up by any significant effort to acutally be able to support Linux to any reasonable degree.
The last big push before I quit was when they released a couple of 1u boxes. One ran NetWare and the other Red Hat Linux. They really "went the extra mile" that time and provided maybe 25% of the technicians with a big one day class and a copy of O'Reily's "Running Linux"; which is a very good book, but was grossly out of date at the time. One day. You couldn't get your foot in the door without being able to say you had two years of NT experience with a straight face, and back it up in a techinical interview that was no punk.
I genuinely hope that this aliance ends up being a boon for the community, but to be honest I think 'ole Mike has used up his credibility in this department.
-Peter
Larry Ellison is often treated with a reverence Bill Gates can only dream of. Yet, if you've ever read about him (in say the excellent, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison* by Mike Wilson) you'll discover he his faults (like, allegedly, being a pathalogical liar.)
Anyways, to come back on-topic, Larry talk a lot of sh*t. And he isn't really trying to promote Linux, only to bash IBM DB/2. And the reason he's bash DB/2 is that Oracle has being losing a fair amount of share in the database market, particularly at the high-end.
For the last nine months, Larry's hobby-horse has been 'unbreakable' real-application database clustering. Yet, there has been remarkably little support: partly at least because early point releases of Oracle software have a reputation for instability (and possibly insecurity, too) that make Microsoft look... well only very bad rather than really, really bad. (Take Oracle 11i, their latest application suite; now on 11.5.4 and still not stable, allegedly.)
Anyway, I take anything Larry says with a very large grain of salt.
--- My dad's political betting
The companies have the potential for a proprietary extension into the Linux environment (GPL/LGPL) to a degree not seen. How do I say this?
It's a great way to maximize the profits of the three corporations at the expense of the guy paying the bills at the other end. It starts with the support. If certain improvements are made to the system and are held under Oracle, then they are shipped as binaries and un-reviewable by the rest of the community.
Now that there are sections which are closed, it is fairly trivial to ship enhanced product lines which are tied to those sections without violating the GPL but also rendering RedHat with a block of code which works as a kernel level key. Some key portion of the RedHat system won't work without the Proprietary object included and the Oracle database won't work without the Proprietary Object that is only available from RedHat. Meanwhile ALL of the hardware that is supported consists of only that which is provided in the Dell build sheet.There is some great potential here for one of the greatest supporters of the Linux OS to start edging themselves somwhere between the OS developers and OS movement and the proprietary foothold that forces payment
I don't know that RedHat is entirely like this, but I've heard comments from more and more people that they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their financial tactics to dictate payment schedules. What worries me about this is that Oracle is the next closest thing to Microsoft in their aggressive and morally questionable business practices.
Personally, I believe that the philosophy of Open Source, as outlines originally by ESR is more valuable socially and therefore economically than the stock option performance of these three companies and as such, this ideology needs to be preserved in the face of such movements. Not that they are bad, they are part of the migration process. But it is imparative that these migrations keep moving things forward in a constructive direction rather than becoming some instrument of code oppression that allow companies to exercise baseless claims (legally and advertising) and practice FUD tactics.
This could have two edges to the blade. Linux is recognized as a real enterprise level solution and can start being accepted into the Corporate IT fray, or only two companies can provide Linux (IBM and RedHat) and everything else belongs to the terrorists, crackers, child molesters, and dead-beat dads.
calling anything "unbreakable" is just asking for trouble, and a Really Bad Idea. it's inevitable that some flaw, some exploit, will surface; and the makers, and by extension the linux & open source communities, will have egg on their (our) faces in the eyes of CTOs, bean-counters, and the general public. considering the high visibility of this project, i really hope that somebody thinks better of this before the foot goes into the mouth.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
If Dell are so interested in this project, how about giving the option to buy a desktop online with RedHat instead of just offering the latest M$ OS?
I'm sure sales at Dell.com would increase if Linux users could buy a new PC straight from Dell without having to go through the bother of uninstalling Windows and installing their own copy of Linux. Think of the cost savings as well! No XP license!