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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.
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with a big one day class and a copy of O'Reily's "Running Linux"; which is a very good book, but was grossly out of date at the time.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
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!