Forbes on Linux

mvdwege writes "It appears that Forbes is doing a Linux Special. Lots of nice articles showing off the state of the art in Linux development today. It's nice to see Linux get some good mainstream press without hype or FUD. A very objective treatment that might definitely make some people think."

Comments

Re:Why is this an unusual occurrence?

[strictnein]

that Open Source developments are a viable option for companies these

How has it showed this?

I'll probably get flamed for this, but where are all the open source Linux companies that are currently truely making a profit (and not just using some creative accounting tricks)?

Or maybe I'm just oblivious to all of the open source success stories....

somebody woke up

[tanveer1979]

well so t seems. Though till now it was a geek geek thing, linux users were a bunchof social outcasts and what not.. finally we have THE FORBES taking interest. This had to happen someday. After all the business community wants to mae money, and in a slowdown scenario like now linux makes sense. To some extent slowdown has been a blessing in disguise with cash strapped managers wanting to take the buck an extra mile.

This is definately a first and really a great achievement... and the goal now is to sustain linux rather that develop!

Tastefully done

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody read the part about cost and aggravation savings. Now read it again. Memorize it. Got it? Good. THAT is the angle to use with management. Not "freedom", not "evil empire", not "Windoze sucks". UPTIME + COST SAVINGS = MORE PROFITS. Show 'em the numbers (in Excel if necessary).

Re:Good series - what motive?

[oever]

Don't be so paranoid!

This series is very good. It takes away part of the fears that executives have of Linux. Especially the article on the retailer going Linux.

The readers will get mixed feeling from this article though: "These programmers are weird, they can't make money from this. But it is free software and it seems to work."

I'm not sure reading about Linux is healthy for executives.

You're wrong

[Subcarrier]

The Forbes target audience will be very interested in anything that can cut costs for companies.

The screenshot and description of Pine amused me

[Jack Hughes]

In the article about email they say that "pine is the most linux specific" coupled with a screen shot of pine on Windows 2000!

Of course, we all know that pine is the least linux specific.

And all the apps featured run on at least UNIX....

Moral: Whatever Forbes does, it shouldn't do software reviews.

"Never"

[truthsearch]

The word "never" should never be used in a technology news article. Well, maybe if they're referring to OS/2... ;)

It's hard to believe the author of this article has been a technology news writer for at least a decade. "Linux will never be..." "Linux will never gain..." She doesn't mean never. I think she means in the short term (5 yrs maybe), which seems like an eternity in the tech industry. But to say something, especially something new, will never take over a market or will never be used for critical systems is simply rediculous. By this author's writing, some execs, if they're smart enough to read that far into the articles, will think Linux has mostly run its course and found its place in the industry since it'll "never" get beyond certain levels. By her logic, if she wrote an article about Microsoft back in 1985, she'd have said "Windows will never be a serious player in the server market."

This author's writing is incredibly irresponsible.

Re:Why is this an unusual occurrence?

[skippy5066]

That's a pretty interesting point. I work for one of many IT groups inside a major financial company, supporting mostly NT servers. About 90% of the applications we run here in-house are custom built.

They don't rely on outside vendors for supporting software and creating patches; the entire process takes place internally. This would seem to be the ideal situation for application development on Linux...

Obviously the learning curve for developers used to MS developing environments has to be considered, but next to the potential cost savings of migrating hundreds of servers off of a (relatively) expensive OS to one that is (relatively) free, one could make a pretty good argument that the time and money spent on training for the dev guys would be well spent.

I wonder if any of the developers have thought about that. Pardon me, I think I need to go drop a clue on someone.

-Jeff

Re:Why is this an unusual occurrence?

[mborland]

However, what Linux has proved, more than anything else, is not that Linux is a viable OS, but, far more importantly, that Open Source developments are a viable option for companies these days.

I totally agree. In my last project for a large financial services company, I was looking for some third-party libraries for use in our application. After conducting some research, I found an open-source solution which just blew away the alternatives.

I was a little concerned at the beginning of the project that people would be fearful of my recommendation--that they'd be afraid we'd have to reveal all our sources, or that our code would be more prone to exploits because of the open-source library.

I did spend extra time making sure that the licenses matched our corporate policies, which they did. And I was very surprised, just yesterday a guy who was reviewing the project was particularly pleased we had used open-source software--not because he was a zealot, but because he understood the drawbacks of black-box software and nasty licenses.

Linux and Apache are the two best-known systems which have caused people to understand open-source software. Thanks to everyone involved.

P.S. The libraries we used in the project have worked wonders. Seriously, the commercial 'peers' were completely unreliable and hard to use, all for thousands of dollars more!