Mega-Geek March?

hammerm writes " According to an article on infoworld.com, 'A group of open source and free software developers is planning to lead a march on San Francisco's City Hall next week in an effort to promote the use of freely available software by California's government offices,' and it goes on to say 'it aims to bring attention to proposed legislation that would require California's government offices to use software with freely available source code rather than products from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft Corp.'"

Comments

Re:All OSS no better than all CSS

[ericman31]

**Laugh** No, like actually running a sysplex of several Z series servers with CICS on top of it, providing millions of transactions per day in the state's welfare system. Linux *can* run on IBM 390 hardware, yes. It can't do what OS/390 can do, or what Solaris on SunFire platforms can do.

Now, Linux will be able to provide Enterpise level computing in the future, but it's not there today. What I prefer is public domain licensing. In many state contracts the OS and apps may be proprietary but all the custom integration work is public domain and freely available to anyone.

Re:All OSS no better than all CSS

[ericman31]

Is there anything in particular that makes you shy of Linux on these big systems?

I'm currently a government IT contractor. I am an architect for Enterprise systems. I'm also a huge proponent of Open Source. OS/390, now called zOS, is incredibly stable and capable. Yes, it's proprietary, but it does the job. In one particular case that I'm deeply involved with we have a system that runs on OS/390 that provides benefits to 5 million Californians and deals with about $18 billion in financials annually. While the Linux kernel itself can handle that level of computing until recently I have not seen any applications, proprietary or open source, that ran on Linux that could support the system.

Secondarily to that I don't see the ability to actually run on the hardware platforms you need to support a system like that. We are talking about either IBM zSeries or pSeries or Sun SunFire level hardware. To the best of my knowledge Linux does not currently support SMP computing when 15, 20, 30, or more CPU's are involved on a single machine. Undoubtedly it will be able to, but it doesn't today.

By mandating Open Source you will eliminate some of the most stable and reliable RDBMS available (i.e. Oracle, DB2, Sybase) and force those same systems to use MySQL. Before someone gets their panties in a bunch, MySQL is a good database, but it's not yet capable of running multi-terabyte data warehouses, or transactional systems that support millions of transactions a day.

I think that, as of today, Open Source can replace desktop computers, especially for two arenas:

• Office automation
• Developers

Open Source can also replace all those proprietary web/ftp/mail/file/print servers and do a better job than most of them for a much better price. The Linux/SAMBA combo is pretty damn good. But, because the work hasn't yet been done, I don't think that Linux is ready for Enterprise level computing. Linux needs to be ported to those platforms and some work will have to be done on the kernel for it to work appropriately. The applications aren't there yet either and that will take longer.