Slashdot Mirror
FT on Europe's Open Source Option
Anonymous Coward writes "The Financial Times offers a very interesting read about Linux, its possibilities for business, and its threat to Microsoft. Also a second article about "Europe's open-source option"."
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I'd say that the article misses out on the freedom part of the word free. Not to sound evangilistic, but there is a bias towards free as in no money (but what can one expect from the _financial_ times?).
Written by businessman, for businessman.
I can undestand why slashdot puts stories like these on but I still laugh when I read them. The contradictions, the overstatements, not to mention the information they sometimes get wrong. I don't mind reading them though, if only for a laugh.
Not to say that this story has ALL of those listed above, but I did notice some lines that gave me a chuckle.
Karma: Raspberry Kiwi
I love them - yes they are funny, but they are of major use to our community.
Most of us on squishdot rage flamewars about code stability, scaleability, freedom of choice - but none of this matters to the execs - they don't read what we write.
But if someone like the FT mentions Linux and how good it is - this gets read in the board room, on the train, on the trading floor.
And then maybe, just maybe, someone will ask the head IT person just what its all about. Then we get a chance to explain it. Get a copy of these articles, save the link somewhere - and then next time you have to do a whitepaper or value proposal in your company where you know open source is the better choice you have some references that people will sit up and notice.
Treat these articles as sales leads to big buisness - marketing is what open source is not good at beacuse we don't press the right buttons - the FT does.
Still - good for a chukle wasn't it.
The article states that the server market is $200bn and that Linux's share is only $8bn which looks like a very small percentage until you read the Linux machines "cut the cost of hardware purchases eightfold, says Geoff Penney"
So Linux share of the server market could be much larger than it would appear.
Nick
The basic concern here is also reliance on technology that can be controlled by another goverment, the advantage of Open Source is not just financial but is also one of Intellectual Property. Most of Europe is politically much further to the left than the US and is pro-sharing. This is a major principle of the EU, as opposed to the US centric treaty that enables logging and exploitation on the other side of the pond.
So there is less of a clash of culture when considering open source, Europe understands why co-operation is good, that is how much of the European defence industry works already.
Now there is also the arrogant bit....
We think European Students can build better OSes than US corporations - Linus
We think that Europeans can build better enterprise systems - SAP
We think that the best things to come out of IBM were developed in Europe - MQSeries
So basically underpinning this is a belief that we don't have the cash to do better, but do have the talent. Most EU reports on Open Source software talk about leveraging this talent pool, and not having the marketing and release costs of a full scale company.
Its the difference between consent based and co-operative management and the approach taken over the pond.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The Slashdot link seems to have caused this article to rise to number 1 in the FT list of most popular articles (from 3 in the 10mins or so it took me to read it).
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagena
Looks like t
Now, I am not a Fortune 500 CTO (IANAF5CTO?), but I would be pretty worried if I had a global deployment of Windows systems and Microsoft just started handing out the source code to foreign governments (or my own for that matter). If people consistently find exploits without access to the internal code, imagine what a motivated foreign intelligence service can do with access to it.
Is Microsoft, in reacting to the emerging "open source in government" movement, inadvertently making Windows less desirable to everyone else?
I wouldn't think so, since your company has not actually "distributed" the binary. If the company has made the modification, then as long as the company keeps the binary internal to the company, I wouldn't imagine it would be constrained by that portion of the GPL. Just as they didn't "give" you that monitor on your desk, or that chair you're sitting in, I don't think they would "give" you the binaries that you're using. Since the GPL seems to rely on variants of the term "distribute" however, it could legally be interpreted several ways. I would think, however, that you are being given access to the binaries as an agent of the company, not as an individual; in that case, no real distribution has occurred.
IANAL, but I'm sure your company has two or three; ask them.
The Wizard utters the word 'frobnoid!' and cackles gleefully
Count me as one person who's getting a little tired of this argument that we keep hearing that ``Linux's security isn't up to snuff and hasn't been severely tested because all the `hackers' are too busy writing attacks on Windows. Oooh! It'll just be awful when these `hackers' turn their attention to Linux''. Well, to me, that's just pure FUD and BS. Linux is, as reported in the FT article (or was it another one I read this morning) being developed by 1000 developers. These are hackers -- hackers in the sense we understand to be the true meaning of the word and not what the news outlets redefined it to mean -- that are attacking the Linux kernel every day. To think that the security implications of the features that are working their way into the kernel aren't being looked at from a security aspect by (at least some of) these 1000 developers is just silly and wishful thinking by Linux detractors. Not to mention the untold number of people beta testing the development kernels.
Oh sure, there are userland applications that have security issues. But didn't Intuit's flagship product recently have a flaw exposed? And didn't Oracle (you know: the folks with the ``unbreakable'' database) have to issue patches to plug potential security holes?
The day when the army of ``hackers'' writing Windows exploits focus their aim on Linux is the day after Microsoft releases Office for Linux (though I'm not holding my breath until that hit the shelves). And the attacks that target Linux-based systems will be a tribute to the concept of code reuse as most of the current Windows exploits will probably work just fine against the Office running on Linux. (Anyone thinking about who Microsoft would blame for the problem?)
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