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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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Only if you REDISTRIBUTE the binaries as well! This makes it sound like any in-house change must be published.
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?).
We have been doing much work for lots of private industrial companies all over Europe by make the modfications to FreeBSD and Gnu/Linux kernel for years and just now starting to see jobs from the USA.
Oh too, to make a clarification, most of our work has been on FreeBSD (my specialty actually) because we recommend it for companies because of the more flexible license, but we like the work on Gnu/Linux too.
All the best,
--Achmed
Swaribabu Consulting Inc. -- We code so you don't have to
World Business Report this morning. Very good indeed that Linux gets more and more publicity among businesspeople too.
Karma. Moderation. Is my
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
Not everyone is a mathmatician, infact (here in the UK atleast) a large number non business people know FT is short for Financial Times.. In fact the main UK stock exchange the FTSE is short for Financial Times Stock Exchange..
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.
That's a part of the model that I don't often see pointed out. It's pretty apparent, when you think about it, but not obvious. Sure, companies can add distinguishing (and proprietary) applications, but the core stays relatively stable.
Not only do others benefit from what is added, they benefit from what isn't added.
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
Apart from the big Linux piece highlighted, the paper's Lex column carred a note on Linux as well today (it was in the dead tree edition - the online bit is subscription only.)
To explain, the Lex column is a very influential daily piece of analysis, read by the financial world's movers and shakers (mainly in the UK). I'd quibble about a few points - MS's Office franchise is (financially) secure? Linux suffers from "real security issues"? Nonsense. Anyway, for review purposes, here the piece:
"Technology investors should be thinking long and hard about Linux. The free, open source operating system has moved beyond the beard and sandals stage and is no longer just an option for bleeding-edge early adopters and those theologically opposed to Microsoft. Linux, whose mascot is a cuddly penguin, has developed teeth. The technology has emerged as a credible alternative for corporate IT departments and is winning significant share in the $200bn server market.
"Sun, Hewlett-Packard and IBM - which have traditionally marketed high-margin Unix equipment and software - are among those that have suffered from Linux's growing popularity. All three have seen the writing on the wall and have begun supporting Linux, but the transition from Unix, with proprietary hardware and software, will be painful.
"For the moment, Microsoft has not been overly affected by Linux's rise. Open source software is unlikely to gain even a foothold in personal computer operating systems, so Microsoft's $10bn Windows monopoly remains impregnable. Its $8.8bn Office franchise is equally secure.
"Nonetheless, Microsoft cannot be complacent. The long-term threat to its $6.5bn server business is real. Microsoft's model has been low price, high volume, but for the first time it is being undercut on price. It can argue that Linux suffers from real security issues that are only now emerging and that the operating system has a tendency to fragment, making it difficult to ensure applications' reliability. But it has a real marketing battle on its hands."
"Although Linux has been slower to catch on in Europe, the drive to end dependence on the US for technology is a common but seldom admitted justification in every country exploring the technology."
Perhaps I'm taking the comparison a little too far, but the similarities between the US and the Roman Empire at its height (before it imploded) have been jumping out at me even more lately. Bush's unilateralism, the RIAA's panic response to P2P, and yes, even Microsoft's attempts to hold off Linux strike me as desperate actions of a dominant power failing to keep up with the changing times and thus losing its grip on power.
If India, China, and the EU eventually embrace open source as the new paradigm, that will be just one more crack in the wall.
-mh
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 don't think that's true, actually. You're thinking of the FTSE100 (used to be FTSE30), which is a measure of how well the stockmarket is doing on a given day. It's calculated from the prices of the stocks of 100 listed companies. The Stock Exchange itself isn't owned by the FT.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I still think that the most striking feature of this market is not so much the spread of Linux now -- after all, it offers obvious benefits -- as the fact that people are finally *stopping* spending huge amounts of money on Unix (read Sun) hardware.
I've occasionally had to do with projects where costs were reduced to 1/8 or so (yes, about what the article says) by replacing Sun with NT hardware. With hardware savings like that, it doesn't matter if you have a whole entire backup system with it's own set of staff.
What the popularity of Linux really means in money terms is that sites that kept spending millions a year on Sun, because of internal opposition to Microsoft, now have a politically correct way to buy cheap Intel hardware.
This is good. It's just a pity so many sites upgraded to ma$$ive Sun-hardware j2ee systems during the boom... it'll take forever to get rid of 'em all!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Isn't it great how these articles list sales of Linux systems? Consider how many of the Linux systems out there aren't purchased preinstalled. It must be a pretty high percentage of those 'sales' numbers, if not more.
The others are considered by the analysts to be proprietary, not the chips but the systems, it would be quite difficult for you to build a POWER, or SPARC system, but anyone can assemble an PC compatable. It is not really the Intel part that is open, but the old IBM part that is open and what makes x86 so much cheaper.
Linux and Windows are both benefiting from the fact that x86 is now very competitive on a performance basis, and extremly competitive with HP Sun SGI and IBM on a price performace basis. When you buy a $20,000 server the price difference between a Red Hat AS support contract and a Windows Server license is much smaller than the difference between buying an Dell 2 way P4 Xeon and an HP rp2470 (two way PA-8700). I realize that there are other considerations, especially the RAM addressing over 4 GB, but the Dell will save you a boatload of money even if you buy a Windows license.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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?)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Whilst this sounds very nice, I feel that I should bring everyone back into the cold harsh reality by pointing about that the UK has a long long way to go before it becomes more open source savvy.
For example, the NHS, possibly the most underfunded thing we have, just coughed up £60 million for Microsoft Licencing.
Money well spent? You decide.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Stallman doesn't wear a tie. Get over it already.
However, more importantly, The Financial Times and many others seem to intentionally obfuscate or misinform their readers regarding the Freedom part of the GPL. Peddling misinformation does a heavy disservice to any that might be trying to make an informed decision regarding their IT strategies.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Not to mention the fact that Americans INVENTED THE COMPUTER, which started the entire industry for which Europeons are patting themselves on the back for excelling at.
It *really pains me* to defend Europeans in this discussion, but I must point out that Alan Turing was English, and Colossus was one of the most significant developments in computers. And don't forget that Britain also made major contributions in the development of the atomic bomb and radar.
Of course, many of us don't consider Brits to be "true Europeans" since they speak a fractured form of English, which is the language of the most successful societies on earth.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Yeah, right.
Open Source databases are just as good for enterprise level applications as Gimp is for professional photo processing.
Shut up, Larry.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Europe has 50+ years of co-operation, and a history of it. Not everyone together, but a history of country alliances.
WWII, France, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark etc.
WWI, France, UK
The Brits and the Dutch used to have alliances against the French and the Spanish. The Germans and Austrians are pretty pally, lots of parts of Europe used to be owned by other countries, e.g. most of France by England, Alsace by Germany etc etc.
The Napoleonic wars were everyone v Napoleon. The Crimea was Brit and France v Russia.
In terms of the European defence industry being a joke, pretty harsh. Look at the contracts the US Goverment awards and look at the sub-contractors, Thales, Bae, Rolls-Royce are most often there.
Violent Crime in terms of rape and murder is MILES lower in Europe than the US. Muggings et al are higher, so we have unhappy people who live, and the US has unhappy relatives of people who died.
This isn't bloody American bashing, its laying out how Europe likes to co-operate to compete with the US Globalisation plan. Its a clash of cultures, each has their advantages and disadvantages.
Europe knows that the US is the biggest fish in the pond, but it also knows (to its cost) that being the biggest fish doesn't give you the right to dictate as you only get embarressed by what you did 100 years later.
WWI was started because the empire building powers thought that you could still fight a war from the 1800s with technology in the 1900s and that having plebs shot wasn't a very bad thing. Europe learnt alot from having tens of thousands of people die in a day.
Namely War does actually suck.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
They do point out that UNIX fragmented in the '80s and '90s because each UNIX vendor went off and created their own additions and variations, and that this is what created the opportunity for Windows to get into the server market. Without the introduction of Linux, we were quickly going to a situation where Sun was the defacto UNIX standard, and in the Sun/Solaris vs PC/Windows competition. This isn't that different from the competition with Apple, where the software development and support is really a drag on the hardware business (keeping costs up), and it is hard to compete with the commodity PC pricing (MS just cleans up, big time).
With Linux, system vendors can cooperate on software without worrying that the competition can just take their contribution and not return anything. IBM will not work on Darwin, but Linux is great precisly because of the limits imposed by the GPL.
Here is what the FSF says on this very issue:
Q- Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?
A - The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL.
Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.
Again this is specifically addressed by the FSF:
Q- Does the GPL allow me to distribute a modified or beta version under a nondisclosure agreement?
A - No. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy of your version from you has the right to redistribute copies (modified or not) of that version. It does not give you permission to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis.
Q - Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?
A - Yes. For instance, you can accept a contract develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. This is permitted because in this case no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA.
You can also release your changes to the client under the GPL, but agree not to release them to anyone else until the client says ok. In this case, too, no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA, or under any additional restrictions.
The GPL would give the client the right to redistribute your version, but in this scenario the client will choose not to exercise that right.