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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
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
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 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.
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.
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