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"."

Comments

Problem with the article:

[Gentoo Fan]

Developed by Stallman, the so-called general public licence attached to Linux forces anyone who modifies the system to make the modification freely available to others.

Only if you REDISTRIBUTE the binaries as well! This makes it sound like any in-house change must be published.

Very good to see

[Achmed Swaribabu]

I think that the EU has traditionally been more open minded to open the source technologies than the USian people have been, by my judgment.

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.

Re:Free beer!

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah. So much for Stallmans vision of free software being wanted because you could control it and share it with friends. That sort of stuff is important only to a small fraction of the worlds people clearly.

These things are interesting to read, and overall I thought the article was pretty accurate, but it makes it feel very dry doesn't it? All the graphs, figures, and relentlessly the focus on cost, the bottom line. Other benefits like increased flexibility and lack of lockin weren't mentioned. Neither was the fact that the vast majority of people who work on Linux the OS as a whole are not employed by big tech companies.

It's also rather depressing how much the involvement of IBM means to people. IBM has done a hell of a lot of good work, but the "we didn't pay any attention 'till IBM did" line indicates supreme daftness to me - Linux hasn't changed that much. I guess it's just a case of sheeple following whoever is biggest.

So do I - for different reasons

[CharlieO]

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.

An interesting point that gets overlooked

[icantblvitsnotbutter]

Keeping the big companies in line this time round - other than an increased mutual respect for Microsoft - is a licensing system that gives them little incentive to try to commandeer Linux for their own purposes. Developed by Stallman, the so-called general public licence attached to Linux forces anyone who modifies the system to make the modification freely available to others. "The licence doesn't guarantee there won't be fragmentation but it makes it very difficult to support a business model" if a company wants to develop a proprietary Linux, says Mr Frye at IBM.

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.

Re:Free beer!

[christophersaul]

IBM's involvement means a great deal. If you're an IT manager following IT trends, you'll have read about Linux in the trade press and shrugged your shoulders with vague interest. When the IBM sales guy turns up to tell you his AIX box can run Linux, or the Sun guy is talking about Linux boxes running your webservers, then you start to take more notice.

Before, the evangelists were totally irrelevant and totally without credibility - in terms of who an IT Manager would take advice from.

Europe and Microsoft et al...

[MosesJones]

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.

More on Linux in the FT's Lex column...

[dipfan]

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."

Windows Getting Less Secure?

[Mackus Daddius]

Microsoft last week said it would let government customers examine the source code of its Windows operating system, a move intended to overcome perceptions of the systems's security weaknesses.

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?

::md

High cost of Unix

[kahei]

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!