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Why PHBs Fear Linux
Tin Foil Hat writes "Paul Murphy over at LinuxInsider examines the role IT text books play in business school curriculums and the misconceptions and misinformation that they present to students. If you've ever wondered why your PHB just doesn't get it when it comes to UNIX and Linux, this article is for you."
I think a lot of people just don't know what *nix is. Of course, textbooks like these don't help. Hell I'm in my senior year of a CS BS course of study, and there are students in my classes who couldn't use a terminal to save their lives or work remotely without a GUI. They just don't understand the system commands.
Sad
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
Expect this to change now that IBM and Novell have to IT world all a-buzz. People are already being sent to Linux training (by their employers) in droves in my area.
I received an email at our lug webmaster account asking for help with some questions about Linux from an MIS student. Here are the questions that her instructor had given them to research and answer:
1.What is Linux and who created it?
2.Why was it released into the public domain rather than copyrighted?
3. Is it possible to copyright anything that relates to Linux? If so, in what way?
I gave *long* answers, showed examples of copyright statements from the Linux source, explained that everybody who contributes to it, such as Linus or IBM, keep copyright, etc. I really wanted to meet her clueless instructor, but, maybe next time.
Keep in mind that these guys were pushing cobol up until about 3 years ago, so they probably think it's extremely cutting edge to push windows nt.
Do you have ESP?
I work for a major defense contractor, where I've been integrating systems for numerous years. One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs...and yes, I do believe this is a huge waste of taxpayer money, but that's how it's done. You can't make a profit by saving the govt. money.
Just another day in Paradise
I was once told by an MBA that in order for my consulting services to be valued more, I should raise my rates. People automatically think that they get what they pay for, therefor a free distro can't be worth as much as an XP or Solaris license.
:)
I agree, and there's more to it than that:
Consider Godiva chocolates. I've read studies that state that blind taste tests cannot rate them higher than Russell-Stover chocolates, a much less expensive chocolate. The reason why Godiva exists is because people want to pay more for chocolate. It's part of a high-class lifestyle. They need to feel high-class, and they need to fit in with their high-class friends. This same phenomenon is true with many other products. Just replace "high-class" with "cool", and you'll see what had fueled the sale of Nike shoes for years.
I'm not interested in using products to make me feel like I'm better or, or in using products to impress my friends. I am, however, interested in selling products to people who feel that way. It seems to me that the seller is in the much more intelligent position than the buyer.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Some people are freaked out by the notion that Linux's source code is "open", and, as such, don't understand how it could possibly be a secure platform if all of its workings can be easily seen. Yeah, I know, it's wrong, but that's what a lot of people think. A lot of people think something freely available like Linux can't possibly be secure.
My experience with IS MBA textbooks and students is quite different; many of them have barely, if at all, even heard of Linux (and Unix), and almost none of them have any idea of the advantages it can bring to their business. I've shown some of my MBA-student friends some of the utterly cool stuff that can be done with OpenOffice, Python, PostgreSQL, and Samba, and many of them are stunned at the flexibility and capability, given the low cost and ease of development. They're also nominally kind of pissed at their instructors for not bringing this fantastic technology up, because they know that the kinds of advantages offered by free software are the kinds of advantages that can make-or-break a business.
I'll be working on an MBA in a few years myself, and I plan on paying pretty much nothing but lip service in the computer section to the instructors -- I've been working in the field long enough to see how things work, and I'm not stupid enough to think that one vendor is going to be able to solve all of my problems. I'm also not stupid enough to turn down a cost-effective solution just because it's not "commercial" -- nevermind that the non-commericial offerings of the free software world often have better support.
Maybe I should just start up a business that does nothing but set up and train users with free software for a small fee. *grin* It'd still be cheaper than any of the solutions from Redmond...
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
PHB have no clue about it because it isn't offered as standard by the major PC makers. If when you were buying a PC and you forgot to tell them to ship Windows XP they by default shipped SuSE or Mandrake then maybe they might know what it is.
Now at the Best Buy it's not that Linux is missing from the shelves. It's that applications that Run on Linux are missing on the shelves. Give me Quickbooks, OfficeXP, or Adobe with little "for Linux" stickers on them and we might get noticed.
Most PHBs don't even know what an OS is. I've had plenty of well educated people, when I ask them, "What OS do you run?" tell me Word. They know on some level that they run Windows but they are clueless about what it really is. They just hear the name and they parrot that. Word, Windows, whatever...
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Although we certainly see plenty of that kind of Linux zealotry on /., I really doubt that's what's going on in the corporate IS world. I'm one of the success stories -- I was able to convince my boss to go with a FOSS solution for our corporate database setup -- and I did it by preparing a calm, reasoned cost-benefit analysis with lots of references. But the primary reason it worked, IMO, is that we're a small company, and my boss, one of the founders of the company, is a scientist rather than a B-school grad.
... and I do believe that many of them are the way they are because they're the projects of the kind of "education" the article describes.
For every Linux (or BSD, or OS X) zealot, there are a hundred Windows zealots, the majority of them suits who have never had any real education in the evaluation of competing software, and who will reject out of hand any non-Windows solutions because that's how they were trained and because Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I took an 11 week course (we are on quarters) in Management of Information Systems. During the entire 11 week period my proffesor constantly damned the "cathederal approach to software engineering" we refer to as Linux (the book coined the term). His arguement was that it is not easy to use, it is not guarenteed to continue into the future, and there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes.
That being said, he refused to take a copy of knoppix, refused to play with it when I loaded it for him on the school's computer, and refused to believe that I wasn't playing a trick on him. Because he was the boss of the class and was handing out the grades, I was only able to convience one member of the class on the possibilities of class.
Oh yeah, the prof was a teacher at Northwestern and at DePaul. Yeesh.....
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
Ever tried installing Java and Java programs? Ever tried to compile Java 1.3.1 (Native threads) on OpenBSD where you have to downloading several big files files from Sun after agreeing to Sun's obnoxious lisences? Java, the platform where everything is opaque? Where lack of relevant informations is the norm, and not the exception?
To vent some frustration, I've got a quote from the bok "Apache: The Definite Guide" (page 384):
Very true. Curerently, my college is quite MS-centric. It's got this whole "Microsoft Certified Academy" plaque somewhere in the main hall which gave me a fear for something which became a reality when I got into "Advanced Programming" classes. They basically told us to go learn ASP.NET from w3schools.org and to get ( download ) a ASP.NET forum up and running, which I didn't like for several reasons:
And I won't even mention some of the books I must have for college: Very MS-centric. More or less to be expected, but a general understanding on other operating systems is never bad. Don't even get me started on the things they dont teach regarding Macs, which still hold a sizeable portion of the desktop market. ( when compared to Linux ) You'd think some general knowledge like knowing how to set up a network with Macs and Linux/Windows machines would be useful.
* Silly Dutch educational system.
** Not to mention licensing costs. W2k AS, 3999 USD and SQL Server, 1489 USD. Of course, we could fiddle around with Access database which would be a joke, but a less expensive on at 229 USD. I could of course use MSDE ( core of SQL Server ) which is free but comes with NO management tools. Woot. Not surprisingly, after the "teacher" told us to install W2k AS with SQL Server, legally, we told him to go hell.
Hate me!
Well, except you just made me think of the article again and the big problem is that the article is most likely WRONG.
We're talking about some reasonably smart people here. Most of whom don't just buy off on an idea because they see it in print, and most of whom know how to research things a bit. Hell, I know a lot of business types and I seriously doubt they remember anything from school. Most of them went to get that scrap of paper that helped 'em land the job, then learned the real stuff there.
Treat the text of this article the same way you'd treat the text of one of the referenced text books: Don't believe it just because it's on Linux Insider.
Business people are trained to think in terms of dollars and risk. They need quarterly profits to satisfy investors, they need to manage risk. I have seen very few treatments of Linux or other OSS solutions that satisfactorily address BOTH cost and risk management concerns.
Linux is growing in a somewhat organic way, and the technology of it is way ahead of our ability to actually sell it. Until we address that lop-sidedness in the community, I don't see things changing fast, but they still will change, it's happening all the time.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
People are already being sent to Linux training (by their employers) in droves in my area.
.la file is. I definitely could not set up a Linux firewall or routing system without *heavily* drawing from a reference work, not like those Cisco gurus can do with their hardware, where they just happily rattle off commands. I don't have a clue how emerge works, or what its drawbacks are. I don't know how to configure Metacity. I've never seen YaST. I barely know any PHP. Perl's objects are a closed book to me. I develop software, and yet it's still a complete mystery to me how people can write autoconf files without painfully slogging through huge masses of GNU documentation and looking for likely candidates and doing days of cutting and pasting and trial and error. I've never used subversion. These are all standard Linux tools that you'll find on a common distribution.
This should be interesting.
I can't see any kind of training course that effectively teaches someone Linux. You *might* manage to teach someone the GUI configuration front end to Red Hat's current release in a week (including enough background concepts to allow them to understand it). Not much else, though. You definitely can't learn to admin Linux effectively in a week any more than you can learn to admin Windows in a week. I'd go so far as to say that six months of well-thought out curriculum and constant practice probably isn't enough to hammer all the important concepts into someone's head of the workings of just the full set of daemons in a distro, all the important POSIX commands, different security implications, the administrative stuff that a distro uses (keep in mind that this is just for *one* distro) the ins and outs of packge systems, troubleshooting procedures, appropriate forums to go for help and etiquette in those forums, rescue procedures, networking issues...
Maybe it's expecting too much. Most Windows admins that I've run into are barely more than instruction-manual-following monkeys, whereas there are some *scarily* knowledgeable UNIX gurus out there (could be because there are people with thirty years of UNIX experience out there, but none with more than eight of Win95+ experience). You might be able to take a short training course on how to do very basic operation of a system, but if anything breaks, you aren't going to have a *clue* what to do.
God, I've been using Linux heavily for years, and I still don't know standbys like awk (well, just enough to get by, but not much) or anything more than a single operator for sed. I *still* find new commands that I haven't seen before. Groff is a closed book to me. I know a bit of Apache's workings, but not loads. I don't know how to set the systemwide timezone in a distro-independent manner (I could look it up, though). I know almost nothing about sendmail's cf syntax -- without a GUI config frontend, I'd be helpless to get sendmail running, and probably mostly helpless to fix anything more than a basic problem. I don't know what a
May we never see th
You bet! Take a look at the full draft on my site (there's a link in the article). There are thousands of errors of all kinds in these books of which my personal fav rave is "mainframe and minicomputers have one cpu" (Turban et al).
His arguement was that it is not easy to use, it is not guarenteed to continue into the future, and there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes.
.NET. This is all covering a span of under twenty years.
Wow.
not easy to use
I'd give it currently, from an end-user standpoint, about roughly equal to Windows. It is different, though, which means that for a user skilled in Windows, it is more difficult to use at first, until they become familiar with the differences.
it is not guarenteed to continue into the future
I will bet a million bucks that the Linux kernel will be around longer than the Windows NT kernel. There is one company working on the NT kernel -- there are many people working on Linux. Many companies have an investment and the ability and desire to continue using it, and nobody has the ability to "discontinue" Linux.
Or did he mean the APIs? UNIX system and library APIs have been more or less constant since the *'70*s. On Windows, a programmer has had to learn (get ready for it) DOS goodies, Win16, Win32, potentially the missing functionality in Windows CE and the added functionality in WinNT (which, frankly, is vastly more of a pain in the ass than the differences between even "different operating systems" like FreeBSD and Linux). Toss MFC into the mix. Now Microsoft's moving their developers to
Or maybe he was talking about the applications? Sysadmins might learn an application and then it's yanked out from under their feet...but sendmail (then called delivermail) shipped in the *'70*s. How about Apache? It started out as NCSA httpd, and was the second web server ever written.
there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes
Absurd. Unless you are Dell or the US Government (and then only *maybe*), Microsoft does not *care* whether there's a bug in Windows. Name one instance where someone successfully sued Microsoft for a flaw in, say, Windows, and recieved damages for the problems caused by it. You can call Microsoft "accountable" all you want -- they are simply not.
In the Open Source world, I can sit down right now and email the main author, the development team, the maintainer, or the author of a particular feature (and usually *exact* line of code that I care about). I can generally enter bugs into the same bug-tracking system that the developers themselves use. If I'm in a hurry and need a contract for a fix within a certain time bound, I can hire a contractor to fix a bug or add a feature and send that fix to them, even if my company does not have any in-house developers capable of fixing the problem. I can discuss the problem at a technical level and point out the exact lines of code causing the problem publically, with every interested eye in the world trained on the bug. Linux has seen bug fix times for crucial bugs on the order of less than an hour ("there's a TCP bug that needs to be fixed *NOW*) "we need a fix out ASAP". Let's say you use Photoshop and report a bug to Adobe. Maybe, if you're lucky, they'll fix a bug. WilberWorks (a company formed by some GIMP developers) sells service contracts with guarantees that bugs you run into and require fixes for will be fixed within ten *days*. Try getting Adobe interested in doing something like that. Plus, if I don't like WilberWorks, I can hire anyone else to deal with my problem -- there are consultants and programmers-for-hire all over, and I can pay them whatever it takes or have them sign whatever contract I want to get them to fix my problem. Getting someone to be accountable to ensure that Open Source works is much easier than closed source products, where you have only one option -- the original vendor, which generally does not provide support on par with open source developers that provide support contracts (at least of the ones I've noticed). Most closed-source companies have churn, and do not keep developers on a single project. Microsoft, for exampl
May we never see th
Most executives got to BE executives by caring more about leveraging technology than using technology. In other words, by taking X and using it to make money, rather than takign X and using it to do something.
A guy came into my cube today and asked about the box I'm building. When I mentioned that it ran Lniux, he asked me "Really? What *IS* Linux, anyway? What good does it do me?"
This was a brilliant question and it deserved a complete answer. So I looked at him. All of his needs were already met by Windows. We don't upgrade operting systems -- we just buy new machines ever three years or so on R&D grants -- so the cost issue was not there. He has never gotten any viruses and the firewall protects him from worms. In his day, he uses all of three apps: a custom program for customer management (Windows only), PC Anywhere (Windows only) and Microsoft Word. And he's busy as hell -- certainly doesn't have the spare time to pick up bash syntax or play around with Gee Whiz features. So I said to him, "It does you no good at all."
And then I proceeded to explain to him why I used in on the server. "If I ran the company website and that FTP site on Windows, I'd have to constantly worry about them. I'd have to constantly be installing patches and watching for exploits. By running Linux, I can decrease my watchfulness to the point where I only have to check up on it once a month."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The professors creating the courses are MS Biased, so it follows that the books chosen are MS centric.
I'm tutoring at the local CC, and was asked to teach a short course in Linux. Try to find a textbook that talks about a current version of Linux. Before you Fanboys start flapping your gums about kernel versions, the school will change books every year to keep up with the latest "innovations" from Redmond, and has changed mid year for the past two years.
The school's only "open" minded professor worked with me, and we ordered instructor's desk copies from all of the major text book publishers. The ones that came with CDs had RH7.2 This was Nov 03! Yet the same publisher had texbooks on Windows server2003.
After looking at the paucity of readily available textbooks, we opted to go for an open source solution: Paul Sheer's RUTE.
I taught out of the book, and the students had the choice of buying the book, or downloading the PDF. I burned copies of Knoppix so that they could actually have Linux at home to practice on.
This school does have two computer labs with Linux, one is locked away from the rest of the LAN, on its own subnet and firewall, and the other has removable hard-drives, and they disconnect the room from the LAN before they install the linux drives!
The school still equates Linux and "Hackers" since the sole purpose of Linux there is use in the computer forensics classes. Any wonder why the CIS majors never learn anything about Linux?