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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();
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
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.
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!
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