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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."
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=phb&r =67
Basically, it's a Bachelor of Philosophy.
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();
"PHB: /PHB/
[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From the Dilbert character, the archetypal halfwitted middle-management type. See also pointy-haired."
Souce: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/PHB.html
It is always easy for a person who dislikes a platform to make it look bad and point out why it is bad. Text Books are no exception an author who doesn't particular care for an OS even though they are try to objective, will often get their feelings about it in some way or another either by ignoring the fact, giving negative examples, or use negativity resining to explain the features of an other product, "Example: Linux was designed in part because of the shortcomings in windows." While I don't say that Windows is Bad it is implied that Linux is better then windows, Implying that windows sucks. So I probably is best is to concentrate on your platforms strong points and not on its opponents week points, Thus saving yourself from a flame war with your boss. What works best for me is that I compare OS's to Tools Windows is a Hammer and Linux is like a screw driver. They do essentially the same thing put a piece of metal in wood. But they do it differently and having different tradeoffs. Most bosses can understand tradeoffs vs. Better and Worse because with better and worse flame wars occure when speaking about Tradeoffs then it seems much more level headed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Eeee, could it be because you don't get kickbacks when somethings free??
(Runs, ducks for cover!!)
Mod +5 Drunk
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.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
Could it be that many PHB's fear the penguin because of the illogical, emotionally-based arguments so many Linux zealots constantly use to push their agenda? I mean, many of the nutcases I've heard from speak of Linux like the coming of some New World Order, reminiscent of how Communists pitched their ideas back during the fifties. PHB's take one look at people like that and say "there's no way in hell I'm going to trust someone so emotionally involved in this to make a valid business decision."
There have been an increasing number of articles, posts, and so forth coming from notable people in the Linux community pointing out how the zealotry is really becoming a serious impediment to further Linux progress. In particular, they cite many Linux zealot's inability to take any sort of constructive criticism and their steadfast belief that the users should conform to the OS instead of the other way around. They say this is bad for Linux, and I think they're right on.
Microsoft is using this irrational zealot behavior to convince more PHB's that Linux is some kind of cult, not just an operating system. The more outspoken the zealots are, the more they hurt things.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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.
Our CIO is a sharp guy, understands that Linux is the appropriate technical answer to several of the problems we have, and understands the value of open-source software in genereal. The problem is, we got _the letter_, and he's understadably not interested in becoming a headline-making company for the wrong reasons. It's annoying and frustrating, but until SCO gets slapped down hard and goes away, we have to consider the legal/political aspect as well as the technical merits. Yes, it's BS. Yes, their claims are worthless, but yes, he has chosen not to put us at risk as a target of SCO. He expressed the same frustration that we techies are feeling.
If SCO is just a shill for Microsoft, and is trying to delay the inevitable slide away from Windows, well, in our case, it's having some of that effect. If they're not doing this as an agent of Microsoft, well, it has the same effect.
I think he pretty identified the primary reason Linux has been slow to catch on in mainstream business.
It's all fun having a bunch of geeks get together and talk about how great Howard Dean is and how c00| Linux is; but we're still very nieve when it comes to educating the decision makers in the world. I'd love to seem some discussion about how to get Linux written up in more business textbooks. I would have thought the RHAT IPO and IBM would have helped this; but wow that article showed that misconsceptions still abound.
You're aware that you can purchase commercial distributions of Linux that are quite pricy, right? Something like Red Hat's high end server product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server starts at $1500, for example. I'm reasonably sure you can find a Linux distributor that will be happy to do business with you if your primary requirement is high cost.
May we never see th
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
Most non-geeks have no clue, period. I'm constantly hearing from mostly educated people that they're having a problem using "Microsoft" or "Adobe", by which they usually mean Word or Excel in the first case and either Acrobat Reader or Photoshop in the latter case. But it could be just about anything. People simply have no clue how their computers work, they just see the brand names everywhere so that's what they remember.
HOWEVER, people aren't entirely hopeless. If you sit down with them with a clear idea of what you're trying to explain, and explain that thing calmly and clearly in terms they can relate to, most will pick some of it up. If you calmly explain it a few more times, still keeping to terms they can understand, they'll get even more of it. We, the geeks, are the educators. The market and the education system has no desire to talk about something that doesn't make them piles of money.
If we treat people with respect and keep our ideas clear, they will listen most of the time. Stick to real world examples that have or can affect them. If you can't come up with a real world example, maybe you should go back and rethink whatever idea you're trying to explain. If it doesn't affect them at all, why are you harping on it?
Geeks are capable of changing the world, one non-geek at a time. Just have patience.