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USA Today and NYT on Linux rising
prostoalex writes "USA Today notices significant rise of Linux in the high-end enterprise environment. Although it doesn't provide obligatory pretty pictures, the paper mentions the projects at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and NASA. Also if you've missed the New York Times Google article of the day, the expose on John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about venture fund investing $12 million in LinuxCare. NYT quote: "That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of," said Mr. Doerr, explaining the importance to having a stake in a Linux-based venture. "Probably get run over.''"
I would like to see Linux succeed as much as any other slashbot, but these "linux is gaining ground" and "XXXX is going to be the year of the linux desktop" stories all over the place are as old as the FreeBSD is dying posts. The next story(ies) I want to see concerning linux gaining ground is when linux surpasses its commercial competitors... specifically apple and MS. If anything I think the large number of them hurts the cause, because using solar energy as an example, years of reading about how much better things are getting and how big things are just around the corner makes you lose faith in the technology.
I mean, seriously... in high-end enterprises traditionally powered by mainframes and other big iron computers, it's just waiting to be overrun by Linux.
Sure, it can also be the *BSDs, but there's no denying that Linux is where the growth is much, much more rapid.
Within the space of a few years, Linux already has feasible clustering technologies and tremendous kernel-level improvements (as can be seen in the 2.6 series).
Those who can't see "the Linux advantage" in this area are just blind, or choosing to see it as a competitor to their traditional solutions, and not as a potentially profitable and cost-effective tool that it really is.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
I don't deny that Linux is rising. Hurrah to open source and down with evil corporations and PHBs!(err, assuming they don't exist in OSS)
However, $12 mil is too small in today's world. The LinuxCare website does not have any customer testimonials listed. Neither is the website itself too impressive - gives you the impression of a startup. Will it crawl, walk and run? Only time will tell.
But what's important is the disparate, yet collective impetus for individuals and organizations far and wide, into a solution that doesn't exist as a single dominant entity, but feeds upon the ever-increasing converts (or zealots).
Let's hope, with time, not only is Linux's use spreads to corporations, but also it becomes usable and acceptable by newbie users. We all know how great and brilliant Linux is, but the true acceptance will come the day first time computer buyers will go and buy a Linux pre-installed PC.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
That's a freight train I wouldn't want to get in front of
Or be riding it on if it derails.
I've decided I'm going to write an article stating "Linux is dying", citing distribution fragmenting the market, Red Hat moving to the ~$5/mo. subsciption model, the end of FreeSWAN, and SCO's litigation invoking FUD.
I'd be full of shit, but it would be about as substanciated as some of the articles posted here on Linux lately.
"High-end enterprise environments?" The article is about scientific research clusters (MPP), not enterprise business servers, which are typically large SMP boxes. There's a big difference between 100 one-way Linux boxes crunching numbers with Fortran and a 100-way Sun E15000 running OLTP with Oracle. The latter is a "high-end enterprise environment"; the former is not.
You have obviouly NOT tried GNOME 2.6. It has been given a complete usability makeover. Most notable is the new file manager which is ultra easy to use and the computer icon which makes hardware support ultra easy. Saying Linux is hard to use with modern distros such as the upcoimng Fedora 2 is nothing but a TROLL!
Intel has open sourced their centrino drivers, NVidia and ATI all have drivers so driver problems are now extermly rare!
Yes I did. My comment on the desktop was slightly off topic, yet still related. But my point is still valid. How long have people been saying that linux/unix is the OS of choice for corporate servers? It's not that admins don't know about linux, it's that they just don't know how to use it. You wouldn't want to install an OS as a server that you knew nothing about, now would you?
I've talked to many other admins, and they all love the performance Linux adds to servers. But again, they just don't know how to administer linux, so they use IIS or whatever. Plus, in college, they don't teach Linux. I know at Purdue, all the classes are Visual Studio, IIS, etc. Why? Because MS gives the bookstore education copied of all their software. MS keeps the market cornered not because they are a better OS, or because linux is unknown. They dominate because they target the prime group. Students studying to be the future admins of the world.
Good news, good news. Soon there will be stories of stupid Linux users phoning support and then we'll see viruses popping up everywhere. It will all be an anavoidable monolith that will shout out the fame of Linux.
From the eWeek article on January 13th, 2003: "The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is already creating supercomputer clusters using HP rx2600 servers powered by Itanium 2 and running Linux. Scott Studham, technical lead for the lab's Molecular Science Computing Facility, said they chose Linux over HP-UX in part because they had used it in other projects. "It is very stable, very robust, and [it is] very easy to get support," Studham said."
The rising tide of Linux at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory came at the expense of the HP-UX. And why not? The PNNL (and NASA) employ a significant number of engineers and computer scientists at high expense. They can justify having them work on computer projects such as customizing or modifying the operating system. I would expect them to "roll their own". Using open source probably has saved taxpayers a significant amount of time and money, and may benefit us all.
Most fortune 500 companies do not have the FTE allocations to bring in computer scientists, and instead look for packaged products and solutions.
Bottom line: Yay for Linux!, but this is not business news.
Have you Meta Moderated t
I suppose that the government funded projects / agencies mentioned have never ever used unix before.
Given the context is the written word, and that documents will (hopefully) persist beyond one week - the reader probably won't know that the document was written in 2004 unless the document says so.
Paying a dividend is only one way of rewarding shareholders. The other is to reinvest in growth. No early investor of Microsoft complained that it took them years (decades?) to pay a dividend. The trick is for the company and the shareholders to both recognize when further growth is unlikely.
I hate it when people start throwing around talk of huge profits. Last time, it spawned a lot of companies later called ".bomb"s...
Not that I think Google will fail...but a massive rush of investment into Linux businesses could lead to another serious round of hype.
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I work for the laboratory and the quote is a little misleading. We actually have closer to 10,000 processors here 2,000 of which run Linux. These are the two supercomputer clusters that we have. Most of our servers and almost all the workstations have Microsoft operating systems. My group has 8 servers and about 100 workstations and only 2 servers and about 3 workstations run Linux. The supercomputers are simply incredible though!
But thinking linux is taking on the world is still a bit silly to me. Sure its gained heaps of mainstream acceptace, but to think Microsoft will let it get out of hand and become a real threat just doesn't reflect history or reality. I know the /. community myself included doesn't care for MS. However, there isn't a one that can deny the corporate giants they are and what shrewed and effective buisness men run MS.
I'm not a MAC fan(never even used one) but I think Apple has a better shot IF it adopted the x86 hardware.
(Just ignore the crazy guy at the bottom of the list)
Again.
Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
You present a mixed message there that really is not fair to Google. They have been private and profitable for quite some time and to lump them in with "companies with no real business plan" does not help your point.
What you point should be, imo, is that many people walking around with capital, with MBAs, or those writeing about these events have no real clue about what is really going on with IT technology and instead play there strategies off buzzwords and watered down reports.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!