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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/
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.
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