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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.''"
John Doerr from Valley's venerable KPCB talks about (his) 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.
Slashdot.org: King of the unbiased quotes
Next article: We ask Linus if Linux is l33t and Windows sux0rz
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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.''"
Unlike all those other fluffy freight trains that one could "get in front of" with no consequences. I imagine his last name is pronounced "derrr" (see 'duh' [colloquial]).
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
What I was going to say:
Eh? Hasn't 2.6 been officially stable for quite a while? Does it run quite of a lot of production systems?
Oooooh!
A two month old article! Well done slashdot!
What I realised just before I hit submit:
Ngggg! Why can't people use ISO date format? That is the silly month/day/year format.
Their response? Bankrolling SCO for a few more years.
Trolling is a art,
Well, according to the banner add at the top of this page, Windows Server has a cheaper TCO than linux.
/. more often?
Maybe they'll just advertise on
Has any of the companies the John Doerr has launched every paid a dividend?
Or is this just Silicon Valley Russian Roulette all over again?
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/
American provide big business stories but it usually seems to be hot air. I don't care about big business as the community depends on a few people that actually do something.
I am not intrested in IBM urging SUN to gpl Java as IBM *easily* could provide assistence to the GNU Classpath project. And what about Jikes?
Or Nat Friedman's anti-KDE Fud machine. Novells Suse supports KDE and he will not change that committment.
Business stories may delight some reader, I found it rather unintresting.
I don't think that despite for propaganda reasons big business was of any real importance. When they want provide help it's letter stamp money for them. I would like to see a real committment, i.e. manpower, code and support. I am not intrested in campaigns from the PR office.
(While IBM's patent attorneys lobby in BXL for swpats...)
At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., Linux has all but taken over, said Scott Studham, associate director for advanced computing there. "When I got here three years ago, there were circa 1,000 processors here, of which four ran Linux," he said. "Now there are circa 2,000 processors, and maybe 64 of them don't run Linux."
If this doesn't show that Linux has gained over the years then I don;t know what will.
Linux is future for
- Developer commnunity
- Intelligent software and equipments (Embedded software)
- Governments
- Expert level users
However, for common users linux still is away as
- For various applications, it is not yet common to have linux version and linux drivers
- Level of expertise (not that it is difficult but there always is resistance to change)
- Maturity in linux.
One thing is sure, linux march will prompt microsoft to do better in terms of price and quality.
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.
As some may now Bill Gates invests in companies like John Deere. I thought, "so that's how he's gonna get in, through the back door". Then I RTFA and said Whew!
They play that damn Nelly and Chingy to much, when something like DEER reads as DERR and vice versa.
Correcty me if I'm wrong, but didn't linuxcare already go bankrupt (or nearly so) once during the DotCom flameout? I seem to recall them having an IPO planned and then canning the IPO and laying off a large portion of their staff in the same week. The only useful thing I remember from them was their bootable business card rescue CDs.
Heck, google doesn't even have a snapshot of text for linuxcare.com indicating it's been down for a while and was recently brought back up. In fact, the top hit for which there is a snippet is an article about linuxcare laying people off.
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. I'm sorry, but you're going to check your enthusiasm in favor or results for a little while at least.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
In my free time, when not reading /., I'm an amateur producer/DJ. One program I use is called FinalScratch which implements it's own version of Linux to maximize performance. I think that hi-performance application specific apps like this, rather than using windows and outrageous system requirements, do well to implement their own shell.
This, as well as a larger support system/better useablity for Joe User, in my opinion, is what will bring Linux into the mainstream.
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