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Follow Up to "Linux's Achilles Heel"
donheff writes "Fred Langa has posted an Informationweek online followup to his "Linux's Achilles Heel" column that drew a lot of attention on slashdot recently. He responds to several of the most common criticisms and 'posits that high-priced commercial Linux vendors are on a suicidal course, unless they lower prices to accentuate their advantages over Windows.'"
The price from suse for five copies of linux is $598. Isn't this still almost half the price of Microsoft Operating Systems?
His recommendation that vendors lower prices is taking htings much too simply. As a person whose job it is to sell Linux to non-Linux shops, I can tell you there are two conversations here: 1)Linux on the server - here it is already price advantaged as most Linux deployments in server rooms are replacements for mainframe/solaris/sco enviroments and WAY cheaper than those solutions 2)Linux on the desktop - here the price issue of the distry is a secondary concern. Customers worry first about retraining, security, disruption of business due to change, application compatibility, vendor support, price of the productivity suite (Office/Openoffice) then the price of the OS.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
I think he's talking about stuff like RedHat Advanced Server. See, this has been a pro-Windows argument that floated around Usenet for years. And it's very easy to knock down:
The price of commercial Linux is that "high" is because 1) the Linux distro actually includes applications and services that Windows does not, and 2) it includes support, unlike Microsoft's licensing.
Next time you're buying a $2000 SQL server license, ask them if you can get 1) a CD, 2) a manual, and 3) ask how many hours of phone support are included. Of course, the answers will be "no", "no", and "zero".
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
It is exactly this sort of shit that nearly killed UNIX in the 1980s and allowed Microsoft the opportunity to supplant technically superior systems with their shoddy software and then leverage that toehold into a desktop monopoly.
Microsoft was never competing with UNIX. Microsoft is primarily an office desktop system and workgroup networking environment. UNIX was specialist technical workstation system and (these days) high-end server. The competitors to Microsoft were GEM and Deskview on the client side, and Netware and Vines on the server side.
On the other hand, it was good marketing for MS to say that they were competing with UNIX...
Fragmentation is bad for everyone. Sun, HP, et. al. made this mistake before. If they insist on repeating it (and I believe Sun is perfectly capable of repeating acts of inane stupidity perpetually, as they really do seem to have difficulty learning from past mistakes -- remember sunview, openwindows, etc.) they will meet the same fate as before, this time with no one to rescue them.
Sun is not fragmenting Linux. Java Desktop is stuff that runs on standard Linux. You can assemble your own 'Java Desktop' by putting all the bits together yourself, assuming you don't want support.
SunView was before X-Windows. It was certainly not a mistake or an attempt to fragement anything - there were no standards then. When X-Windows came along, Sun provided OpenWindows, a GUI toolset for X. What is mistaken about that?
What the H*LL are you talking about? If there
/dev/js0 file opened and then you're stuck- the module can never be removed, because "joydev: Device or resource busy". Plug the joystick back in, and it connects to /dev/js1. /dev/js0 will never become usable again, until I reboot.
/cdrom will give an error, and "umount" will freeze up in a system call (meaning the process will ignore all KILL signals). Again, the cdrom can only be made usable again by rebooting. (And worse, any processes trying to access the disk will be unkillable. So if those processes also have a file open on your hard drive, then that disk can't be umounted either... meaning you can't reboot cleanly, and will have to yank the power cord, then watch an fsck run)
is a driver available, it will certainly be loadable and unloadable without a system reboot.
Wrong. You sound as if the system always works perfectly- but it doesn't. It's easy enough to get a "stuck" Linux module.
For example, I've got a USB joystick. Plugging it in will automatically cause a module called "joydev" to be installed. Unplug the joystick while a process has the
Similarly, I've got a CD-R whose burning failed. Attempting to mount it from Linux will hang up for a few minutes, then print a failure message. From then on, reading
I'm sure that many Linux users never see these problems: either because they never do those sorts of things, or they have a better version of Linux (I last tried 2.4.26), or they're just lucky. But they do happen.
You mean something like yum, up2date, urpmi, YaST or (gasp!) apt ?
:wq
As a small nit to pick, XP home will *not* play DVD's out of the box. You need to download/purchase/etc. a software DVD MPEG2 decoder for DVD playback to work.
This begs the question: Microsoft obviously licenses many patented technologies to implement in their operating system (JPEG, MP3, Zip, etc.) Why the hell don't they license a DeCSS system from someone and include it as a Media Player codec? Even XP Media Center Edition doesn't include DVD playback. Does that make any sense?
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