Slashdot Mirror
EDS: Linux is Insecure, Unscalable
daria42 writes "Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC."
Obviously, I thought the study was biased, looking at the list of supporting companies. But then I RTFA:
The alliance comprises a group of IT hardware and software firms that have combined their expertise and products to help EDS create 'best of breed' solutions and compete with the likes of IBM Global Services and Hewlett-Packard for the most lucrative government and enterprise contracts.
Well, if Microsoft wants a lucrative government contract, clearly the organization that is supporting this move is going to decry the competition to push its own agenda.
Why do people even listen to these organizations? I suppose you know their bias from the outset, rather than having to 'read between the lines' of other organizations.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
From TFH:
From TFA:
Fuji Xerox = Oracle?
Back in 1996 EDS declared IE to be the "standard" browser for use on all internal machines. When those of us who were using Sun boxes asked "What about us?", the reply was "We have Sun users?"
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
There's nothing in Linux except the kernel.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The Linux kernel does have quite a few forks. They're just not big, seperate forks. Their work gets routinely folded back into Linus' fork. There's the personal forks like Alan Cox's -ac patch, Andrew Mortons' -mm patch, etc. Many architectures and sub-projects also maintain their own forks. So forks aren't bad on their own. Open Source licenses allow the different forks to share their work. It's just that the big commercial entities like to keep reminding people of the devastating Unix fork. To their commercial mindset it's the only type of fork they can imagine. And they're obviously trying to slow the commoditization of software through adoption of Open Source.
Nice way of completely missing the point.
KDE and Gnome have nothing to do with forks. They're completely different things, independently developed, and which for the most part share no code. You can't just merge them because the architecture is different.
Having several different libraries that implement widgets have nothing to do with forking. And at least Linux has only two big ones. I rarely use Windows anymore, but each time I do I'm amazed at the non-standard look of every damned application. I mean, for some bizarre reason every firewall, antivirus, IM program, office suite, etc. has to have its own widgets, and MS applications aren't an exception.
A fork is a division in the development of a program. For instance, what happened with XFree. It was stagnating, so a group of developers decided to take the current tree, and work on it separately. Result is that we now have an actually active development in Xorg. I fail to see anything bad about it.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1732672,00.as p
Most of the desktop computers in the UK's Department for Work and Pensions were paralyzed for four days on Monday, when a failed upgrade took them offline. The outage, covering 75 percent to 80 percent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs, is one of the largest in the UK government's not entirely impressive IT history.
And possibly one of the most costly. According to staff reports, the outage occurred on Monday afternoon, disconnecting staff e-mail, benefits processing, and Internet and intranet connectivity. According to one, a limited network upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was taking place, but instead of this taking place on only a small number of the target machines, all the clients connected to the network received a partial, but fatal, "upgrade."
Another source says that the DWP was trialing Windows XP on a small number ("about seven") of machines. "EDS was going to apply a patch to these. Unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 percent of the Win2K desktops. This patch caused the desktops to BSOD and made recovery rather tricky as they couldn't boot to pick any further patches or recalls. I gather that [Microsoft Corp.] consultants have been flown in from the U.S. to clear up the mess." EDS is also thought to be flying in fire brigades.
Jason Lotito
Oracle is NOT mentioned in the actual article. Oracle is part of all this in some fantasy world, called Slashdot.
NOT mentioned in the actual article. Remember? You're reading Slashdot...
http://grids.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?s
"More than half of the [world's] fastest supercomputers -- which recently might be more accurately described as super clusters that are assemblies of many lower-power processors -- run on Linux, and Top 500 super list co-compiler and original editor Erich Strohmaier does not foresee any change in the open source operating system's dominance anytime soon."
charlie harvey's website
Just wondering...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
... bullshit! As well all the other major enterprises that have many thousants of deployed Linux boxen running business-critical software. These folks use Linux because 1) it's much more secure and securable than the competition, 2) it scales massively, 3) they can have their own fork (e.g. apply security patches, performance changes, etc. to the current production kernel version on their schedule, not some vendor's). Isn't it ironic how some of the uses of having your own "fork" improve scalability and security. 8-)
Let's not forget that it's far cheaper than the proprietary competition even for all of those benefits.
Also, we are somewhat cautious about what happened with Unix - it splintered into eight applications -- until McNealy (Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun) finally announced he won the battle and had the one surviving Unix out there.
Interesting that EDS shares SUN's view of what Unix versions are available. Imagine how surprised HP, IBM, and even SCO will be to learn that SUN has the one surviving Unix, considering:
The OS registered as compliant with the UNIX 03 specification is: AIX
Other "surviving" Unixes that are registered by the Open Group include, well, look for yourself... http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/catalo g.htm
Big Iron:
BigTux Shows Linux Scales To 64-Way
My current test system has 16 CPUS:
zeus0:~ # tail -15 /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 15
vendor : GenuineIntel
arch : IA-64
family : Itanium 2
(yes, it is Itanium!! Anyone got a 16-way Opteron box? Anyone? Buhler? I thought not...)
And, of course, we all know about Linux clustering:
Beowulf Clusters
Single System Image Clusters for Linux
Ignoring the oddity of Oracle being in that group, none of the rest of the members actually make a scaleable Linux box, just ones that compete with them. The slant is obvious.
- Necron69
Good article from all the way back in 2004 regarding where this is actually pointed. http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=510 00391&flatPage=true
e x.html. Guess not.
m l
s p
Would Sun rather see Linux go away? Sure, but they also believe in it enough to sell it. http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z/index.jsp
These are quotes directly from they guy heading up EDS's strategic alliances. Not from members of the strategic alliance - has anyone asked Ellison if he thinks Linux is insecure, prone to unfriendly forking? Guess not. http://www.oracle.com/events/unbreakablelinux/ind
Cisco? Well lets see they have linux running on some of their hardware, and apparently its good enough for their engineers to run http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0216cislinux.ht
So lets round out the list...
EMC - http://www.emc.com/products/systems/linux/index.j
Dell - http://linux.dell.com/
Microsoft - http://www.mslinux.org/ Err, umm - ok maybe not.
http://windows.scares.us
They say linux doesn't scale well. SGI has Linux systems with 256 cpus in a node. http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/ Microsoft is only now getting a cluster version of their OS http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 3/04/2134229&tid=201&tid=231&tid=156
would highly resent having to replace all it's fine work on NMCI with a new technology. Even if it would be an improvement.
-- Improve Windows - Buy a Mac!
If you check the Alliance's web site (http://www.eds.com/services/alliances/agility/) you will see that Oracle is indeed a member of that group. As is SAP and Siebel, but, they aren't mentioned in the article either.
The poster is correct.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison