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Google Gives Reason Why it is Built on Linux
Rob writes "A common reason why more governments and enterprises around the world are moving to
open source software is unhappiness, it was revealed during a panel discussion at the
LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday. Google Inc open source programs
manager Chris DiBona said the search giant has stuck with Linux throughout the company's
life, in part, because it
was unhappy with the terms of another software company. Which borgware company is he referring to?"
Also, the freedom to change the bits that you need changed. Don't like that particular piece of software? Change it. Don't ask any other company - just do it.
You can't do that with most commercial products. All you can do is put in a feature request, and hope that it is implemented before the sun goes cold. (Yes, I know that some companies do, but some do not.)
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
They had a talk here at CMU by a Kernel hacker at Google ... he was talking about how they were able to add code to the kernel to get an incredibly close view at exactly what was going on in the kernel so that they could pinpoint problems and bottlenecks - something that they could not do with a proprietary system. (The speaker, BTW, was Richard Sites, who also helped design the Alpha architecture).
Apple was an extremely bad example of yours. Ever heard of Darwin? It is open source, runs on PPC and Intel. You can tweak it as much as you want (like Google wants), and if you are a government employee (like in the remainder of the article) you can just boot up the full Mac OS X to get a usability that linux will never come close to.
A few points:
Tivo is not open source. It runs Linux and you can get your very own version of Linux from the source code, but you do not have a Tivo when you are done, because that code is not open.
Linksys routers are an appliance, and not completely open as well. e.g. Broadcomm drivers are closed.
Because Google Earth wasn't written by Google - it was written by Keyhole which was subsequently acquired by Google. There's no reason to presume there will never be a Linux version (but there's also no reason to presume there will be, either).
When a popular web site links to another web site, the link target gets a lot of hits.
Slashdot is one example of this. Fark is another. SomethingAwful's Awful Links of the Day are another. Netscape's "What's Cool" is one of the first. I don't see what the big deal is. Google could start soliciting payments to link more sites -- oh wait, as a company that makes nearly all its money from advertising, that's what Google always does!
For more information, click here.
Ahh, the knowledge that has been lost.
;-) you could run your BBS entirely from an RAMdisk and it was FAST.
/dev/r0 or /dev/ram0 or similar, which you can format and mount and use like a hard drive. Or at least, it used to. I haven't checked in a few years, and I never actually built it into my kernel, but OSes like Slack did use it for their boot/root floppies, etc.
When I was a CS student in the late '80s and early '90s, we had entire labs full of Sun and HP machines that had no hard drives. They booted off the net and ran entirely in RAM.
Years before that, when I was a kid with a PC, there were RAMdisks in most operating systems at the time that were easy to use, and if you had a fancy schmanzy expansion card with some godawful amount of RAM on it (like 512MB
Linux still has RAMdisk drivers in it somewhere that lead to something like
In any case, getting back to diskless workstations netbooting... this is a MAJOR win when you have rooms full of hardware. There's no reason each of them needs their own hard drive if every single one of those hard drives will just have the same data and enough RAM to run w/o excessive paging/swapping is cheap. You save on initial cost. You save on power. You save on failures of other hardware due to heat. You save on failures of all those freaking drives. You save on the labor it would take to re-image and replace them. And you save on complexity, since all systems then become essentially interchangeable--just plug it into a network port and go, no need to worry about whether it's been "configured" right or whats on its hard drive (or isn't on its hard drive, as the case may be).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Before that talk I never new you could run entire systems directly from RAM. Wild.
Yes, it's very cool. Done right, response times are dumbfounding. And if you take an approach like Prevayler you can still have reliability and transactional integrity.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Apparently I've gored some sacred cow here: my original question "Why didn't they pick BSD" got ranked "overrated", when it hadn't even been rated.
Thanks moderators.
Here we go again: why didn't they pick BSD? All things being equal, I figure that just due to having more expeirence with BSD, they would have gone with it over Linux.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
What an annoying poke at Microsoft, but I suppose I shouldn't expect anything less from the ass-puppets at Slashdot. It must be nice to have all your worlds problems boiled down to one fucking target... a FUCKING HUGE target.
Chill, we would still be bitching about OS/2 or DrDos if they were around. But they are not. I bitch at the KDE/Gnome teams as much as I want too.
Linux works fine, but it doesn't allow me to be productive. I leave Linux to do its job where it really shines: Office labor, Servers, etc. The selection of Software available for Graphic and Media are simply pathetic for Linux.
Ok, its your choice. But if you really wanted quality sound you'd still be running an Apple 2GS with 32 simultaneous channels. If you really wanted quality video you would still be running that Amiga 4000 with a video toaster. Generic Dell/Gateway whatever Windows PCs wont give you either. Neither will generic Linux PCs.
My Wifes $200 Naked PC equipped with Audigy and ATI running SuSE gives me a little of both worlds without the cost of a Windows license. I invested a day to learn how Audacity and Broadcast2000 work. It took me two days to teach her how the programs worked. We do video/audio editing just fine.
I prefer to use a Mac or XP for that.
Knock yourself out. I have two Macs here at the compound (no XP). I was trying to be helpfull, and please don't trash what your not willing to experience yourself.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Article mirror:
http://firepacket.net/mirror/unhappy.html
Thats part of what the GPL 3 is supposed to address- if you use modified GPL code to supply a web service to the outside, you'll have to release the modifications. The web service and patent holes are why they're writing version 3.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
http://www.google.com/linux
sig?
That's not ironic.
Parent illustrates WHY OSS is so valuable.
That level of support is available with a lot of money and a lot of clout. I doubt that either alone is sufficient.
The skill required is not that great. It is entirely reasonable to fix one bug you care about and cause 10 bugs you do not know or care about. The patches go back to RedHat who has the non-trivial task of figuring out if they are worthwhile in general. (If accepted, it's much easier the next time;)
I may have said 'Microsoft, or any other commercial os'. I mean, hate to say it, but the Microsoft XP Kernel isn't terrible, I just don't want all the stuff around it (windowing systems, etc..).
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
The history of your searches are not in the cookie. The cookie is a key to some data structure in a hash table or tree that resides in the server, which stores further information about you.
And this key works even though I set Firefox to delete cookies at the end of each session and I regularly obtain a new IP from the DHCP server?
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
And content rating preferences and so on. Or would you rather reset them each time? But unless you signed up for an actual account (e.g. gmail), Google had no idea who you were dispite the cookie. All it knew was that someone, somewhere, kept looking for free porn.
And I know how cookies and servers work. It's my job. But read the sentence, "...the same cookies [sic] that store the IP and info of every single search that is done on google."
Given that sentence, is it obvious that the OP understands these things? For that matter, was it not obvious from the tone of the reply that I was being just a little sarcastic?
Please reread the posts before responding to them...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The formatting is screwed up, but it would take too long to fix it. All the information is there. You can see that Microsoft's own site won't stay up as long as the sites listed running Linux (those with known uptimes). There could be a lot of reasons for that, however; I'm sure Microsoft has some extra troubles just because it's so huge. Also note that not all Linux-run sites stay up much longer than Microsoft-run sites, but on average they seem to win hands down.
Esoteric reference.
We had a Google rep. come visit us at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in April or so, to round up fresh engineers.
As far as I remember it, they are now on version three of their cluster design, and today it is simply rack mounted machines like you find in any cluster, but up until and including version two it was simply motherboards stacked on top of each other. And like the grand parent said, they were never replaced simply because you couldn't get them out of the stack. So the dead ones were just sitting there.
He showed us a few photos of it, it looked worse than any geek closet I have ever seen.
this has not stopped a lot of popular software from being presented to the users in a distro-agnostic manner
.EXE, you can build a .RPM that contains only your package.
.... etc"
But I think it has prevented even more software from being released for Linux!
Sure you can work around it, but let's face it: for Windows you buy one of those packaging tools that handle installation on 98/2000/XP for you and you only have to supply your files and where they have to go.
On Linux, it could potentially have been simpler, because the packaging tools are delivered with the OS. No need to package everything as a
But there the nightmare starts. Will your user be able to install the RPM with a commandline or via the sysadmin GUI? If the latter, where would he/she have to click? How do you write your installation manual?
Does the system support RPM at all? Or do you need to supply multiple formats?
Small wonder that the few successful packages had to fall back to a custom installation program. This means a lot of extra work (proportionally more when the program to be installed is smaller, like some toolbar).
IMHO it is a major holdback for deployment of Linux on your average desktop. Users want to download something, and install it using clear instructions not longer than a few paragraphs. Like "click on the YaST icon, choose install additional software, select the program you downloaded", or "doubleclick on the program you downloaded and type the password for software installation".
Not "first find out if your system uses RPM or DEB, then download the appropriate package. Or select the tarball if it supports neither of these. Then, when you chose RPM, open a Shell window and type 'rpm -Uvh the_name_of_this_program.rpm'. when you downloaded the DEB file,
I wouldn't say a world of search features but it's definitely handy.
So, this begs the question: Why didn't they use a BSD?
It raises the question. Begging the question is a particular type of logical fallacy. Don't use phrases you don't know the meaning of.
If you look, most BSD's have a "lite" version, and a pro version, and you get the lite for free, and the pro version requires money.
What. Mind pointing out evidence of that? Because I've used FreeBSD and OpenBSD and there's absolutely no mention of free and pro versions of it. Well, I've heard of a free version, and a pro version, but since they're the same thing, I don't think you can really call them versions. You want a BSD? You go download it. You want to support the developers? Buy the CDs, but remember that you're getting exactly the same OS as you would if you'd just downloaded it.
Free and Pro versions of "most BSD's"??? Have you even gone to their websites, much less used them?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
They're required by GPL to distribute the kernel mods if they distribute the kernel.
Somehow I doubt they need to give away the software, and as GPL allows, use the modified version "only internally" at the company.
That everyone with a net access over the planet can benefit of those "mods" is irrelevant. They aren't redistributing nor selling their modified kernel.
When I write applications for Unix, my primary concern is that they work correctly in both Linux and Solaris. That nicely exercises most of the portability issues, and as Unix APIs go, they're not very far from the ideal center of mass. I find that when I do this, I can adapt to other Unix variants quite easily, whereas I end up doing a lot of grumbling and fiddly refactoring of IFDEFs if I go the other way around.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
However, if you are writing a graphically based application, will cut-and-paste work uniformly for the user so that the text will appear correctly in another application, with font information intact? Can you say with confidence that the end-user's cut-and-paste will work properly for pictures from one application to the other with no problems? Can you write a program and distribute it without worrying about whether the end-user is running Gnome or KDE properly installed with proper version numbers? Will your installation package work no problem with Gentoo and RedHat and SuSE? Are fonts standardized? The X-Window management system has historically always had a problem with these issues. Indeed, Linux vendor RedHat complained
And these are issues that Google never has to worry about. Google has a lower threshold of acceptability and their front-end application is so elementary (it's just a single form with a text field) that it does not test the system in the way a word processor might.