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?"

Comments

Re:Free

[aaza]

In this case, the freedom to use the bits you need, not everything that's bundled with it.

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.)

Re:Unsurprising!

[brilinux]

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).

Re:OT: Traffic impact by Google Personalized Homep

[generic-man]

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!

Re:Slackware

[aussersterne]

Ahh, the knowledge that has been lost.

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 ;-) you could run your BBS entirely from an RAMdisk and it was FAST.

Linux still has RAMdisk drivers in it somewhere that lead to something like /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.

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).

MIRROR

[firepacket]

Article mirror:
http://firepacket.net/mirror/unhappy.html

Re:giving back

[zerocool^]

http://www.google.com/linux

Re:Not so sure

[chrisd]

In fact, I'm not even sure I said Microsoft at all during my few minutes up there. I was trying to say that one of thde truly cool things about Linux is that you don't have to talk to anyone outside the company or whatever if you want to mess with it.

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

Re:Netcraft Results

[pe1chl]

Remember that Microsoft sites have to reboot at least once every month after installing patches.

Linux sites often can avoid this (at least as far as Netcraft is concerned; restarting Apache does not cut the uptime), however there have been so many kernel updates last year that a Linux system with a year of uptime is a bit questionable as well.

(of course most kernel updates are for local exploits only; one could decide a properly firewalled system does not need them)