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Linus's Baby Comes of Age
just_another_sean writes "Torvalds' Baby Comes of Age - BusinessWeek Online is running a story on how Linux has matured over the years. They have some positive things to say about it, and back up their statements with some examples and stats." From the article: "Hardware companies are selling more than $1 billion in servers to run Linux every quarter, while sales of servers running proprietary software continue to fall. And now, slowly but surely, Linux is making inroads on the desktop as well. According to IBM, 10 million desktops ran Linux in 2004 -- a 40% jump from a year ago. That progress has been an important foot in the door for all open-source companies. Marc Fleury, chief executive of open-source middleware company JBoss, describes the Linux operating system pioneered by Torvalds as the older brother who fought the tough battles and was able to get the curfew extended and the keys to the car, so that life was a lot easier for the rest of the open-source world. "
He does.
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/pat.gif
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The kernel is just one small part
I may be a small part but just try and run those other apps with out it
http://Lenny.com
For web servers, even j2ee application servers and open source stuff linux is fine and dandy, where i can't stand it is enterprise applications.
:(
I can't stand the horrible certification matrix that is a joke on RedHat AS. I can't stand the fact that vendors lock into specific redhat releases and NONE of those locks carry forward. I can't stand the fact that Redhat doesn't seem to care. "contact your software vendor".
Hence, i love solaris for enterprise applications - i'm talking about financial back end systems, i'm talking about heavy duty bpel, oracle sso, applicaitons 11i, oracle 10g grids and everything else. RedHat's TCO because of the lack of supported arch's is more than solaris or even HPUX which is downright scary.
I love my redhat boxen, i wish i could standardize on that platform. Why the hell hasn't the market caught up? i mean for christs sake oracle preaches linux day in and day out yet i have to run AS 2.1 or AS 3.0 and i can't run 64bit database back ends in certain mixes nad i have to have oracle kernel versions for this and that and yet all of this is supposed ot come together in some "proposed" future date.
They've only been saying that for 5 years now
Maybe a little off topic, but I've always wondered what Linus runs on his computer.
Anyhow, last December I got a Linksys wireless ethernet adapter and put it in my main desktop, a Windows ME machine (I haven't bought a new machine since the market crashed in spring 2000). Except it didn't work - perhaps it only wanted to work on Windows XP or something. Anyhow, the drivers for the adapter fried all my networking. I kept working on it, and finally decided to reinstall my C drive. Except it's not like Windows 95 with its decent install disks, I have these crappy OEM Windows ME repair disks. OK, so I backup everything I need on C and go. Well, the crappy OEM CD not only blows away C (which I expected), but blows away the D drive as well to write just one file. So I stop everything, and ponder how I am going to get my stuff off D which I need. So I install Debian on drive C, and rescue the important stuff on D. I also pull my stuff off drives E and F. Then I blow everything away and reinstall Debian for my entire disk.
I have to say, I have missed Windows a lot less than I thought I would. My main concern was being able to read and send Microsoft Word documents, but I haven't had to send a Word document in months, and I haven't had a problem reading the few I need anyhow. So I haven't even had to use the Linux programs that say they can help compensate for this. My roommate has a Windows box anyhow, so I can always use his if I'm desperate (or make other arrangements). I've been using UNIX for a long time and love being able to run Apache, MySQL, PERL, PHP etc. on my computer. I have Mediawiki and osCommerce running locally just for testing, and I have my own MySQL tables and PHP/Apache and PERL scripts as well.
I haven't needed Microsoft like I thought I would. Also, I should point out, I switched because Microsoft has gotten worse (OEM repair CDs instead of the old, easy Microsoft vanilla install/reinstall CDs), and Linux has gotten better (which includes GNOME/KDE etc.) I switched due to necessity, not because I am a free software zealot, although I appreciate free software zealots and can be one myself sometimes. I should also add that my wireless adapter worked fine - Linux had the drivers for it. Windows had the drivers as well - but only for XP (ones that didn't blow away your machine). I would have had to shell out money to upgrade my OS to use my new device. You don't have this problem with Linux.
As far as me being a tech, and this not effecting the population, I disagree. I write software, as do many of us, and this is really what effects things. If all the techs begin writing lots of software for Linux, this changes the dynamics of things. There's an old saying "if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow". Microsoft no longer has me by the balls, which means my mind no longer has to follow them.
Sure, Linux would be nowhere without Gnu, but Gnu would be nowhere without Linux. Can't we just call it a happy symbiosis instead of trying to say it's one or the other's baby?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
On Windows, open source would be okay until MS decides it's time to get into that market.
Yeah, you have to wonder whether Microsoft has shot itself in the foot there. By refusing to port their tools, they've forced the FOSS community to develop the whole software stack for Linux. Now instead of having to compete with just a free OS, and leveraging their Office software income to do so, they're having to compete with an entire platform. Worse for them is that Linux is providing a haven for developers who don't have to immediately compete with closed-source products - at least until they're on their second or third generation and ready to port to Windows.
When someone buys a Mac (for example), there's a fair chance they'll be giving Microsoft some cash for Office, but every successful deployment of Linux on the desktop means Microsoft loses revenue from both of it's main income streams.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Sorry, but Stallman of www.fsf.org was the one, and Linus made an important contribution (the kernel was only one of many pieces needed by the OS), but not as important as those made by the guy who failed to name anything after himself.
The existence of the BSDs is proof that this argument is bunk. Without GNU tools, we'd still have had the BSD toolchain and utilities which predate it. Yes, we might initially have had to use a free-as-in-beer instead of free-as-in-speech compiler, but GNU itself had exactly the same bootstrap problem. In the real world, the GNU toolchain and utilities and compiler are very important on Linux systems, but historically speaking, Linux without GNU is like a fish without a bicycle.
RMS's great contribution to the world was not his so-called operating system, it's certainly not his leadership or project management abilities, and it's certainly not his half-baked armchair philosophy. Much of the ecosystem he insists we all call "the GNU system" (or "GNU/Linux" if we're feeling charitable and want to credit the allegedly unimportant kernel) is there despite his efforts, not because of them, as those of us in the trenches at the time remember.
No, Stallman's great contribution to world was the idea of copyleft or share-alike, as embodied in the GPL. And both Linux and Linus absolutely owe him a debt of gratitude for that, for it drove much of the developer energy that made Linux possible. It's such a great contribution, in fact, that most of us let him slide on all the rest of the egotistical rantings and ravings.
"You could use the GNU utils on FreeBSD and be just as fucking happy."
Not if I want all my hardware to work.
Fought that several times while "trying out" various BSD flavors over the years on numerous computers.
(NetBSD 1.0 DID work well on my A3000/A2410 video card setup back in ~`94 tho IIRC, but any given Linux (0.93?)
tarball "distro" was STILL far easier to port random software to...)
I belive the compiler is more important than you think. Sure you might get free-as-in-beer compilers for the more popular archs, but finding a single one that supports all major and many of the obscure would be a major feat. A lot of kernel development has been sponsored by ibm (power) sgi (mips) sun (sparc) etc, it's not entierly obvious that the adoption of linux had been the same if they not only had to port the codebase to a new arch, but also adapt it to a new compiler, possibly one for each arch, while all maintaining the same codebase.
The existence of the BSDs is proof that this argument is bunk. Without GNU tools, we'd still have had the BSD toolchain and utilities which predate it.
That argument also works in reverse: the BSD kernels can be seen as proof that linux is unimportant.