Slashdot Mirror
Unisys: We No Longer Have A Way Out
rbochan writes "Some of you may recall a couple of years back when Microsoft and Unisys decided that a multi-million dollar ad campaign against *nix was in order, dubbed 'We Have A Way Out.' The results weren't what they'd hoped. ZDNet is now reporting that Unisys has done an about face and is now touting Linux as 'a mature technology and the right cost-effective option for many companies.'"
A disclaimer: I am a Unisys employee.
Unisys is definitely making a move towards widespread adoption of Linux (Red Hat and SuSE) as a development platform, and various other open source development tools (eg, Maven, Eclipse, various parts of Apache Commons, etc). Regardless of current marketing hype from Blackmore and McGrath (the CEO), this is very much a bottom-up driven initiative. Open source software is finding itself in an increasing number of Unisys solutions, to the occasional consternation of management. So what you're hearing from the Unisys management publicly now is "hooray, Open Source," but what you would have heard a few years ago was... well, nothing, unless you worked for Unisys, in which case you probably would heard "stay the hell away."
Note: when I say "finding my way into," I don't mean "being stolen." Unisys is being extremely careful as to what the various license requirements are for the things it's using, so developers and architects are cognizant of the implications of the GPL and other similar "sharealike" licenses where their efforts are concerned. My experience with the developers here has been that they are pretty agnostic about everything except efficacy - they just want the stuff to work, and they want to get it done right for as little money as they can spend. I find that to be a healthy attitude.
For a guy like me whose roots are pretty heavily in open software, there's more than a little irony here. You may recall Unisys' spat with the Free Software Foundation, or... well, really a whole bunch of people, including Accuweather, over software patent issues.
One last thing: Peter Blackmore has identified outsourcing as a major component of the Unisys strategy. He's not kidding. Tons of Unisys developers have been axed over the last few years, and much of the development activity has been given to Caritor employees, based either locally at Unisys offices, or in India. The ones I've worked with are good guys, but there's more than a little discomfort between the two groups. Many Unisys folks see his biggest impact on the company as having been the guy who sent Unisys jobs to India.
Think about it -- you're interviewing two guys for an important job. One talks about all the good things he's done at his last job. The other talks about how screwed up things were and how he 'fixed' them. Who are you going to hire?
Well, if you're looking to hire someone to fix a problem, experience fixing those types of problems seems like something you'd look for. I worked at one place where I literally fixed everything - the production web server was rooted and they had no security features in place, at all. I cleaned everything up, built a firewall and a sane security policy. At my next interview, while I didn't dwell on how bad things were before I started, I made it clear that I "fixed" a lot of stuff.
rooooar
Need I say more?
-- Cheers!
Have gotten her to finally consider that maybe all she needs is a good chunk of network storage. I've shown her how she can put 400GB of mirrored storage onto the network with long warranties on the disc drives using a NetGear SC101 for $600. She's considering it right now.
While Unisys may aim towards the higher-end markets than this, a Linux solution with good multiprocessor support and zero cost can make a significant difference in this ever increasingly competative environment -- especially if you're flogging Intel iron against AMD Opterons.
Besides, some things really do run better on Linux. IIRC Oracle 9i is a prime example.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
IMHO, the same forces that caused them to be such jerks about the GIF patent are the same one that caused them to miss the boat with Linux. What many businesses don't understand is that there is far more money out their to be made with IT related services than IT related licensing. To be successfull in the information age, you need to treat the free wheeling free copying nature of the internet like a benefit, not a competitive threat.
Unfortunately there are still all to many businesses who think that the way that they're supposed to make money is by selling information they create like a boxed product and choking off how it's used. Since their business model is incompatable with the Linux business model, there will likely be far more attcks on Linux, and especially freedom in software and information distribution, down the pike.
IMHO, copyrights can not survive the information age.
Sun has lost datacenter shares to Linux, not to Microsoft. Windows just isn't even in remotely the same ballpark as *nix for the kinds of things most people deploy *nix for in datacenters. I've never really heard of any significant cases of people migrating significant services from *nix to windows in the datacenter, other than "business" windows desktop services like company email, company file sharing volumes, etc. At most companies that matter, internal business services are just a small thing running in the corner somewhere compared to whatever domain-specific thing it is they really do with most of their hardware.
Even on the business desktop services side, I suspect we're (finally) seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. As more US states, foreign governments, and eventually the US feds adopt document standards like OpenDocument that OOo uses and start embracing the idea that government software must be open-source, the effect will filter down to private business. First to those that contract with the government directly, and then to businesses that in turn contract with them, etc. The net effect of that change will be that the typical corporate desktop will be running OpenOffice, Firefox, Evolution/Thunderbird/Sunbird/etc (or similar in nature/compatibility) software, and the data being interchanged will be flowing in open formats on open protocols (even if, at least initially, the desktop OS itself is still Windows).
At that point the momentum builds strongly for converting the backend business services off of Windows servers and onto Linux, and off of Windows and onto something better (maybe a future better Linux corporate desktop, or OS/X for x86, or god knows what).
11*43+456^2
The ad was targeting commercial Unix, and asserting that it's expensive and inflexible compared to Wintel. In fact, the ad was right.
Intel/AMD is advancing much faster than proprietary RISC. PC-based servers deliver much better value. Don't use Windows where you can use Linux/BSD (slashdotters cheer); don't use Sun where you can use Windows (slashdotters boo).
So there's not really an "about face" in Unisys's later support of Linux - its a continued drive away from expensive, proprietary and inflexible systems.