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The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won
xtaski writes "Dana Blankenhorn bluntly states a reality that many have known: 'The war is over and Linux won'. With Oracle and Microsoft putting Linux in the spotlight and positioning themselves to grow with Linux. 'A new report shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux against 23% for Windows. ... Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.'"
You missed one. The embedded market...which I'm sorry, but Linux/*nix has had that for a few years now, and no one has noticed.
I'm not talkin cell phones and PDAs. I'm talkin things you use that you NEVER think about. What do you think runs all the slot machines in vegas? Keno machines at truck stops? Station pumps at EVERY BP gas station in the USA? Etc etc. That's a huge marketshare that's pretty much hidden from the public eye.
Linux has already gotten what it's gonna get. Don't expect it to gain any double-digit percentage of market-share in the next decade...it just won't...unless Microsoft takes Novell and incorporates it into their own stuff natively. Maybe we see Windows 2010 with a *nix kernel in it and it runs pretty much all apps.
I think that #3 will happen as a natural progression from MS's anti-piracy efforts and OEM deals. It used to be that when an new MS OS came out, you went out and bought a copy, and installed it on all the computers in your home. Maybe you even went in halfsies with a pal. Now, not only are you not able (without some real effort) install on multiple machines, but you don't even go out and buy a copy of the OS. You buy a computer with the OS already on it. Now what happens to your old machine. Yes, some people will toss them out. Many will keep running their old software. But, there will also be a significantly large group of people that will just install Linux. They won't care if it runs everything, as it is the second computer that they use for writing emails, or surfing the web with someone else in the family is on the gamer system. They may not do much on those systems, but their existence in their homes will show them that there are other choices. Some may even decide that they like Linux better, or that it suits their needs all by itself. That is how I see #3 coming about.
I'm a software consultant, and I see the inside of a lot of companies. In engineering/software departments, there are lots of Unix desktops. Mostly Linux, but quite a bit of FreeBSD and Solaris as well. I'm not seeing it in IT departments, though. I think once Linux manages to get past the MCSE cordon, you're going to see an explosion in corporate deployments.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I really don't think so.
Aunt Tilly is an interesting statistic, nothing more. Look at what she does -- she browses the web, uses wireless. Apparently she needs to edit sudoers for some bullshit reason -- but I think it's bullshit for you to even bring it up; an ordinary Linux user does NOT have to do anything with sudoers, and in fact, I've touched the file maybe once, and I do far more with my box than Aunt Tilly ever will.
But regardless, look at what she doesn't do.
She doesn't spend between $50 and $500 a month on new games.
She doesn't make decisions about what new software a multi-million-dollar company is buying and deploying on hundreds of desktops.
She doesn't develop software... period, not to mention software that is so intricately bound to some quirk in the Windows API that she causes headaches for Microsoft itself when they try to fix their OS.
She, as so many people have made so perfectly clear, doesn't care what OS she runs, so long as it works. Thus, if Linux were taking over in a big way, she might buy an Ubuntu machine and not even know it. She certainly wouldn't be having these "Aunt Tilly" issues you so colourfully describe if Linux came preloaded on her computer and already set for her wireless card.
If "Earth from Space" doesn't work on her computer, and Linux has sufficient marketshare, she'll complain to the Smithsonian, not to her OS. The Smithsonian would be forced to use actual web standards, not made-up proprietary ones.
She doesn't impact, in any real way, the success or failure of Linux, other than perhaps word-of-mouth, and whether she tolerates websites going down or her credit card information being stolen.
The people who would need to use Linux are: gamers, business executives, IT people, and software developers, not necessarily in that order. These people are the only people who will actually make a conscious decision one way or the other, and they're certainly in a way to make other key people sweat.
For instance, let's say a large company suddenly decides to go pure-Linux, but they've been buying from Dell. They switch to someone else. As one company after another does this, Dell will either be forced to start selling computers without an OS (and at an actual, legitimate discount from the Windows ones), or even start preloading Linux, or they'll lose business and someone else will fill the gap. With enough companies doing this, it becomes viable for an OEM to decide it's cheaper to support their few home users by preloading Linux and supporting that than to deal with Microsoft. Home users will be faced with a choice -- actually spend $250+ on an OS, or switch. My feeling is, Aunt Tilly, given the choice, won't want to spend $250 on something she doesn't care about anyway. Many of them may even notice how nicely their work computers run, and will take Linux home with them.
Another scenario: Gamers, who have long built their own systems or ordered ludicrously expensive ones from the likes of Alienware, discover Linux -- cheaper for the custom-built, and available in a shiny case from a game-specific OEM, already pre-configured and tuned (so none of your "ndiswrapper" complaints). They start running so many games under Cedega that game developers decide it's cheaper to support Linux directly, with cross-platform games, than to keep dealing with the nightmare that is Cedega and actual Windows support. Eventually, games no longer run under Windows, and gamers either dual-boot or switch completely. Anyone who cares about that demographic starts developing Linux versions at least, if not exclusively, for all their major apps, so eventually, non-gamers start to switch, going to their gamer friends for technical help.
Finally: Software developers discover Linux. Be it some killer language or some killer tool, or simply the fact that Linux provides none of the hassle of Windows, and really isn't lacking anything -- even today -- that a software developer would want for his job, they start to switch. They start
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Microsoft can see the writing on the wall but evidently no one else can. Virtulalization, i.e. running more than one operating system at once has made war obsolete. Microsoft doesn't need to compete with linux. The day and age of running only one operating system is near over. You buy a windows licence and microsoft will give you virtualzation software and setup and install linux for you. The only time anyone needs to worry about patent litigation I think is when they get between MS and it's tax. Linux compatability is now a windows feature. Getting linux to work well with windows is desirable. Think about it, if they give you linux they can tell the EU regulators to go stick it. Let me repeat myself, so long as MS gets our money they are happy. MS is currently taking the advice of keeping it's enimies closer to heart. If you don't believe me your going to cry when you see the ads of MS including linux for free.
None of these reports is faultless, and they measure different things from what the parent article measures. But there seems to be no crisis for Microsoft for the time being.
Your assessment is farily realistic. Being an ex-Windows user who moved to Linux in 97, I have to say the only reasons I moved were the things that I could do in Linux that you can't do in Windows. There are a ton of things like that. But, it's pretty much an even split. For all those things, I'm sure you can find things that Windows can do that Linux can't. The only thing is the reason Linux can't do them is typically artifical restrictions and not really technical limitations of Linux. Which is an important point to clear up and keep at the forefront. Many people who complain about Linux "sucking" tend to do so because if they tried it, they typically ran into a restriction that was imposed artifically by a hardware vendor or some sort of copy protection mechanism. The "problems" in Linux are not due to design issues of technical failures at all. The fact that I can't join Vongo, for example, has nothing to do with Linux distros not being capable of handling streaming video over broadband. It has to do with the fact that Vongo decided to base their service around Windows Media Player with DRM. A completely artifical restrction made in the name of business.
:)
The fact that I can't play games like Max Payne unless I want to shell out for Cedega (which does work quite well for the games it supports officially) has nothing to do with Linux "not being up to par with Windows" where games are concerned. It has to do with the copy protection that the publisher chose which it is a crime to reverse engineer. Once again, an artificial restriction made for business reasons. I had a laptop from work at one point that I had to install Windows drivers in an NDIS Wrapper to get WiFi support for Linux with. Again, not a limitation of Linux at all, and quite a clevelr solution, I might add... The problem was that for business reasons, Broadcom had decided that they didn't want to release any specs for their WiFi chip. Seeing a theme here?
In my case, Linux won enough for me to ditch EVERY Windows box I owned and run only Linux. If I need access to something in Windows (which is typically due to DRM issues), then I use virtualization. It's also been a lot cheaper for me since I can now have EVERY piece of software I want and I don't have to worry about licensing it for each machine I've got. The NLE video suite Cinelerra, is a perfect example. I *could* buy multiple copies of Premiere for the six machines I have here at home to do video editing. Or... I could just install as many copies of Cinelerra as I want on all 18 of my systems and use it's clustering features to have a nice little free renderfarm. But, my needs are a bit more advanced than most Windows users which is why I still think that having Windows around for the normal user is just fine. And, no that's not an elitist statement. I'm just saying that there aren't many people who have 18 systems at home, like to do video work and need/want a render farm.
I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Being an ex-Windows user who moved to Linux in 97, I have to say the only reasons I moved were the things that I could do in Linux that you can't do in Windows. There are a ton of things like that. But, it's pretty much an even split. For all those things, I'm sure you can find things that Windows can do that Linux can't.
:)
I do hope that you have at least worked with Windows since 97 or use it from time to time. Windows from 1997 Win95/Win98 is quite different from the NT based model of XP and Vista.
There are very few things you can do on Linux that you cannot do on a Windows system based on the NT architecture of today. From running in a GUI off mode to even not utilizing the Win32 subsystem and just using the BSD subsystem to write, compile and work with *nix based applications.
Your statement about capabilities is VERY true when comparing a *nix OS to the DOS model Windows of the 90s, but it fails when trying to make the same assertion about the NT and modern based Windows versions.
I don't want to pick on your post, but your comments would be like me saying I stopped using Mac at System 8.x and then defining my statements based on the limitations of the System 8 OS. And as most people know, the difference between a Mac running System 8 or 9 and a Mac running OSX is quite different, as OSX has very few architectural limitations. The same is true of modern Windows, there are very few architectural limitations.
I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't.
In 1997 you could make a very long list of applicaitons and concepts in use on Linux that just were NOT possible on Win95/98, yet today there are almost no applications or concepts in use on Linux that are either available or in use on Windows.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
I will even be kind enough to go first with a very basic example of something Windows can do that Linux cannot do at the core architectural level. Windows is based on the NT architecture, which is a hybrid kernel concept that allows it to host OS subsystems. This is also why the NT architecture has been called a client/server kernel concept. What this gives NT that Linux cannot do is the ability to natively run multiple OS subsystems concurrently that also can communicate with each other at the kernel level.
Win32 is an example of one subsystem in use on Windows and runs independantly of other subsystems like the *nix subsystem, OS/2, Win16, and Win64 subsystems to name a few examples. The subsystem OS architecture concept is not virtualization nor emulation, as each subsystem are true OSes acting independently with their own subsystem level kernels that sit on top of the NT architecture.
It is even rumored that MS has worked on a non BSD based *nix subsystem for Windows that is Linux based and would be able to run anything Linux could run with no virtualization or emulation and it would also have the ability to talk to the other subsystems, like the Win32 subsystem.
Ok, your turn...