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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.'"
The battle is over and Linux has won it. The desktop is the major war.
At best, Linux has won an opening skirmish. For most people, the internet is what runs on their desktop ( or laptop ). They have no more concern about the particulars of the server that their router connects to than they do about the particulars of the powerplant that their power cord connects to. They neither know nor care about server software
At worst, it is like the Japanese general ( admiral? ) who is alleged to have said after Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant." MS is obviously taking Linux seriously now, but most people still don't know what it is. Expect MS to engage in serious Linux FUD.
Anyway, congratulations to all the Linux coders.
why do i keep on having recurring visions of a flight deck with a "mission accomplished banner" blowing in the background...
*ducks*
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He spent a significant amount of time in the US before the Japanese attacked. He felt that the pre-emptive strike was a mistake, and that it would only buy them about 6 months reprieve before the American war machine was fully geared up and ready. Thus his "I fear I have awakened a sleeping giant" comment.
He was right. Six months later, the U.S. turned the tide at the Battle of Miday. The Japanese Navy was nowhere near as resilient as the U.S. Navy, and their losses hurt them deeply. Combined with the incredible number of carriers the U.S. began to manufacture, the six month turning point was a deadly one for Japan.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
and there, Linux hasn't so much won, as it is simply accepted as a fait accompli. The networks run by government departments are enormous beasts, with tens/hundreds of thousands of desktop PCs running Windows XP and thousands of servers running Irix, Solaris, OpenBSD, Linux and Windows 2003 server. The interesting thing is that all new server installations are either Linux or Windows 2003, other versions of UNIX have pretty much fizzled out and Linux (specifically Red Hat and Novell) is used for critical servers, firewalls and data-diodes, while Windows is mainly used for Active Directory and Exchange, protected behind an army of penguins.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
First off, "war" is a stupid metaphor for OS marketshare.
Secondly, there are multiple market segments.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
#2. The corporate/government desktop market. Pay attention to how Munich progresses. This is the next big market for Linux.
#3. The home (non-gamer) market. This isn't going to happen until you can buy Linux pre-loaded from the major OEM's. And that's not going to happen until Linux has the marketshare with the corporations/governments.
#4. Finally, the gamer market. This depends almost entirely upon the support of the hardware OEM's and game ISV's. If the newest video card doesn't come with Linux drivers, the gamers will buy the video card and run the OS that does have drivers. Look for this market to be the very, very last one that Linux will gain marketshare in.
Don't worry about whether Linux is taking over the gamer machines yet. Focus on getting Linux into corporation/government desktops. That will get the OEM's to start pre-loading it which will set the stage for the home user migration.
"Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers."
Man, you had me confused for a minute. I sat here for a minute wondering what the Playstation 3 had to do with this!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'll take it one step further. Linux needs to meet certain 'benchmarks' in order to succeed in the markets you mentioned. Specifically:
#1 Server segment - Linux needs to interoperate with Microsoft before it can fully tackle the enterprise administration server market. Active Directory and Outlook are the 2 major players for Microsoft here, Linux needs to be compatible or companies will not fully make the switch. As you said, the desktop comes after the server market, so in order for the server market to succeed, all of those corporate desktops need to work with linux servers.
#2 Corporate/government desktop market - It will be a huge help if Munich succeeds. Applications are the key here, specifically office applications. Open Office is great, but it still has a long way to go in some areas before I would feel comfortable doing away with MSOffice entirely. A working Powerpoint replacement is a must, as is a fully featured Excel replacement. Writer is relatively solid for most uses. Open formats will be a key contributer to advances in office applications.
#3 The home (non-gamer) market - The only reason this will not happen before the corporate/government market is because the OEMs have much to gain by ignoring linux and a lot to lose by embracing it as long as MS has enough market dominance to throw their weight around. A solid web-browser, a decent office application, and a usable movie/music player are all that is truly needed by this market - and they all already exist. The only thing stopping is the OEMs not pre-loading linux in favor of MS.
#4 the gamer market - You hit the nail on the head on this one. Drivers Drivers Drivers. If #3 succeeds, game makers will naturally focus more on their linux customers, but only if they have compatible hardware.
Unfortunately most of us slashdotters want to jump straight to #3-4. That simply isn't going to happen until microsoft's influence is already weakened from some other area such as corporate or government use of linux.
This is due to the collapse of unix and novell on the server marketplace. It's a well documented phenomenon. As the market for unix and netware collapse people either move to linux or windows. Studies show that the vast majority of migrations move to linux but a certain percentage moves to windows. This is why linux on the server is growing faster then windows on the server and both are growing. Once all that migration is done they will have to fight over new customers.
Linux is winning this war, and will continue to win it.
evil is as evil does
Did you really just compare Gandhi's fight for freedom from British rule in India to the OS "wars"?
You can compare anything to anything. That's the beauty of C style type casting, really!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
Oh, how I wish this were true.... But it's not.
Every day, dozens of servers are deployed running Microsoft Exchange. These servers spread through data centers like a plague, leaving behind Active Directories and MS SQL Server databases. Users start using the non-interoperable features of the windows server and it causes DHCP, DNS, and eventually FTP and Web servers to go to windows 'because it's easier'. Somewhere in there a CIO, who only knows about software with a multi-million dollar marketing budget, figures out that it is cheaper to buy a bulk license than to buy individual Microsoft licenses. His trade magazine said he would get audited if he didn't anyway. Then the administrators are forced to use the products for every task to maximize ROI, while the CIO walks around the office spouting inaccuracies about Linux, like it's "famous inability to handle timezones" and other such trash, in order to seem smart. Before you know, while there may be a couple of Linux boxes in the company, for the first time ever Windows Server is dominating every rack in these companies datacenters where there user to be commercial UNIX. Linux's main role? Providing a stable kernel for the virtual machines that allow Microsoft multiple license fees for a single piece of hardware.
You just can't compete with that marketing budget. Not when people with no technical knowledge make the purchasing decisions. Not only is Microsoft encouraging you to buy their own products, but the thousands of other tech companies that bring in billions of dollars of revenue each year by selling products that make Microsoft's broken bloated trash usable are encouraging you to buy Microsoft so that you'll need their software to fix them. In 5 years, Microsoft will have the same stranglehold on the server market that they have on the desktop today. Ironically, they may blow the desktop market with Vista.
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