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Is Linux At the End of Its Life Cycle?
Glyn Moody writes "That's what Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft Russia, seems to think. Quoted in the context of continuing questions about Russia's plans to create its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux, Pryanishnikov said [via Google Translate]: 'We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle.' An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?"
The same criticisms can be applied to Windows. Definitely not a Russian OS, and it's definitely starting to slip.
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?"
Too much vodka?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
As in looking at the world with your head stuck firmly up your ass.
The GNU tool chain isn't going anywhere. The Linux kernel isn't going anywhere. The only thing in flux to any great degree would be the packages contained in the distributions.
If you define "end of life cycle" as the middle of eternity, then sure, GNU/Linux is at the "end" with half-way to go.
Remember to maintain your supply of
is at the end of its life cycle
That's not a bad thing. In a lot of the classic software development models, the "end" state of a software's life cycle was operations and maintenance (O&M). Which is to say you have no new requirements having fulfilled all the basic requirements. It's bad if you constantly need new features but sometimes it can be an indication that the software is mature or near complete. At this point the customer only ever pays you money to put it back into development or fix/improve something small.
I would agree that the 2.6 kernel series is very robust and something we will most likely use for quite sometime. But I would always shy from ever saying that an operating system has all the major features it could ever need. I mean, I know a lot of clients that are committed to some version of the 2.6 kernel in their server rooms and would only ever update if there was a necessary security flaw or performance feature that they could not live without. For a lot of them, Linux has provided all the web server or database hosting features they would ever need and the product of "Linux" is indeed in the final phase of its life cycle. The vast majority of their patches are to Apache, Postgres, etc.
My work here is dung.
I'm not one of those people who mindlessly bashes on Microsoft for being Microsoft. But what I see here is the president of a Microsoft branch saying one of their competitors is dying. Specifically a competitor for, essentially, a government contract.
In other news, water is wet.
Really, this is the kind of remark best ignored rather than obsessing or getting upset over. Company execs talk nonsense all the time. I mean what do you expect him to day "Oh dear, this new OS will cut into our sales, as Linux has been doing and will continue doing for the foreseeable future"? Didn't think so.
Let him talk, just nod politely and continue compiling your kernel.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Windows is not a Russian OS either... I'm not aware of any OS which has been developed from scratch in Russia.
Linux at least comes with source code allowing the Russians to customise it however they wish. Windows doesn't provide that flexibility.
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I have to second this. My girlfriend is trilingual and is a professional translator. She jokes with her coworkers at how bad online automated translations are. Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." becomes: "The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know."
Ask the KDE4 guys how's that working out for them.
Meanwhile, it's an interesting point. In the closed source world the justification for keeping ancient shit code is that "we have too much money in it to throw it away"; open source can simply outwait the creators of the ancient code, or fork.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Most of these Microsoft people believe their own FUD. They'll argue that the sun is the moon to discredit alternatives. One of the best that I've heard from someone I used to think highly of is that "Windows has far more security mechanisms in place than Unix"
I think that part of the driving force for the attitude among Microsoft enthusiasts is that they are scared of change. They are happy in their safe little world (safe, in terms of job security etc.) and it makes them angry that better systems exist and people are taking an interest in them.
Note that I'm an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer) but please don't hold that against me :-)
This guy is the "president of Microsoft Russia". Does anyone think that he's going to say anything positive about Linux?
Yeah, but ms only does this when they already have a competing product that has already proven itself vastly more successful.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/09/11/1920205/Microsoft-Holds-iPhone-Funeral-Event
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/09/22/1416246/Xbox-Head-Proclaims-Blu-ray-Dead
It's not like they're trying to create popular doubt in superior products or anything.
Nah, I just think it is just the way they see things in Microsoft. When an OS is stable and works reliably, then it is at the end of its life cycle (like Windows XP).
What about all the other socialist services you enjoy, such as roads and highways, food inspections, parks, etc.? Should those be eliminated too? Good luck inspecting your own food before buying it. I guess you can just have your family sue the grocery store after you die of food poisoning, or maybe we'll just rely on word-of-mouth getting around and the grocery store selling tainted meat going out of business after a few hundred people die.
We do want socialism in the US. Look at medicare, medicaid, the military, police, fire departments, public schools, public libraries, public roads, social security, the list of popular socialist endeavors is quite long.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Linux kernel architecture is creaky, but so is everybody else's. And it doesn't matter. The kernel's job is to shuffle bytes between devices and processes and manage memory. The Linux kernel does that pretty efficiently, people seem to be able to write good drivers for it, and that's pretty much all there's to it. It's the same with window systems: X11 gets the job done as efficiently and well as anybody, and even though there's some legacy stuff in there, there is no point in rewriting it.
And it's not like anybody else has something better. The NT kernel is full of complicated functionality that nobody actually uses. The OS X kernel is a microkernel that has been turned into a monolithic kernel and has had a BSD brain transplant. The one recent OS that really tried to shake things up a bit is Plan 9, but it crashed and burned.